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 On 02/05/2018 at 03:38 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
I was shooting some golf at the Bushwood Country Club when head of maitenance, Carl Spackler, came up to me and started talking.
from arcade-museum.com
What's this Missile Command I keep hearing about? I want to find out how to use it to get rid of these pesky gophers. It's a video arcade game by Atari. You use three buttons and a trackball to stop missiles raining down on your cities. Each button controls one of your missile batteries and the trackball your targeting crosshair. You defend six cites. As you clear levels, the missiles come down faster and in greater numbers, sometimes from planes. There are also smart bombs that avoid your attacks. You gain points for each city and unused missile from your batteries after every level. At every 10k points you regain a city.
Oh, it's just a video game. Well, that gives me an idea. Plastic explosives!
Off he went. I quickly finished my round and got back in the tardis, setting it for 2018. Back home, I started Atari Flashback Classics Vol. 2 on my Xbox One and played arcade Missile Command. It wasn't bad, but I remembered the trackball controller on the cabinet was a much better way to play this game.
Controls for arcade Missile Command from thearcademan.net
When things got tough, you could sweep your crosshair across the screen, unleashing an array of missiles to stop the incoming missiles right near the top of the screen, a key strategy in getting farther in the game. Also, the trackball was a much more accurate way to target than the Xbox controller's analog stick. On Xbox One, I really had trouble stopping missiles. Eventually I just started blasting all my missiles in clusters in the hope one of them would stop the incoming ones. Then I kind of gave up.
I would say, play this in an arcade. But maybe, there is a version of the game called Atomic Command within Fallout 4 on the Pipboy interface. It's supposed to play exactly like Missile Command, so maybe they adjusted the controls for better gameplay. I'm going to try that since I noticed the other week on my downloaded games list on Xbox One, that I own Fallout 4. It's so easy to forget about games one downloads.
I usually don't download all my games, but there are definitely titles where I look in my PS4 library and go, "oh right I have that."
I guess Caddyshack was released this year. I saw the Netflix movie about the National Lampoon guy, called A Futile and Stupid Gesture the other day. I quite enjoyed it.
All these games with gold and sales and stuff. Now I have nearly 150 games on XBO.
Wow. I watched the trailer. I didn't know I was referencing a recent movie that recreates scenes from Caddyshack. I'm still not getting Netflix to watch it though. David Wain of The State is director. Looks great.
Aside from Centipede, Missile Command was one of my dad's favorite arcade games back then. I remember the shape of the cabinet for it was kind of weird.
I didn't know there was a Missle Command-like game in Fallout 4. I'll have to ask my brothers about that. They know more about that game than I do.
Yea it's in the Pip Boy device thingy. I haven't played Fallout 4 past the demo yet, but I'm going to now to play Atomic Command - and maybe get hooked on the rest of the game, we'll see.
That reminds me of when I got No More Heroes and its sequel and only played the mini-games. Brother Jeff played the main parts. :)
I can't wait to try that series. I have the first one for Wii still.
Missile Command is my joint, dawg.
I really like the physical quallities of MC in the arcades. I got my whole body into it swiping that trackball around. All I do today in games is twiddle my thumbs.
yeah trackball games are definitely a different feeling. Shame they're pretty much obsolete.
I guess with most games in 3D now, who needs a spinner or trackball. But then again, the PC's mouse is basically a trackball in a housing. They could totally put one on a controller. I wonder if designers considered it and why they didn't go for it.
Hot damn this game sounds tough in the higher difficulties but it can be fun. Shame there wasn't a track back attachment for consoles...actually I think Nintendo may have had one. There has to be a PC version of this because having a mouse would have to be the closest to a trackball that you can get.
Mouse would work great. I remember back in the day just spinning that trackball hard in later screens to sweep a bunch of defending missiles across the screen.
There was a trackball on a Madcatz joystick for the Xbox 360 (meant for retro games), but OXM gave it such a bad review, I never got one. I still want one.
When I was growing up, I went to a birthday party with one of my friends from school, and he had a Missile Command arcade machine in his house.
I read that the designers of Missile Command had nightmares about nuclear war while they were making it. Although the 2600 version's documentation painted the game as defending a space colony against an alien invasion, to soften the theme for kids, the cities in the arcade version were meant to represent cities in California (where the designers lived) under Soviet attack.
I played a knockoff of Missile Command written in BASIC, where the cities were cities in Oklahoma.
I was thinking about the cold war stuff when replaying the game. I remember being a little bit scared by the ending screen when I played it in the arcade in 1980.
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