Assault/Walkthrough

Namco's 1988 multi-directional shooter arcade game Assault (which is the last title from that company to be licensed to Atari Games for US manufacture and distribution) is divided into eleven different stages, based in four areas: Progress Planetary Circumstances (Stage 1), Memorial Land Forever (Stage 2), Crops Grow in River Side (Stages 3-5 and 10) and Question Mark (Stages 6-9 and 11). Once you have inserted your coin into the cabinet, the text of "PUSH 1P BUTTON" will appear on the screen (as shown in that image above); however, if you insert a second coin into the cabinet, the text "PUSH 1P OR 2P BUTTON" will appear on the screen even though the game does not have a two-player mode. If you are using MAME to play the game, pressing "2" on that start screen will have the same effect as pressing "1" - and if you can enable game cheats, a simpler controlling system will also be available.

At the start of each stage, all enemies are dormant, and will only become active when your tank approaches them; however, once you have been raised into the air after driving onto a Jump Zone, every enemy in view will instantly become active. You should therefore be careful when doing this on a stage with lots of enemies, as they will time their shots to hit your tank while it is dropping back down to the ground - and on all later stages, the game can also suffer severe slowdowns. To compensate for this, enemies that are far enough away from your tank will disappear from that stage; this distance is a little further than your nuclear missiles can reach when you have been raised into the air by a Jump Zone. This rule also applies to the craters that the enemy tanks leave behind when killed, which will slow yours down if it tries to cross over them (much like they had done to Namco's own Grobda back in 1984).

At the end of each stage, you will receive 50 bonus points for every second of time you have remaining (the timer will only be displayed at the top of the screen when you have less than 100 seconds, or 1:40, remaining); if you can time it correctly, you can end a stage with exactly 0 seconds left. Because this game has a bug which does not recognize that 0 seconds is worth 0 points, it wraps the timer around to its maximum point value - and this trick can earn you as much as 17000 points on the later stages if you manage to pull it off. However, if you time it all incorrectly, it will immediately cost you a life.