Air-Sea Battle

Air-Sea Battle

Atari 2600 - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Atari Publisher Atari, Sears, Roebuck and Co. Published 1977-09-11 Platforms Atari 2600 Genres Action, Fixed shooter, Shooter, Single-screen Themes War Multiplayer Simultaneous versus Distribution Commercial

Air-Sea Battle is a single-screen fixed gallery shooter developed by Larry Kaplan at Atari and published by Atari on 1977-09-11 for the Atari 2600. The game is largely based on the 1975 Atari arcade game, Anti-Aircraft.

In the game, each player controls a turret at the bottom of the screen and shoots bullets upward toward various targets that move across the screen including planes and ships. There is also an alternate mode where players control their own ship, one at the top of the screen, and one at the bottom, and shoot at each other while trying to dodge their opponent's fire.

Personal

Own?	Yes. As Air-Sea Battle and as Target Fun with the manual.
Won?	Yes. I can beat the AI in every category.
Finished	Around 1987.

My family had this game as part of a large collection of Atari games we got at a garage sale in the mid 1980s. While we gave that version to our cousin around 1989, I got a couple other copies later in life.

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

• 

  Manual - Air-Sea Battle.

Videos

Gameplay.

Play Online

Atari 2600

Download

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

• Download (Info)

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no characters.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There are no characters.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	There are no characters.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no characters.

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