- BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES INSTALL
- BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES MANUAL
- BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES LICENSE
If you can successfully destroy the enemy units attacking you on your territory, you now have the majority of scrap right next to your HQ. Recycling fragments of scrap from repelled attacks can offer the defensive player a powerful tactic, or an out in a failed ambush. The only other resources to manage are geothermal energy points to deploy your factories on, and the barracks providing human resources, pilots for your vehicles. Every vehicle in the game, once destroyed, breaks down into this core component or can be recycled into it. What is this bio-metal? In a practical sense for the solar vanguard of the rival Earthling forces, it’s a memory metal on steroids, that can be researched for the forms it has previously taken, and be constructed into seemingly fantastical structures that defy heat, gravity, or just about any fact of the universe. The levels, despite being simple bitmaps-turned-displacement-maps, somehow manage to cultivate an overwhelming sense of cosmic dread and terrifying atmosphere, the macabre droning of spacey synths serving as a backdrop for your game of cat-and-mouse in the dark reaches of an icy moon. Like many old games you’ve never heard of, it feels fresh yet awkward, even moreso given its very loose relation its extremely popular namesake.īattlezone is a strange FPS-RTS hybrid, presenting an eye-in-the-sky electromechanical fog of war if you put up a satellite array otherwise, it lives up to its moniker of “Combat Commander”, having you command your fellow soldiers from the cockpit. Retro overtones give way to Aliens vibes, to David Lynch’s DUNE adaption yet, for all this confluence, few are familiar with it, let alone have played it. The game opens with the grizzled retelling of the “true space race” by an exhausted veteran of a secret war, when things went hot on the moon, Soviet and American influences fighting for a monopoly on a mysterious resource called “biometal”.
BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES INSTALL
With ominous fanfare, the familiar Windows 9x install wizard gives way to a dive into the deep end of a John Carpenter film, mired in dark Cold War lore, with esoteric exposition plucked right out of Serial Experiments Lain hinting at an alternate history. Wanting to find some use for the beefy MechWarrior engine still on their hands, they went on to use it to develop Heavy Gear, Interstate ’76, and, of course the Battlezone reboot Atari was looking for. Activision, meanwhile, had spawned the successful MechWarrior franchise, then subsequently lost the rights to the IP.
BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES LICENSE
Unbeknownst to many, Atari sought to license out the Battlezone property, pushing for a reboot in 1998. So, maybe it’s vaporwave? No 98 Redux is a different sort of throwback. See, when we think of throwbacks, we think of retro drink recipes, anime our older cousins used to watch, or classic films we saw while dragged around places like blockbuster. Kept alive by a team including at least two original Battlezone 1998 developers, Mike Arkin and Ken Miller, and a diehard community that utterly refused to give up on their beloved fandom, Battlezone is a throwback, but not in the sense one might immediately think. Now that it had my attention- it was time to install the game and see what these planets looked like from the cockpit of a hover tank. Within the pages of the game’s instruction manual, past the list of key mappings and paragraphs of game lore, were detailed overviews of nearly every astral body in our solar system giving accounts of planets well-known or moons I had never even heard of.
BATTLEZONE 2 FORGOTTEN ENEMIES MANUAL
No, it was the instruction manual for a nearly forgotten 1998 remake of Atari’s 1980 arcade classic Battlezone, forgotten no longer as Battlezone 98 Redux. I’m embarrassed to say that it wasn’t documentaries or the History Channel that got me into astronomy, or gave me the notion that I might one day grow up to be an astrophysicist.