Battle City RM2k Gold

After playing Battle City for five minutes, you've basically seen enough to decide if you like it.

Based on the NES game of the same name, Battle City presents you with a simple map in which you run around shooting your enemies, dodging their shots, and protecting your treasure chest at the bottom of the screen. Wasting about 20 enemies advances you to the next map. Repeat.

This is a faithful adaptation of the NES game, so whether or not you like it will probably depend on whether you had a NES as a kid and can appreciate the calibre of games that existed back then. It's fascinating sometimes to remember the earliest games of the 1980s and consider how aimless and simplistic they were, and how they would never in a million years fly today, when games are expected to have context and immersiveness of a novel's breadth.

Battle City is HARD. It usually takes me 4 or 5 tries to beat each map. (And you get called a "daffodildo" every time you get game over.) I wonder if I'm actually expected to be able to start at map 1 and play all the way through to map 50 in one go. Fortunately, you're allowed to choose any map you wish to start on -- and good thing, because if you always started at map 1 I would have never seen anything past map 3 or 4.

This game also includes a rarity in RPG Maker games: a 2-player mode. Using a key patch by Ineluki and NX-Shade, eNSO mapped controls for a second player to the ESDF keys. I don't know how he programmed the second player (eNSO encrypted his game for security -- poor us) but it's executed flawlessly. And let me tell you, playing with two players is the only way to make it anywhere in this game. I played it with my friend and we actually didn't die for ... at least a minute.

(Alas, the key mapping somehow makes my PC gamepad not work for this game. :( Bad news for someone who luvs his gamepad!)

A custom game system of this sophistication deserves commendation; gameplay is simple and intuitive, and there are no critical bugs or flaws. This game is about as crisp and professional as it can be as an RPG Maker game.

Alas, my usual bones about RPG Maker Action games apply here; movement and hit detection in the RPG Maker engine just isn't ideal for games where you need precision in terms of timing and position. Sometimes you'll get hit with a bullet even though you swear you got out of the way in time. Event-based bullets sometimes disappear if they strike another bullet; sometimes the two bullets pass through each other if the timing is right. Also, the player can only have one bullet in the air at one time, presumably because there's only one player-bullet event. (I don't know whether this is the case in the original game.) But these problems only occasionally cause frustration, and eNSO gets credit for making the game as smooth as RPG Maker allows.

It should be noted that eNSO did not use this adaptation as an opportunity to add variety to the repetitive graphics. Using the exact same brick wall graphic for all 50 maps is faithful to the NES version, for sure, but it would have added visual flair to provide a variety of different chipsets, and I would have been more enticed to try out all of the 50 maps.

The sound is also minimal in this game -- again, this is probably a quality copied from the NES game, but there isn't even background music while you play. Considering eNSO used the rockingest track from the System Shock 2 soundtrack as the menu music, I know he's capable of more. :)

Appreciated as a remake of the original game, Battle City RM2K Gold is impressive and flawless. The only problems are the shortfalls of RPG Maker as an Action Game system in general, and the sense that eNSO could have expanded more on the aesthetic limitations of the NES version.

My rating: 3.5 / 5

My favourite map: 21 (I like Shy-guys.)