Atari‘s 1980 hit Battle Zone was one of the first ever video games to use 3D polygonal vector graphics to represent the playfield.
It’s a tank game, and you’re basically hunting down tanks, flying saucers, and other baddies. Shooting them before they can shoot you.
I remember Team Fortress 2 launching back in 2007. The wait had been immense… I forget how many years we waited; around seven or eight years after it was first announced, until finally getting to play it.
To me, the game was a bit of a let down. It was all a bit too cartoony for my liking. Nonetheless I have played and enjoyed Team Fortress 2 on occasion over the years, and took some grabs along the way.
These grabs do say what year they were taken, and do show Team Fortress 2 as it evolved over the space of a decade.
Granada is an obscure-but-brilliant overhead tank shooter on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis that was developed by Wolf Team Japan and published by Renovation in North America in 1990. Granada was never given an official European release.
Dynamix‘s 1989 combat flight sim, A-10 Tank Killer, is fast and fluid on the PC, making it one of the first serious combat flight sims to offer more than 20 frames a second to games-players. In the early days of combat flight sims: the games were battling against weaker machine specs and lower CPU cycles. When 386 and 486 type PCs entered the market (in 1989), and VGA graphics cards became affordable, only then did the genre finally have the power to be “fast” and “fluid”.
Nazca Corporation‘s infamous run-and-gun blaster – Metal Slug – was first released in arcades in 1996, before following as a cartridge on SNK‘s cutting edge home console the Neo Geo AES.
An early ZX Spectrum classic, Deathchase was first released by Micromega in 1983.
Although it doesn’t look like much (especially in stills), Deathchase was (and still is) an exhilarating game, and is something of a tribute to the speeder bike scenes in Return of the Jedi (which was released the same year as this, in 1983).
The spiritual successor to Smash TV (in the same way that Smash TV was the spiritual predecessor to Robotron 2084), and a brilliant overhead shooter with 360 degree blasting action.
Drill Dozer is a fun, side-scrolling “drill ’em up” where you take control of a small tank with a drill on the front, which allows you to dig your way through the landscape and bump off your enemies. You can upgrade the drill as you play, which then requires the learning of new control techniques – using a kind of gear type system. It’s all quite clever and original.
The King of Grabs 