I am fortunate to own an Atari Warlords cocktail machine. It was long a “holy grail” of mine as I always enjoyed playing Warlords on the Atari 2600 as a kid and with the arcade version being superior, I really wanted to have one. It was the most expensive classic game I have ever bought but it was worth it. The people who give the game a shot at my arcade fall in love with it immediately, last week I had one kid declare “this is the best game ever!” in his excitement while playing Warlords with his friends. Would it be awesome to have a modern version of Warlords in arcades with flashier graphics? Absolutely as it’s the perfect multiplayer “party” game. Thanks to a student project in Taiwan they are doing just that with a game they are calling Force.
The game isn’t exactly like Warlords but it’s pretty close – it’s a four player table top game, where each player has a sphere to protect with a shield that they can move to deflect the oncoming ball. Each player has a rotary-like controller which is more of a disc than the knobs that Warlords used but the disc also serves as the button. As it’s a student project I do wonder if it could get a general release for arcades to pick up or not but in the stronger arcade environment of Japan I would say that it’s more of a likely prospect than we’ve seen with other student arcade projects. Those of you who understand Japanese Chinese will have to let us know if any of the text in the video below reveals what release plans they might have for this. EDIT: This is out of Taiwan, my apologies.
UPDATE: More details here from the developer including more video of the game being played
[Force @ Blue Works Gaming DNA]
Also the creator sent us an e-mail stating: “Team FORCE is a six students team at Yuan Ze University from Taiwan. 《FORCE》is our graduation project at The Department of Information Communication, and It will be in an exhibition during May 13-16, 2010 in SOGO復興館, TAIPEI, TAIWAN.”
