Battle City RM2k Gold

The RPG Maker 2000 game engine is primarily known for making console-style role-playing games, but it is possible (and somewhat difficult) to use the engine to make games in other genres. Battle City, an adaptation of Namco's 1985 tank combat game for Famicom, goes above and beyond most non-RPG RPG Maker 2000 offerings with 50 levels and a fully functional cooperative two-player mode. While the game is a fairly accurate translation of the original, your overall enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for repetition.

At its core, Battle City is a simple shooter. You (and a friend in two-player mode) move around a square arena and try to shoot down enemies as they come in from the top of the screen to try to kill you or destroy the treasure you're protecting at the bottom. Your gun has an unlimited supply of ammunition, but you can only shoot one bullet at a time, so the game boils down to finding a good place to stay out of the enemy's line of fire and then picking them off one by one. Each of the 50 stages has its own layout of breakable and unbreakable blocks similarly to the Bomberman games, and there are power-ups laid around each arena to improve your firepower or make the enemies stop moving to give you an easier shot at them. Things get more difficult as you move on to higher levels as some enemies move faster, others gain better weapons, and still others take more than one shot to kill. However, you can choose to start on any stage you want, with the game looping back around to stage 1 once stage 50 is complete. A second player can join in on the action to make things a little bit easier. While it's difficult to get functional two-player games working in RPG Maker 2000, Battle City's two-player mode works perfectly here, with both player able to move about freely without much input lag.

Each stage plays out mostly the same way - enemies wander around the arena occasionally shooting and hoping to hit you while you sneak up on them and attack. The goal is to kill 20 enemies in the stage, but it's never made clear how close you are to your goal. While the original Battle City indicated how many tanks you needed to destroy to progress, in this game you only know you're about to proceed when enemies stop spawning at the top of the screen. The basic gunplay is good enough, with the only downside being that enemies that take multiple hits don't react to being shot until they're already dead.

The game supplies the "City" part of its title with an "urban" art style, replacing the tanks from the original release with armed soldiers. It provides the game with some much-needed atmosphere, but it doesn't change much as you progress through the stages, even if the stage layouts themselves do. Sound design is similarly spartan, with loud and crisp gunshot sound effects to make up for the lack of music.

Those who seek out Battle City will find a decent, if somewhat basic, shooting game that does a good job of translating the original game's style into RPG Maker. With a little bit more variety in level design and clarity in presentation of the game's goals, this would be easier to recommend.