Night Bomber

The Good
When I got my first PC way back in 1992, one of the first games I played that was sitting on the hard drive was called Scorched Earth, a shareware artillery-based game where you have to blow up your opponent using a variety of weapons. Its success warranted similar versions for the Amiga and Windows-based PCs.

Before making a name for itself when it comes to action games and first-person shooters, Apogee Software released the Adventure Fun-Pak, a collection of games released by MS-DOS and created by various independent developers who submitted the games to the company for publication. The games were quite small that they fit on a single disk, and were an opportunity to pass the time. One of these games was Night Bomber, which, in my opinion, is a precursor to Scorched Earth.

Night Bomber is one player only, and you only need to enter one value – the angle in which to fire at. Also, you are trying to destroy an enemy city on each go until you run out of ammo, after which point the game will be over. You are awarded a point if you hit a city. Occasionally after each go, a UFO passes by to make a kill. It may destroy you or the enemy city. Other times it may miss both. When I play this game, I always miss the city myself. So maybe I can use an imaginary ruler to fire at the correct angle. It is amazing that if a UFO shoots a city, you still score a point.

The game opens up with some instructions on what to do, and tells you that you need to fire all 12 missiles to finish, after which point the game gives you a rank. I don’t know how many ranks there are in the game. The instructions themselves are big enough even for a short-sighted person to read, and are more than one color.

Graphic-wise, the enemy cities are different each time after you fire a missile, and if you hit one of them, the resulting explosion is satisfying. The starry background looks good as well. Sound is through the PC Speaker only, yet the sounds are also good, with the major one being heard when one of your missiles is making its way toward a city. It sounds like the standard sound effect in cartoons when some character drops a bomb on someone.

The Bad
After you launch a missile at a city, you can't see where it will land.

The Bottom Line
Night Bomber was made at a time when most games were very basic, consisting of PC Speaker sound and either CGA or ASCII graphics. For this reason, the game is intended to run on an XT-based system, and this goes with the other games in the Adventure Fun-Pak. If you own a 286 or higher, everything in the game will be very fast. Regardless of this, this is a good game, which is often ignored by everyone as Apogee's rise to stardom didn't occur until the Nineties when they were popular for their action games.