Missile Command

Missile Command is an Atari, Inc. game released in 1980. The game is quite simple, as in the above picture, there are three missile guns which aims to destroy the missiles which are going to come from the top of the screen approaching the cities. We, as the player need to protect the cities/buildings from the missile attack by shooting and destroying the incoming missiles.

Interactive

Interactive explains the CORE game action/mechanic of the game. The action involved in this game are shooting (fire a missile) and move the missile guns to left and right. In addition to this, player can shoot a special weapon, but this is only available in multi-player model. To play this game, we only need a mouse to fire the missiles. Only with a mouse click, the nearest missile gun will fire the missile. There are three missile guns, but each missile gun has certain area limit in shooting the missile. For instance, the middle missile gun can only shoot from where its place until the are between left missile gun and middle missile gun. If the player wants to shoot in left corner area, then it is a job for left missile gun to shoot the missile.

Setting

There is no specific setting for this game. However, the player could choose either play in single-player mode, or multi-player mode. Additionally, if the player choose to play in multi-player mode, they will have special feature that they can fire a special weapon by clicking 'Launch' button.

This game uses simple and nicely design environment with buildings and cities are displayed in the lower part of the screen. Additionally, it also provides dark cloud, presumably to create a dramatic and strong feel for war.

Concept

In Missile Command, there are three missile guns which each of the missile gun has certain area limit in shooting its missile. The game begins with missiles coming down randomly from the sky or the top of the screen. Let's call these incoming missiles, unidentified missiles. The player needs to destroy the unidentified missiles by fire the missiles from their missile guns.

Goal

The goal of Missile Command is to protect the city from getting destroyed by the unidentified missiles by destroying them.

Challenge

The game sounds simple to play. However, the real challenge is to calculate the distance and time between the missile gun shoots and the missile reaches the mouse-click position. For me personally, this challenge begins to be felt when I reached level 8 when the my missile kept missing on destroying the unidentified missile because I clicked the mouse too slow and it ended up the unidentified missile kept coming down before my missile reached them.

All images is derived from: Missle Command — Atari.com
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