See introduction here
The Game: Armor Attack
romname: armora
Screenshot:
(click to see current MARP scores)
Reward: $50 (usd)
Deadline for submission to MARP: August 26, 2005 2359 hours GMT
Further Bounty: none
Same controls as Rip Off, same programmer, I thought I might do well on this game whenever I got around to applying the overlay and trying it out.
Wrong!
Some pages with info on the game:
http://www.arcade-history.com/history_d ... ail&id=113
http://www.vectrex.nl/armorreview.php
http://www.cinemarcade.com/TGTTF/gametime71.html
The programmer himself wrote this (which I can't find currently on the web...thank God for Google's cache):
The arcade machine record of 2,009,000 by Tom Larkin set in 1982 and its quantum excess over any other score hints that he may have found something about the game that no one else did. There are sites out there that indicate "safe spots" in the Vectrex version, but I haven't seen any documentation of such in the arcade game. I did find that staying in one spot and defending myself from there worked best for me (just the opposite of Rip Off!), but I see no reason to suggest that this is not a perfectly legitimate strategy.Tim Skelly wrote:Armor Attack was done at a time when I felt I had worked out a few things about game design. I was just trying to do an artful update of one of the earliest video games, "Tank." Everything went smoothly.
There were only two problems.
One was that (again and again and again!) (Jim) Pierce wouldn't allow the mirror technique used in Warrior to be used here for a background. Pierce and (Papa Tom) Stroud (the owners of Cinematronics) were cheap, cheap, cheap! With every game they took away one more color from the cabinet art because each pass cost a few pennies more. Check it out. If I had done one more game the artwork would have been black on black! Like Warrior, I just didn't have the drawing time to draw the (very important!) background outlines on the screen during the game. (They can be seen by themselves in the test mode for alignment.) So, the clever solution that management came up with was to use the same kind of overlay that was used on Star Castle. The problem was that the overlay wasn't covering/coloring anything but black! That's why the playfield for the game is either black or slightly-greenish-black. Ah, well. It worked well enough I guess.
A second event occurred about the time I had just started the game. We heard through the grapevine that Atari had completed a tank game and was testing it in the Bay area. Obviously we were concerned. One of the management guys went through the phone books for the bay area and called every arcade until he found the one with the test game. (He used a cheesy hillbilly accent. It was pretty funny.) We flew up immediately. When we got there we spotted the game, which turned out to be 'Battle Zone.' Since it was 3D and mine was top-down with entirely different game play, we went ahead with our plans, despite how good we thought the Atari game was. But that's not the funny bit. While everyone else was checking out 'Battle Zone' I wandered around the arcade like I usually did, looking for games I hadn't played. I found one and really got into it. It, too, was an Atari test piece, but none of the management guys thought much of it. Funny, I really thought 'Missile Command' would make it. ;>)
At the time I was finishing the game, the (US) government decreed that every male of draft age had to register, even though there was no draft in effect. This pissed me off (old draft resistor), especially since my buddy Scott Boden was someone who had to sign up. I wanted to use morse code sounds in Armor Attack, and I knew morse, (old boy scout) so that's real morse code in the game beeping out "dontregister." I was also assuaging my own conscience, since I had heard that Atari had sold Battle Zone to the Army.
I note that the TG settings for the arcade machine are 3 jeeps to start, whereas for the MAME track it is listed as 5 men to start, The latter is the MAME default and, as always, that is what we will use unless otherwise noted.
Use WolfMAME .98 or .99
"On Deck" game: Zoo Keeper
Good luck!!! 3 days marathon 
).
But I will do it.