Mankind has always been fascinated with the moon since the dawn of time. That ball of rock high above, we could have sworn that it has a face that smiled back at us once in a while. Maybe the moon is mocking us low life human beings that made us conjuring up a story that we actually have landed on the moon. Seriously, how can we control a space craft with the technology far less than a Nokia 3110. Heck, even those pictures of the first landing was fake – where were the stars? Why was the flag fluttering? What about the ‘C’ rock? And what about the Van Allen Radiation Belt? Too many questions and not enough answers.
Well the answer to all of these questions and more is this – NASA doesn’t want to show the world the real truth of what happened during the first landing on the moon. If they did, there surely will be total chaos among the people of Earth. However something has leaked out that no one expected except the folks from Irem. Instead of chaos among the people, it was the opposite – we lapped it up like a thirsty dog to water. This ‘footage’ was called Moon Patrol and boy the moon’s surface is a lot different than we expected. And who would have thought these lunar lander guys have to fight off aliens, watching out for open craters beneath whilst listening to groovy beats?
After extensive research, this simulation has been ported to practically all consoles and the Atari, for which is review is based on, is one of them. This simulation arguably is the first to use parallax scrolling (the other being Defender) and for its time, it looks pretty cool. Deemed as a side scrolling game, the gameplay can be divided between what’s on the ground and what’s above. The ground has craters and rocks that you need to jump over and the occasional tank that will shoot with little provocation. The air will be swarming with alien space crafts that drop missiles to destroy you and some can even initiate craters. Lucky for you, you can press the fire button once to simultaneously launch an air / land attack – how’s that for innovation?
You earn points by destroying / jumping over obstacles and completing a leg, you earn bonus points if your time is lower than the average time. Each stage is marked with a letter of the alphabet starting from A to Z and separated into five parts being A-E, F-J, K-O, P-T and finally U-Z. There’s two levels of difficulty being beginner and champion. Finishing the beginner difficulty will catapult you to champion and there’s no ending for champion other than death or your tolerance levels. However mark my words that death is the most likely outcome.
Controlling the buggy is very easy as it’s a matter of moving your joystick left to slow down / right to speed up / up to jump and pressing the button to fire. However firing only has a limited range (about half the screen) so be careful when taking a shot otherwise you may shoot just short of the target. Speeding up will result a longer jump so use this wisely however some obstacles like a rock, are wedged just next to a large crater so time wisely your long / short jumps.
Visually it’s not a bad port for the Atari. Obviously the arcade version looks a lot better however I cannot complain too much about the Atari’s version. Smooth side scrolling with an illustrious demonstration of parallax scrolling (meaning the background images move slower than the foreground images, creating an illusion of depth), this could only been done under machine language and thankfully it was. Colourful graphics to boot with recognisable alien landscapes sets the scene quite nicely. However the most memorable moment for this game is the musical score – seriously it’s so funky it hurts and just as memorable as the Spy Hunter’s theme.
There’s has been some dodgy arcades ports in the past for the Atari at to the point when Moon Patrol was released. However, and thankfully so, this one was quite decent. I wished the buggy was a little more detailed as the Atari has the power to do this, especially with the wheel physics acting as suspensions whilst traversing on the rocky surface. Overall a decent looking game with a very cool musical beat that thankfully almost sounds just like the original. And to memory, I think Mark Robichek holds the official record for this game with 1,214,600 points. And to finalise this, this game also appeared in the 1984 movie 'The Karate Kid'.