Blast From the Past: Battlezone

This week's blast from the past is an old game called Battlezone.

The game is a fictional version of the space race between the USSR and the USA. Where each side attempt to claim ownership of different planets by occupying them with army forces. You are a marine and can fight for either side of the conflict. Depending on what side you play for you will get different vehicles but the sides are essentially balanced.

Battlezone is a tactical first person shooter. You fight by getting into a vehicle (you can shoot while on foot but it is very ineffective) of some sort, usually a tank of varying degree of toughness or an artillery platform. From inside that vehicle you can more around and shoot other vehicles or give orders to vehicles around. You can deploy turrets to guard strategic locations or air drop supplies for your troops. Once the vehicle you are in is destroyed you are ejected from the wreckage and you walk around the map, looking for another vehicle. You can of course just grab the one of your nearby NPC allies. They won't object.

The picture on the right is a screenshot on Mars. At the top left of the screen is a list of all your available troops. From there you can issue commands to said troops. At the bottom left of the screen is the 3d map, showing the terrain and any vehicles in the vicinity. At the bottom right is your health bar, split into shield and armor. Shield is easy to repair while armor is much harder to fix. The list beside that are the weapons available to your vehicle. Most vehicles have more than one weapon to add diversity to the battle.

I say the game is a strategic first person shooter since a large part of the game is about commanding team mates. By yourself, you are not very effective so you need to create the correct vehicles for your allies. If there is a choke-point you are likely going to have to defend, build turrets and deploy them there. Have artillery back up the turrets and then be ready to airlift supplies when they run low. If you need to attack the enemy, order some of your troops to follow you and lead the assault. By yourself you won't be able to accomplish much.

After several missions on the moon, the enemy team will "up the ante" and try to colonize mars. After Mars, Venus is the next target. I do not know where the space race goes after Venus as that is the furthest I have gotten in the game. I'm talking about this game because it introduced me to the first person shooter genre and got me to play more first person shooter games. Unfortunately the game is now hard to find and won't install on windows Vista or 7, so replaying the game is not going to be easy. The game itself was incredibly fun though so I hope I can find a way to do so soon.