Moon Patrol (CCE)
Moon Patrol (ムーンパトロール, Mūn Patorōru) is an arcade game by Irem that was first released in 1982. It was licensed to Williams for distribution in North America.
The player controls a moon buggy, viewing it from the side, that travels over the moon's surface. While driving it, obstacles such as craters and mines must be avoided. The buggy is also attacked by UFOs from above and tanks on the ground. Moon Patrol was one of the earliest side-scrolling shooters and is credited for the introduction of parallax scrolling in side-scrolling video games -- although Jump Bug featured it first.
The player takes the role of a Luna City police officer assigned to Sector Nine, the home of the "toughest thugs in the galaxy."
The top portion of the screen shows a timeline-style map of the current course, and three indicator lights. The top light indicates upcoming enemy aerial attacks, the middle one indicates an upcoming minefield, and the bottom one indicates enemies approaching from behind.
The map shows five different checkpoints labeled E, J, O, T and Z. Similar to racing games, the time spent during between each checkpoint is compared to the average which determines the number of bonus points allocated to the player. The game contains two courses, the regular and champion course; after completing the first course your buggy's color changes from pink to red and the game continues on.
The player controls a moon buggy, viewing it from the side, that travels over the moon's surface. While driving it, obstacles such as craters and mines must be avoided. The buggy is also attacked by UFOs from above and tanks on the ground. Moon Patrol was one of the earliest side-scrolling shooters and is credited for the introduction of parallax scrolling in side-scrolling video games -- although Jump Bug featured it first.
The player takes the role of a Luna City police officer assigned to Sector Nine, the home of the "toughest thugs in the galaxy."
The top portion of the screen shows a timeline-style map of the current course, and three indicator lights. The top light indicates upcoming enemy aerial attacks, the middle one indicates an upcoming minefield, and the bottom one indicates enemies approaching from behind.
The map shows five different checkpoints labeled E, J, O, T and Z. Similar to racing games, the time spent during between each checkpoint is compared to the average which determines the number of bonus points allocated to the player. The game contains two courses, the regular and champion course; after completing the first course your buggy's color changes from pink to red and the game continues on.
Technical
CPU
- maincpu M6502 (@ 1 Mhz)
Chipset
- TIA (@ 0 Mhz)
- Cassette
Display
- Orientation Yoko
- Resolution 176 x 223
- Frequency 59.922743 Hz
Controlers
- Number of players 1
- Number of buttons 1
- Kind of controler joy (8 ways)
© Copyright author(s) of Wikipedia. This article is under CC-BY-SA
Clones of Moon Patrol (CCE)
Ports
There have been many ports of Moon Patrol to home computers and console game systems, including:
- Apple II
- Atari 800
- Atari 2600
- Atari 5200
- Atari ST
- ColecoVision (in prototype form; never released to the public)
- Commodore 64
- Commodore VIC-20
- Mobile (Moon Patrol EX & Lunar Patrol)
- MSX
- Game Boy Color (Arcade Hits: Moon Patrol & Spy Hunter)
- PC booter
- Dreamcast (included in Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 2)
- PlayStation (included in Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits - The Midway Collection 2)
- Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
- TRS-80 Color Computer
- Windows 95 (included in Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits - The Midway Collection 2)
- ZX Spectrum (completed but never released)
- Intellivision ( named "Space Patrol")
Clones
- A bootleg version called Moon Ranger was released in the arcades the same year.
- An open-source clone named moon-buggy for Unix-like terminals is included in most modern linux distributions.