A blast from the past

If you are old enough to remember this, thanks, now I don't feel so alone!

Back in 1983, if you wanted to have an armored vehicle combat experience in the realm of console video games, a person had a few choices to pick from. For the Atari 2600 there was Battlezone and Robot Tank (just to name two), the Intellivision had Armor Battle(also sold as Armor Ambush) and Battle Tanks (part of a three-in-one game cartridge called Triple Action) and ColecoVision offered Tank Wars. Although this is a far from complete list, feel free to Google for other titles that I have not included here.

In my world of time, history would record that IBM launched the Personal Computer XT, Micheal Jackson introduced his career signature move, something called the "moonwalk" and the Space Shuttle Challenger taking off for the very first time. My memories from back then consisted of the snow just starting to melt and the weather getting warmer. Also, my mother made the expensive decision to purchase a video game system for our household.

Why she didn't go with the more popular Atari 2600, Intellivision or ColecoVision choices wasn't immediately obvious to me then (of course, now I know that it was so she could watch our one and only TV and not have it tied up with me playing games), but for many years to come, I would have a lot of fun playing on that now mostly-forgotten system called Vectrex.

Although the first game was built in (a title called Minestorm, very much like the more popular and better known Asteroids), more cartridges were eventually added to the growing library. Forgotten or even unheard of titles like, Clean Sweep (just like Pac-Man), Scramble and Web Wars, to name a few.
It would be this one game called Armor Attack that would hold me to the screen for hours and hours....

The premise of the game was simple enough, by using a missile armed jeep, destroy wave after wave of enemy tanks and helicopters while using the ingame environment for cover and protection. The first few levels would be easy going, progressively getting harder as the enemies multiplied and moved faster. The were no power-ups or upgrades of any kind, just unlimited missiles and modest speed to try and survive the onslaught.

It was an entertaining and challenging, single-player adventure. However, invite a real life friend over and plug in the second controller, now there was team based action with two jeeps running around!

As time went on, games were becoming harder to find on store shelves and the titles that were purchased were not very interesting to me (like a title called Blitz, a football game I would seldom play). Even the machines themselves stopped being available. It seemed as fast as Vectrex hit the market, it vanished just the same.

Eventually, I would move on to other gaming consoles (all the hype was surrounding this new at the time machine called the Nintendo) and titles on the PC, while my mother continued to play the Vectrex on occasion, right up to her passing. Surprisingly enough, our old machine is still around after all these years, now in the hands of my much younger brother. He claims it still powers up and plays just fine.

I wonder if he would be interested in shooting up some tanks and helicopters with me?