_ _ _______ _____ _____ _______ _ ______ _______ _____ | \ / |__ __|/ ___|/ ___|__ __| | | ____| / /| / /\ | \ / | | | | |__ | |__ | | | | | |__ /______/ |/____/ \ | \/ | | | \___ \ \___ \ | | | | | __| | | | \ /| | |\ /| |__| |__ ____| |____| |__| |__| |____| |____ |_____ | | __ \/ | |_|_\/_|_|_______|_____/|_____/|_______|______|______| /__| | | | |\ | | / ____|/ __ \| \ / | \ / |/ __ \| \ | | __ \ | | | | |_| | | | | | | | | \ / | \ / | |__| | \ | | | | | |___ | | | / | |/ | | | | | | \/ | \/ | __ | |\\| | | | | /____| | | |/_/ | | |____| |__| | |\ /| | |\ /| | | | | | \ | |__| | | | | / \_____|\____/|_| \/ |_|_| \/ |_|_| |_|_| \_|_____/ |_______|/|_____/ MISSILE COMMAND 3D FAQ last updated January 27, 1997 by Clay Halliwell halliwee@ts436.dyess.af.mil e.halliwell@genie.com Publisher Atari (http://www.atari.com) Developer Virtuality (http://www.virtuality.com) Released December 1, 1995 Product# J9097E Media 2 megabyte cartridge Players 1 ProCtrlr Yes I. General Info II. Production Credits III. Contributors IV. Original Missile Command V. 3D Missile Command VI. Virtual Missile Command VII. Martin Brownlow Interview I. GENERAL INFO Missile Command 3D was to be the pack-in game for the cancelled Jaguar VR headset. This headset would have provided [tech info]. After the headset was cancelled, Atari decided to go ahead and publish MC3D anyway, much to the delight of Jaguar gamers everywhere. The original title of MC3D was "Missile Command 2000", but reportedly Atari's marketing experts hated the whole 2000-series concept, and forced the name-change. Nonetheless, MC3D remains at heart a "2000" game, and stands proudly among the ranks of Tempest 2000, Defender 2000, and Breakout 2000. II. PRODUCTION CREDITS Missile Command 3D was brought to life by the following individuals: VIRTUALITY Producer Jim Tripp Programmer Martin Brownlow (martin_brownlow@shiny.com) Game Design Martin Brownlow Scot Jones Mark Brown Jim Tripp Artist Scot Jones (scotj@virtuality.com) Musician Dale Robins Additional Terry Rowely Software Matt Wilkinson ATARI Producer John Skruch (jskruch@jtscorp.com) Assoc Prod. Robert Powers MC3D Design Robert Powers Testers Jennifer Vernon Nick Katakis Jason Lane Nicole Tatem Lance Lewis Tal Funke-Bilu III. CONTRIBUTORS The following individuals contributed to this FAQ: Clay Halliwell (halliwee@ts436.dyess.af.mil) FAQ compilation, and original research. Martin Brownlow (martin_brownlow@shiny.com) Answered all sorts of questions about MC3D (and wrote it, too). Chad Ridgeway (chadjag@geocities.com) Tracked down Martin and coaxed the Stage Select cheat out of him. Wes Powell (powell@easilink.com) Provided John Skruch's email address. III. ORIGINAL MISSILE COMMAND IV. 3D MISSILE COMMAND V. VIRTUAL MISSILE COMMAND A. Enemy Weapons 1. Missiles 2. MIRVs (Multiple Independantly-targeted Reentry Vehicles) 3. SWIRVs (Single Wildly Independent Reentry Vehichles) Smart Warhead in Re-entry Vehicle (STEPHEN FINTON) 4. Bombs 5. Rovers 6. Unknown, aka MIBBS (Multiple Independently-targeted Base Busters) MIRV Jr. (STEPHEN FINTON) A. Stage Select Cheat Enter anytime during play. Stage 1 Pause, 1+9+C+Pause Stage 2 Pause, 2+9+C+Pause Stage 3 Pause, 3+9+C+Pause Ending Pause, 4+9+C+Pause A. Level Bosses Virtual Missile Command has a total of 10 bosses that you encounter at the end of each wave. Each boss has a unique movement pattern, mode of attack, and weakness. With almost all bosses, shooting them causes them to break off their attack for a while. Stage 1-1 Boss: Flying Saucer Attack: Drops bombs on your cities. Strategy: Shoot it anywhere until it's destroyed. Stage 1-2 Boss: Sea Serpent Attack: Drops ball lightning on your cities. Strategy: Shoot it in the head until it swims away. Stage 1-3 Boss: Mothership (does Spielberg know about this?) Attack: Drops missiles, launches rovers, and fires disintegration beam. Strategy: Shoot off the four pylons with the red lights, then the center structure, then the beam emitter. Stage 2-1 Boss: Fighter [need the name of this fuselage type] Attack: Dives in and out of the clouds, making bomb runs on your cities and bases. Strategy: Shoot it anywhere until it's destroyed. Stage 2-2 Boss: Panzer Dragoon Jr. Attack: Breathes fire on your cities and bases. Strategy: Shoot it in the head until it dies. Stage 2-3 Boss: Lead Zeppelin Attack: Assaults your cities with disintegration beam and flamethrower. Launches missiles at your bases. Strategy: Destroy the beam emitters (which are protected by opening and closing force fields) then shoot the flamethrower until it's destroyed. Stage 3-1 Boss: Asteroids Attack: Dozens of asteroids rain down on your cities and bases. Larg asteroids, when destroyed, break up into smaller asteroids. Strategy: Destroy any asteroids which seem to be about to hit something. The huge, textured asteroids can only be destroyed by missiles. Stage 3-2 Boss: Tiny Robots Attack: Lots of tiny robots fly around and shoot missiles at your cities and bases. Unknown-type missiles are also launched. Strategy: Destroy the robots as fast as you can. If you have them to spare, one or two smart bombs are extremely helpful. Stage 3-3 Boss: Big Robot Attack: Fires missiles at your cities and bases. Strategy: Shoot it anywhere until it's destroyed. Final Boss: Assault Platform Attack: Launches tiny robots and Unknown-type missiles. Strategy: Shoot struts until they all fall off, then shoot remaining center section until it's destroyed. Fire off a smart bomb every few seconds to keep the tiny robots under control. Smart bombs are also extremely effective against the struts. If you have 7-8 smart bombs accumulated, you can knock all the struts off without firing a single shot. VI. INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BROWNLOW This "interview" with Martin Brownlow (programmer of MC3D) was assembled from several email exchanges between Martin and myself. Q. What other games have you written? A. I wrote a few shareware and PD games on the Atari ST - Grav, Grav 2, Gems, Chaos, Abombinaball, [Tanx] - and whilst at Virtuality I wrote two VR coinops - Virtuality Boxing and Buggy Ball (don't blame me for the framerate on those - I wasn't allowed to touch the 3D engine!), and helped do the Sega NetMerc VR coin-op. I'm currently working at Shiny and finishing off MDK. Q. What home console games have you done? A. This (MC3D) was my first home game to be published. Q. How long did it take to write MC3D from start to final version? A. Six months. Q. When I saw preview footage of MC3D I was a bit skeptical about what you'd done to Missile Command... it seemed like substituting point-and-shoot lasers for missiles ripped the entire heart out of Missile Command. A. I was pretty skeptical myself when told to do a VR Missile Command (I was kinda hoping for Marble Madness VR!), but when I finally resigned myself to doing it, I think I came up with a pretty good game design (VR version). Q. Isn't it kind of short? A. Too short? Doesn't it take about half an hour of constant blasting to beat it? Q. Well, Tempest 2000 has dozens of levels and takes a long time to beat. A. The only problem with T2K is that it gets boring after about 20 waves - you know nothing really special is going to happen, that it's just going to be the same. MCVR was designed to draw the player into the VR. Hence the fact that nothing attacks from below until stage 3. It was all ramped around the user getting better with the headset (which of course never came out). Q. Are there any scraps of VR headset code left in the cart? A. Yeah. If you can get your hands on a prototype headset (unlikely) with the right ROM in it that transmits the correct keycode (even more unlikely)then you can play using the headset in both VR and 3D modes. If a headset is attached then you get some extra options in the options menus and the keypad functions differently (left and right will move between bases rather than 1 and 3, since the D-pad is easier to use when you can't see). Q. Who designed the "MISSILE COMMAND 3D" variation? A. This game was totally Atari's design, and was written in about 2 weeks (including tweaking to get it how Atari wanted). Please don't talk to me about this section - it's a sore point. Atari at one point wanted to drop the 6 months of work on the VR game in favor of making the cartridge 100% MC3D, which just sits in a spare couple of K off in one corner of the cartridge! Q. What are all the missile powerups in "MC3D"? The highest I've seen is Fireball Missiles. A. I honestly have no idea. I think that fireball missiles are the best (don't they make a horizontal line of explosions?). As I said before, I didn't really care for this game, since it wasn't designed very well. I believe that a lot of people have complained that the game won't actually let them die. Q. Would you say that MC3D came out well in spite of Atari? A. Yeah, although I still think the 3D game sucks. Q. The "classic" Missile Command was a major disappointment. I'd rather play a 99% perfect Missile Command than fool around with polygon models of TV sets and Lynxes. A. I would have preferred this, too, but Atari gave me absolutely zero support, no screenshots, no arcade machine, no copies of near perfect conversions, just a design doc for the Microsoft Arcade version, which went more into wave structure than screen resolution and appearance. Q. Why are powerups only identified the FIRST time you pick up one of each type? Sometimes it's impossible to see what you've picked up through all the explosions. A. Blame the producer, and Atari. Atari wanted no text, the producer compromised and made me change it from every time to just once. Q. Did Atari give a reason for this bonehead idea? And was there a Tramiel involved? A. So you heard stories about the big bad Leonard, too... they're all true! Q. I've heard that the level select cheat originally had no "9" in it, that you added it to hide the cheat from Atari when they demanded you take it out. Any idea why Atari wanted it out? A. I have no idea. They just said take it out. Q. Were the city domes and tunnels originally transparencies? A. No, they were always stippled. Transparency is almost impossible to do at any speed on the Jag without limiting yourself. Q. What does "SWIRV" stand for, if anything? A. Erm... actually, the producer came in one day near to the end of the project (the first two levels were almost totally finished and I was just putting the last 1/3rd of the last level together) and said that he wanted to add a new missile type that was like a MIRV but targetted your bases. When I asked for a name for it (for the missile ID screen in the intro) he said to call it the SWIRV, but I believe I called it UNKNOWN and moved the name SWIRV to the one that swerves out of your sights. So SWIRV doesn't actually stand for anything, but is a corruption of "swerve". Q. In the VR mode, are missiles really useful against anything besides the bosses? A. With practice you can use them to detonate multiple ships or missiles, or pick powerups up, and this was the original idea, but it's kind of flogging a dead horse... there's no point when the lasers do a perfectly adequate job against all the smaller enemies. I wish it were otherwise, but there was really no obvious way to keep the game missile based when moving into immersive 3D. Q. Why wasn't there the standard "city count" between MC VR waves? A. The wave summary was kind of a last second thing. There was no room in RAM to decompress a sample, and no time to do it. Q. Does the game decompress all three wave bosses into RAM at the beginning of each stage? A. No, what happens is that while you are playing the wave, the game decompresses the boss on the 68K. Then when you beat the boss and the next wave starts, the next boss is decompressed over the old one. That's why I didn't leave the smartbomb cheat in - you could get to the end of a level before the boss was decompressed and have to wait around for it to finish. Q. Was the dragon boss inspired by Panzer Dragoon? A. Yup. The artist outdid himself on that one. Q. Why is the A.I. on the dragon boss so cheezy? Sometimes he'll cruise around sightseeing, and sometimes he'll wipe out all your cities in 30 seconds flat! A. He's not got A.I. as such, just 4 or 5 linked paths that he randomly goes down. You know that if you shoot him in the head he stops breathing fire for a little while? If you missile him in the head it's quite a while. Q. I thought the bosses were on the simplistic side . Star Fox pretty much set the standard for polygonal bosses, and MC VR doesn't really compare (with the exception of the spectacular FINAL boss). A. The FINAL boss? I thought he was one of the simpler ones... Certainly from my point of view the more complex bosses were the dragon and the robot (especially the robot). The problem with the bosses (and the number of SFX) was that there's only so much memory in the Jag cartridge, and I didn't want to go up to a 4MB cartridge because of the increase in unit price, and I was dead set on having 3 bosses per level. The only defense I have is to say that there were 10 bosses to do (originally 9 but I decided to surprise you at the end when the artist came up with a new boss (I wanted to keep the little robots boss!)), and it kinda gets hard to think of new things to do with them. Q. Do you have names for the bosses? A. Nope. Q. Did you program the Virtuality arcade MCVR? How does it differ from the Jag version? A. No, Simon Fox did that, but it was based heavily on the Jag game. The differences are that it is a lot more arcade oriented - a lot faster, the waves designed for high response headset input, the players go around the arena in gun platforms that go around a circular runner. Q. Does MC3D use much 68K code? A. The spinny logos are on the 68K, the vertical blank interrupt and the in-game decompression, but mainly the 68K is pointing at a STOP instruction. Q. Is the Jaguar a pain to program? A. Yes. You only have 4K of memory in the GPU, so you need to page code in and out of this, and there's a horrible Blitter bug that caught me out when you start a blit off, it takes 3 cycles for the busy flag to be set, so you have to wait for 3 cycles before you can test to see if the blit has done. This is not documented anywhere, and Atari wouldn't even recognise it as a bug or agree to put it in future documentation. It caused me so many problems - jumping into code that hadn't been blitted yet is not a good idea! Q. Do you have any idea why MC3D crashes on some Jags? A. No, it's never crashed on our development machines, and it got right past Atari's testers... so I can only presume that Atari's testers didn't test it on every model of Jag. Q. Did Virtuality have any other Jag games started or in mind? A. They were doing Exorex - a mech game, and Zone Hunter - originally an explore 'em up, but got changed into a Doom style game (and it's a real travesty that you never got to see my Jag Doom engine - it FLEW!) but they stopped all that ages ago. Q. Do you own a Jag? And if so, what's you favorite game? A. Yeah, I own two (one of which is sitting back in England). I really liked AvP and sort of liked T2K, so I think I'd have to say AvP (apart from MC3D, of course!). Q. The frame rate is good, but a bit on the slow side. What happened? A. Blame Atari... "Oh, and texture this, texture that, texture the other." "But textures are at least 8x slower than flat shaded" says I. "Actually," says Atari, "they're at least 22x slower, but we want them anyway". You saw how the motorcycle game (Supercross 3D) game came out - really slow - that's because they gave in to Atari and textured everything, which the Jag just can't handle. Q. Why are the lasers only solid white triangles? A. That's the framerate issue. Q. Which name do you like better: Missile Command 3D or Missile Command 2000? A. Actually I liked Missile Command VR (and if Atari had made me change the name around once more, then they would have been firebombed). As it was, there's still a mistake in the final game - the high scores for the 3D section are actually called PLUS HIGH SCORES, from when that section was Missile Command Plus - how I ever let that game become the title game is beyond me.