I remember spending hours upon hours playing this game after purchasing it from a local Toys R Us store. Once again, I find myself playing this game with a recently acquired Commodore 64 emulator. The game was a great action game for its time, which switched from various “shooter” views as you progress through the game.
After starting the game, the first phase is a fleet movement phase. This phase is like a strategy phase, which allows you to control your fleet with your joystick through a map.
I remember spending hours upon hours playing this game after purchasing it from a local Toys R Us store. Once again, I find myself playing this game with a recently acquired Commodore 64 emulator. The game was a great action game for its time, which switched from various “shooter” views as you progress through the game.
After starting the game, the first phase is a fleet movement phase. This phase is like a strategy phase, which allows you to control your fleet with your joystick through a map. The map never changes and essentially you have two options; head for the fictitious beachhead straight on or take a secret entrance through a minefield. Taking the secret entrance brings you to a new screen where you have
to control 10 individual ships through a treacherous minefield with torpedoes being fired at you as well. At first, this is a difficult phase, but with patience you will learn a path through the minefield. You don’t have to speed through it, pausing at times will make things easier for you. Attacking the beachhead straight on allows you to avoid the minefield, but the enemy’s fleet is well prepared for your attack.
The next phase of the game before hitting the beach is fighting the enemy’s fleet. If you went through the minefield, then the enemy’s planes and ships will take longer to target your ships and destroy them, because your fleet surprises them. There are two screens to this fight. First is a first person anti-aircraft screen. Here you will have to maneuver an AA gun and try to shoot down enemy planes as the attempt to destroy your ships. The second screen is a first person view where you are engaging the enemy ships in an artillery duel. You will have to take out all of the enemy ships before you can advance to the beach. A big hint here is that each .5 degree of elevation on your gun is 100 meters when determining distance to the enemy ship. As you fire, you will either see a splash our watch your shell go past the ship, if you do not hit it, a report will flash on the screen letting you know how far from the target your shell landed. Using my hint will help you destroy each ship in two shots!
After the enemy fleet, you are now ready to hit the beach. You now are presented with an overhead view of your tanks (2 per ship remaining) and an obstacle course with mines, ditches, pillboxes, and enemy tanks. After you negotiate the obstacle course you reach the enemy’s main gun. This screen is a first person view of your tank trying to destroy the enemy main gun. You are presented with many black boxes that are targets underneath the gun. One of the boxes will turn white. You are to target that box. When you hit that box, another one will turn white. Take that one out next and so on. Sounds easy? Nope, that big main gun on top of the mountain is traversing towards you and will destroy you. After your tank is destroyed, you are taken back to the beach with your next tank and must negotiate the obstacle course again, but the locations of pillboxes and tanks have changed. You keep doing this until you hit 10 white boxes underneath the enemy’s main gun.
The game is over, you won and it repeats itself. Not much to the game, but for the time it was released and the computer it was using, it was pretty amazing. Enjoy.
