11/4/20 Anti Ballistic Missile (1980)

Anti Ballistic Missile (1980) by Silas Warner, published by Muse Software for DOS. This is also technically a review of Missile Command for Apple II, because they’re essentially the same game. This is from a time before home computer game programmers were widely comfortable stepping outside the confines of arcade gameplay, and you can basically get the entire scope of what it has to offer in about a minute. You are tasked with defending six east coast cities from missiles fired by “the enemy.” You move your cursor over the lines and hit fire, try to be as fast as you can and protect as many cities as you can until the time runs out. The difficulty selection is kind of interesting to me, you get to choose not only your enemy’s missile speed, but also the size of your ABM’s explosion radius. This interest is purely historical, though, because most difficulty settings boil down to a single “Easy, Normal, or Hard?” menu without an idea of the gameplay changes; the only other title that comes to mind that lets you tune both sides is Scorched Earth and those that followed in its Artillery Strategy footsteps. I should note that the default 3,000 cycles in DOSBox is waaaaay too fast for this game, the highest comfortable speed I found was 500.