Time Warped 1981 - Strategy X

On 03/10/2018 at 11:27 AM by KnightDriver

Konami's arcade game Strategy X is one I never saw in the arcades or even knew about until I saw it on Game Room on Xbox 360. I'm thankful for Game Room bringing a bunch of Konami games I never heard of.

Looking friom a top-down perspective, you control a tank as it moves vertically across a field of obstacles and gun emplacements. You have a fuel gauge that runs down and fuel supplies on the field to pick up. The controls are a little bit awkward as you have to move with the stick and aim with the buttons. It takes some coordination.

I usually don't get very far on the default setting. If I get off the first stage, I'm ecstatic. Since there aren't any medals to be earned in Game Room anymore for playing that mode, I messed with the virtual dip switches and gave myself infinite lives. I beat the whole game, all 5 stages (or was it 4, I forget now). In a later stage, the gun emplacements go silent and vehicles bear down on you. I found it annoying that your tank blows up when you touch a wall or forested area. What the heck?! You have to move carefully through these mazes of barriers while shooting everything except your fuel depots.

After a while, infinite lives got boring, so I switched to 5 lives. This gave me some challenge. I would get to about stage 2 or 3 before dying.

I like this game. It's similar to playing the tank sections in Front Line.

Unrelated musical note for 1981. The Cure's album Faith. Love that dark brooding stuff not at all in evidence on their greatest hits albums.

Super Step Contributing Writer

03/10/2018 at 02:14 PM

I'm always curious where they got the ideas for these older games' SFX from or what they used to create them. So many chiptunes and 8-bit SFX get re-used so much, but I never hear much about how they were made.

KnightDriver

03/10/2018 at 06:56 PM

Yea. After getting into pinball, I started noticing a lot of sounds that made it into video games. Especially the Williams tables because they made Defender and some others, and used the sounds they made for their tables. Or visa versa, I'm not sure which came first.

i hear Doom sound effects in modern games sometimes. I assume they are like public domain stuff. Like the wilhelm sound effect in movies.

I'd love to know the origin of that stuff too.

Cary Woodham

03/11/2018 at 01:07 AM

I never heard of Strategy X. But that was one neat thing about Game Room is that Konami especially put some of their more obscure game titles on there. One of my favorites was Kit N Kaboodle, a block pushing maze game.

It's a shame that Game Room didn't get more support, and that the company who did it didn't go out of business. I would've loved it if Namco jumped on board. But my main problem with Game Room is that it was such a memory hog. I had to eventually take it off my hard drive. I should've sprung for the Elite model 360, but back when I got the 360 in 2007, who knew how big digital games and DLC would take off?

03/11/2018 at 09:55 PM

Strategy X even got a port on Atari 2600. I don't think I ever played that even when I was collecting Atari carts. Never heard of Kit N Kaboodle. Can't seem to find it on wiki either. Now that's obscure!

I wish they'd make it backwards compatible on Xbox One, but that'll never happen. My ony issue with it is that it crashes my system every time I leave the game.

I've had to replace my 360 system so many times now I forget which one I have now. I think it's an elite though.

goaztecs

03/14/2018 at 11:59 AM

Oh the sounds and graphics of that tank game, man those are the simple things I miss with games. I also think I played a couple of games that involved tanks shooting at things and trying to refill on fuel.

PixlBit