Assault

Assault is a multi-directional shooter arcade game that was released by Namco in 1988 and licensed to Atari Games for US manufacture and distribution. It runs on Namco System 2 hardware, and was the first game to use sprite scaling and massive sprite rotation. It was also included on the fourth volume of the Namco Museum series for the Sony PlayStation.

The player must take control of a futuristic tank operated by two 4-way joysticks. Its standard movements are carried out in the same way as many other tank games (such as Atari's own Battlezone), but two other moves can be executed on account of the joysticks being 4-way - pushing both joysticks away from each other will cause the tank to stop moving, pop a wheelie and allow the player to fire a nuclear missile at the enemies instead of the shots it usually fires while it is in its "normal" position; and if both joysticks are pushed to the left or right, the tank will roll (or "strafe") to that direction.

Another innovation of the game is its perspective, along with the way the player's tank enters and leaves the playfields; while the overhead perspective was not new, the game keeps the player's tank in the centre of screen while the playfield rotates around it. At the start of a stage, the tank is airdropped from above - but instead of the tank falling from the sky, the playfield appears to come up towards the tank; and when a stage is cleared, the tank rises above the playfield and drops through a hole in the ground. These methods of entering and leaving reinforced the player-centric approach of the game.

An upgrade named Assault Plus was released later in the year, but only in Japan. It gave the player a choice between "easy" and "super" mode, featured different music, changed the colours of the enemies and removed the "zero seconds time bonus".