BattleTanx Ranking: C
BattleTanx is an obscure game for the Nintendo 64 that also got ported to the Gameboy Color. I played both and I was impressed when I was a little kid. At that time I just wanted a game where I could go around wrecking stuff, which, well, you can do in this game with a variety of tanks.
Now that I’m older I have 2 major gripes about this game. First, the game is incredibly short. I beat it in about 2 hours and I kind of regret spending money on it. Second, the game’s backstory tells of a post-apocalyptic future where the vast majority of women have been killed by some sort of female-killing virus. The main character’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and you go save her by driving across the United States in your tank and blowing up everything that stands in your way. This backstory strikes me as…wrong. I’m not sure whether it’s the idea that women are basically just trophies in this game or the implications of a world where the country’s devolved into small male-gang-controlled territories and they’re fighting over women in military-grade hardware. Either way it’s not right. To drive the point home, you can tell a compelling post-apocalyptic story with small gang territories that don’t have this wrongness – Fallout and Mad Max are really good examples of this.
I will say that the graphics depicting real-world locations in this post-apocalyptic future are pretty well-done. I always enjoy seeing real-world locations in video games.
BattleTanx is an obscure game for the Nintendo 64 that also got ported to the Gameboy Color. I played both and I was impressed when I was a little kid. At that time I just wanted a game where I could go around wrecking stuff, which, well, you can do in this game with a variety of tanks.
Now that I’m older I have 2 major gripes about this game. First, the game is incredibly short. I beat it in about 2 hours and I kind of regret spending money on it. Second, the game’s backstory tells of a post-apocalyptic future where the vast majority of women have been killed by some sort of female-killing virus. The main character’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and you go save her by driving across the United States in your tank and blowing up everything that stands in your way. This backstory strikes me as…wrong. I’m not sure whether it’s the idea that women are basically just trophies in this game or the implications of a world where the country’s devolved into small male-gang-controlled territories and they’re fighting over women in military-grade hardware. Either way it’s not right. To drive the point home, you can tell a compelling post-apocalyptic story with small gang territories that don’t have this wrongness – Fallout and Mad Max are really good examples of this.
I will say that the graphics depicting real-world locations in this post-apocalyptic future are pretty well-done. I always enjoy seeing real-world locations in video games.