Tanks! a Short Overview.
Do you remember that great game called "TANKS!" which appeared on several machines many years ago? You don't? Where have you been all this time?
Many an hour was had by kids and adults alike playing this simple game at college and at work. It's one of those games, you either love it or hate it.
I am afraid I don't know who created the original Tanks, so I cannot give them any credit. (If somebody knows who it was then please contact me, so I can then give them credit!)
Anyway Tanks is a 2 player game only (Although I have known a few people who play it on their own), each player is given a tank to control on a landscape, the idea is to take it in turns to shoot at your opponent. (See? I said it was simple.) You have control over the angle of the tanks barrel and the velocity behind the shot.
The winner is the person who scores a direct hit on their opponent's tank. (Cooo, now there is a surprise.)
That's the basic idea behind the original Tanks game, now here is my version.
Amiga Tanx.
Amiga Tanx follows the same lines as the original game, but with just a few variations.
- Randomly generated Landscapes.
- Two main types of Landscapes.
- Variable gravity.
- Variable wind strength and direction.
- Targets to hit.
- Objects which affect the flight of the tanks shot.
- Full Stereo Sound.
- 50 frames a second screen update.
- Parallax scrolled play area.
- Over 100 colours on screen. (Honest!)
I could go on, but I won't.
Gary Roberts helped himself quite freely to resources from other games. The background of the title screen is ripped directly from the action game P.O.W. (see screenshot above), some of the sounds and a cursor are from Lemmings.
The Mysterious Tanks!
Strangely I was unable to find that game Tanks! that was
Gary Roberts's inspiration. There is a 1984
C64 game named
Tanks
by Cees Kramer and a 1987 CPC/ZX/C64 game
named Tank by
Ocean Software. Both would qualify for the many years ago,
but the former seems to be something along the line of
Space War, while the latter is an
arcade conversion. Neither even remotely resembles an artillery
game. All other games named Tanks that I found are from 1991 or
later, none of them is an artillery game, and none had a bang.
But Gary Roberts is not the only one to mention it, in contemporary
reviews Scorched Tanks is usually
measured against it.
