Air-Sea Battle

2600 box art.

Air-Sea Battle is a single-screen multi-player shooter developed by Larry Kaplan and published by Atari in 1977 for the Atari 2600.

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. It doesn't have a typical ending (each game has a time limit), but I suppose you could count it a victory if you can reaching 99 points in a particular variation.

Review

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.

• 

  The Sears release features a more family-friendly name, but still manages to accurately depict the hell of war in the box art. Stupid name, decent art, but not quite as good as the original.

Documentation

• 

  Game manual.

Download

Dennis Debro has disassembled and commented the source code of Air-Sea Battle.

• Download (Info)

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Air-Sea Battle
English	Target Fun

Links