{"id":1606,"date":"2011-04-12T23:49:44","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T06:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2016-12-09T11:48:47","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T19:48:47","slug":"combat-the-luxury-of-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1606","title":{"rendered":"Combat: The Luxury of Style"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2001 remake of <em>Combat<\/em> could have easily gone another way: attempted realism. Given the theme of tanks, the developers could have tried to make a tank simulator. Any commercial remake would have had to expand greatly on the original in order to justify the price they intended to charge for it, and going for a detailed depiction of realistic military hardware would be one way to do that.<\/p>\n<p>But they didn&#8217;t. They instead chose to make it about <em>videogame<\/em> tanks, blatantly unreal things that exist nowhere outside of software, gliding around on a sequence of floating platforms and ramps that have no history, serve no purpose but to host tank battles. These tanks don&#8217;t even have treads. They&#8217;re hovercraft, essentially, zipping along on some kind of glowing antigravity engines. This means that they&#8217;re capable of strafing left and right &#8212; often a useful technique, I&#8217;m finding, as it lets you dodge fire from an enemy you&#8217;re facing and at the same time saturate the area in the general direction of said enemy with bullets. (The bullets themselves are essentially sparklers.) You can&#8217;t aim your gun independent of the direction you&#8217;re facing, but at least you can face in a different direction than you&#8217;re moving. Not just by strafing, either: you can build up momentum and then spin around without affecting your trajectory. Sometimes the game feels more like <em>Spacewar<\/em> or <em>Asteroids<\/em> than <em>Combat<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a bit of a paradox here. The original <em>Combat<\/em>, and the arcade game it was based on, were, presumably, designed to give an experience that was the closest thing to a realistic tank battle that their programmers could create on the hardware at hand. The end result was highly stylized, but it was stylized by necessity. It isn&#8217;t until you have hardware that&#8217;s capable of a more realistic simulation that it becomes possible to <em>choose<\/em> a stylized approach, and this makes the stylization more conspicuous, even though in absolute terms it&#8217;s less extreme than in the original. I recall observing something similar with respect to the <em>King&#8217;s Quest<\/em> series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2001 remake of Combat could have easily gone another way: attempted realism. Given the theme of tanks, the developers could have tried to make a tank simulator. Any commercial remake would have had to expand greatly on the original in order to justify the price they intended to charge for it, and going for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,26],"tags":[466],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arcade","category-shooter","tag-combat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4821,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions\/4821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}