Earlier this year we heard about the development of a new tank battle game by a Taiwanese company called InJoy Motion. We have covered them various times in the past, they have have released various arcade titles such as Project X-Pher, Top Gunner, Dido Kart and Street Racing Stars. The new title to join their family is called Allied Tank Attack and one thing that stood out about it when we first saw it was the dual-set configuration with a yoke controller in the driver seat and a mounted light-gun in the passenger seat (as a note, single player is possible, the gunner is an optional co-pilot). This kind of multi-control configuration is really uncommon these days. In the past, one game that comes to mind like this was Namco’s Lucky N’ Wild, which featured a steering wheel and light-gun for the driver and a pair of mounted guns for the passenger. On top of that control scheme, it was also notable to see a new tank battle game and to sweeten the deal, ATA has a motion seat that takes advantage of InJoy’s new “Air” technology that they introduced last year to provide an alternative to expensive electrical motors and metal arms.
What was initially unveiled was limited – we saw the dual player cabinet at a few trade shows running some early software and that was about it. While it is unknown what changes have been made to the game since, we now have some 3D renders straight from the developer that should reflect the final cabinet designs that will begin shipping worldwide in November. This includes a single player cabinet you can find below.
(Click on the images for the full view)
Here is the single ATA cabinet which is just about the same as the dual player, it just eliminates the additional light-gun. The game is linkable for two cabinets and features a software mode for VS. player battles.
As mentioned, this game is available in both cabinet forms starting at IAAPA 2013. InJoy has made an agreement with air hockey manufacturer Barron Games to start carrying their games in the US so that customers do not have to wait for product to ship from Taiwan. Not sure of the pricing yet but their other Air Series cabinets were quite competitive, costing pretty much the same as non-motion titles from competitors ($8000 range). So we will see if this is close to those or not. Either way that is pretty solid for a motion based game since those can easily get into the $20,000+ range (recall Sega’s first attempt at their Hummer racing game was about $35k).
Also I should add that I did get a chance to see a near-final beta video of this in action. They are holding off on publishing it for the final product which will have some minor changes made to the video. But from what I saw, it runs at 60FPS and at least 720p resolution. There are a lot of smoke particle effects, HDR lighting, plants and some other effects for explosions and picking up power-ups. Graphically it is InJoy’s most polished game to date. It also has several different types of tanks with different weapons to choose from, more than I’ve seen in any other arcade tank game. The controls for the driver have the left foot pedal for forward movement, right pedal for reverse; then there are two trigger buttons found on the yoke. The two accessible by the index finger fire the main cannon, the thumb buttons fire the machine gun. There is a large yellow button in the center of the yoke, this acts both as a Start and a Turbo button which can activate a short burst of turbo speed when the gauge is built up.
We will have more info when IAAPA rolls around!
