Tank 8

The Good
Tank 8 is an impressive piece of engineering. A massive cabinet for up to eight simultaneous players, with a remote control for tournament play, and all that in the mid-1970s. With a full set of players, it must have been a wonderfully frenetic and loud spectacle. The lively attract mode gives a slight idea of how that might have looked. All eight tanks bustle around the playing field, shooting their cannons. It's said that Atari employees used to place bets on the scores of the automatically controlled tanks.

The Bad
It's disappointing that this automatic control wasn't also put to use to offer a real single-player mode. The game's flyer advertises that the game can also be played by one player, but that isn't really interesting. The tanks which aren't controlled by human players can't even be destroyed. All a single player can do is drive around on the playing field, avoid mines, and destroy some walls until the timer runs out. Even if the other tanks were just sauntering around the field erratically like they do in attract mode, it would have made for a far more entertaining game. It shouldn't have been a technical issue, either. After all, Tank 8 is the first game in the series to be powered by a microprocessor. But single-player tank action had to wait two more years until the release of successor Ultra Tank.

Another pity is how the land mines have lost almost all of their impact on gameplay. If you hit a mine in one of the two-player predecessors, your opponent scored a point. Since you're competing against up to seven other players in Tank 8, that scoring system doesn't work anymore, but instead of penalising players for destroying their own tank in some other way, it simply has no effect on scores at all anymore. Your tank will explode and leave behind a wreckage, and you continue playing with a new tank from your original starting position, but depending on the situation you were in, that can even be a helpful way to teleport out of a dangerous spot. It would have helped the balance of the game if this manoeuvre at least cost you a point of your own score.

The Bottom Line
As in all the Tank games, the controls take some getting used to but are very enjoyable. It's fun to handle two levers to have the small and nimble tank rotate in place, or quickly back up out of a sticky situation. The twee buzzing sound of the engines does its part to make driving the tanks entertaining. The white wrecks of destroyed tanks look downright cute with their bent barrels, and, along with destructible walls, add a new dynamic to the playing field compared to the earlier games. More than in any of the earlier titles, it's true that "no two games play alike".

A lot is going on in Tank 8. Action this frantic, with so many simultaneous players, is quite amazing. It's unclear why the mines have been defused so much, and the disappointing one-player mode, if it can even be called that, could just as well have been left out. Here, the attract mode raises expectations that the actual game inexplicably doesn't live up to. But for its intended purpose of wild duelling action with a lot of players, Tank 8 is a masterpiece.