Raid on Bungeling Bay

1984 was the year of the helicopter. Airwolf and Blue Thunder (based on the 1983 Roy Scheider movie) debuted on network television that year, and Broderbund published Raid on Bungeling Bay for the Commodore 64. Of the three, the venerably cheesy Airwolf lasted a couple of seasons, and Blue Thunder didn't even last half of one. It is therefore Raid on Bungeling Bay that remains fresh in our memories.

Those pixels blow up real good.

Raid has a storyline that remains eerily relevant to this day: A rogue nation is building weapons that it shouldn't, so you and your high-tech attack helicopter are sent in to destroy their factories before it's too late. The game is played from a top-down view; you take off from your carrier, zoom in fast over the city shooting everything in your way, then come to a crash halt over the target. There are six factories to destroy, and the game gets progressively harder each time you take one out. The action quickly becomes frantic--jet fighters come after you, bombers hunt your carrier, and antiaircraft missiles corkscrew everywhere. And, to top it all off, eventually the enemy will finish construction on its superbattleship, and when it does, you've got to destroy it before it can sink your carrier.

Like in many great games, it's the little things that help to define Raid as a classic. The flight model is well realized for such an early action-arcade game; you can slip and slide around in the air, and you've got to be careful of your momentum so you don't overshoot your target. If you take damage, you have to limp back to your carrier for repairs, a nerve-racking journey as fighters swarm all over you like wolves moving in for the kill. If you need more time, you can delay completion of the battleship by dropping leftover bombs on its construction site. If enemy fighters become too much, you can stalk their runways and nail them when they land to refuel. And, if nothing else, part of the fun is exploring the city and realizing that it's made up of distinct neighborhoods. It's little wonder that creator Will Wright would later go on to make SimCity.

Clearly, the graphics only need a little touching up.

Almost 20 years have passed since Raid, and the closest we've had to a remake are the Strike helicopter games from Electronic Arts. Yet the Strike titles are too arcadelike and linear compared to the free-form gameplay of Raid. They also lack the sense of speed and chaos; there's nothing quite like getting caught up in a dogfight with no fewer than three fighters when you're desperately trying to save your carrier from a bomber attack. For a remake, it might be interesting to change the view from top-down to first-person but without turning it into a complex flight simulator. But a cockpit view would allow for quite a rush as you skimmed low over the streets and buildings of Bungeling Bay, ready to enforce the new world order once more.