Air-Sea Battle
Air-Sea Battle, also sold as Target Fun, is a single-screen multi-player fixed shooter developed by Larry Kaplan and published by Atari in 1977 for the Atari 2600.
Contents
Personal
My family had this game as part of a large collection of Atari games we got at a garage sale in the mid 1980s.
Status
I own this game both as Air-Sea Battle and Target Fun and have the manual for Target Fun. I can beat the AI with ease.
Review
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3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Best Version: Atari 2600
— This section contains spoilers! —
Good
- I like the use of gradient backgrounds to simulate distance.
Bad
- Aiming is pretty clunky.
- Although you can pretty much tell what everything is supposed to be, the graphics are pretty bad.
- The game features no music, and the sound is pretty grating.
- Every game has a fixed time limit of 2 minutes 16 seconds.
- While the game claims to feature a computer-controlled player, it really just fires continuously without attempting to aim, so it's easy to beat.
Ugly
- Despite boasting 27 different games, they're all variations on the same theme, and they all get boring very quickly.
Media
Box Art
As usual, Atari makes box art that is better than the game. The collage by Cliff Spohn features all the game types and clearly shows what they game will entail. Pretty nice art.
Documentation
Download
Dennis Debro has disassembled and commented the source code of Air-Sea Battle.
Credits
Role | Staff |
---|---|
Designer | Larry Kaplan |
Programmer | Larry Kaplan |
Atari Cover | Cliff Spohn (as C. Spohn) |
Titles
Language | Native | Transliteration | Translation |
---|---|---|---|
English | Air-Sea Battle | ||
English | Target Fun |
Links
Categories:
- Video Game Rank - 3
- Video Game Graphics Rank - 2
- Video Game Sound Rank - 2
- Games
- Video Games
- 1977 Video Games
- Video Game Prime Order - Action, Strategy, Adventure
- Atari 2600 Games
- Video Game Genre - Action
- Video Game Genre - Fixed Shooter
- Video Game Genre - Shooter
- Video Game Genre - Single-Screen
- Media Theme - War
- Multi-Player
- Multi-Player Versus
- Video Games I've Beaten