Missile Command War Games

A sure-fire win, if you ask me. So sit down, take possession of the battery that has been assigned to you, and get ready to defend Earth! Missile Command for the first Playstation was released in 1999, thanks to a successful collaboration between Hasbro and Atari, and for the Game Boy a few years earlier, in 1995, but we need to take a step back by almost twenty years to get to know the original game better, an arcade cornerstone as we said at the beginning, a skilful balance of strategy and hand-eye coordination.

È the year 1980. A manifesto year fundamental for video games understood as a nascent form of entertainment: Apple II was raising its shields with the beautiful RPG Akalabeth, while Namco was invading arcades all over the world unleashing a certain yellow ball hungry for fruit and pesky ghosts: with Pac-Man and titles like that, Atari had to pull something new out of the hat, modern if you’ll allow me the term, a game that had to distance itself from the underlying simplicity of the many titles found in homes and arcades, but that at the same time wouldn’t smack the brains out of enthusiasts. Boys and girls in search of instant fun, magic to summon by fiddling with joysticks and pressing buttons, inserting coins and pressing start, in short.

Nel gioco originale del 1980, l’obiettivo principale consiste sostanzialmente nel difendere alcune città americane dagli attacchi missilistici di una nazione nemica “non identificata”: alzi la mano chi se la sente di indovinare chi rappresentava il nemicosky! Nel rifacimento su Playstation, Missile Command ci vede invece alle prese con un meno politicamente schierato alien attack: we’re at it again, the little green men pilot insectoid spaceships and intend to conquer Earth and enslave us, probably overestimating the workforce, but that’s another story.

Lo stesso happens for the conversion to Game Boy, where Nintendo adopts a neutral policy, if we can call it that, setting aside any issue related to enemies and focusing the players’ action on the gameplay that made Missile Command famous. The player takes control of anti-missile batteries, in essence, and must intercept the trajectories of ballistic messengers of death before they hit the targets. By aiming at a point in the sky, we must precisely infer where the impact will occur between our anti-aircraft fire and the offensive missile, destroyed by the shockwave emitted by the explosion, in a chain reaction that will generate a combo of points: when the challenge of reaching the highest score, the famous highscore, was the main goal of every respectable video gamer (controversial moment!).

If we then add that, of course, the ammunition available to the player does not enjoy the infinite bonus, the increasing difficulty of a title distinctly arcade in nature will ignite the enthusiasm of true hardcore gamers.

In conclusion, a remake of the highest caliber in the vein of films like Wargames, but don’t worry: icy U.S. Army corporals with a forced recruitment proposal won’t be knocking at your door... Should that happen, good luck!