640 - Red Baron
Best Games - Red Baron
Anyone who played arcade games in the 80s remembers Battlezone. Battlezone was that tank game made up of vector lines and blocky shapes. It was in first person, felt fully three dimensional, and it was unlike any other game in the arcade at the time.
Well, unlike any other game except of Red Baron.
Battlezone was a ploddingly slow experience, where the tension you felt was mostly because you could see the shots coming but you just weren’t able to grind yourself out of the way in time.
Red Baron, on the other hand, can be blindingly fast.
In Red Baron, you take control of a WWI biplane firing inaccurate machine guns at other biplanes, zeppelins, gun turrets, and other targets. The action can be extremely frantic. You often have to dodge and weave around bullets coming at you from multiple attackers, all while not crashing into oncoming mountain ranges.
Red Baron is the sort of game that shouldn’t have existed in 1981. It moves too fast. It’s too sharp and fluid. It actually feels real. Not like a simulation or anything, but when you move the joystick, your biplane responds like you want it to. When you fire your machine gun, bullets spray in a wild, but tight, pattern. You don’t exactly have to lead targets, but you can see that bullets drift away from your heading. These are all things that wouldn’t really happen in flight simulator games for years.
Yes, it’s a simple game. Yes, after you have played it for a few minutes, you will have seen everything the game has to offer. There are no special stages or boss enemies. But, just because it’s a short game, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game. You could say the same about PAC-MAN, and that game is great.
I found Red Baron in an arcade well after its prime. Not many people played it, but I put many quarters into that machine. It captured a very core felling of high speed 3 dimensional movement that I don’t think I experienced again until I played Quake, or Terminator Future Shock. On the other side of that screen was a real place, and I was moving through it.
Maybe if Battlezone had been a little faster or a little more nimble, I would be singing its praises, but no. I’m here for Red Baron, one of the Best Games.