Mobile Attack

[akator]

I've been enjoying this game over the last few days. It reminds me of an arcade game but it has been so long that I can't remember the arcade title.

I'm not very good at Mobile Attack, though... so far my best score is 20630. Levels can be completed by "eating" the pellet or shooting all of the enemy ships. Most of the time I find myself just passing back and forth at the bottom of the screen, picking off the enemy ships when they wander down. My attempts at other strategies have been far worse.

Does anyone have any tips?

[hasseapa]

Mobile Attack seems to be the same game as Titan, but with sfx for shooting (replacing a droning background noise).

A while ago I decided to sort out the taxonomy of these kind of games and Titan/Mobile Attack is a clone of Exidy's 1980 game Spectar https://www.mamedev.org/roms/spectar/

Spectar in turn is a sequel to Targ. They are very similar but Spectar adds dots to collect (likely influenced by Sega's 1979 game Head On or Atari's clone Dodge 'Em)

Other similar games are Bally Midway's 1982 game Solar Fox (not available on VIC but on Atari 2600 and C64) and (less similar) Crossfire. They both add enemies on side paths that can't be accessed by the player. I like to think of Jeff Minter's Gridrunner & Matrix as a mix of Centipede and Solar Fox.

Sorry, I can't find any better strategy either! I may try again later.

[akator]

^ Thanks for that background and info. I'll have to fire up MAME to rediscover these games and figure out which was the one I played at the arcades in my youth