Extropia’s Retro-gaming: ‘Night Raider’

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

“NIGHT RAIDER”

‘Night Raider’ was a multi-format game that was published by Gremlin and released in the late 80s. It was a cross between a simulation and an arcade game, and it was based on a famous mission that occurred during World War II.

In ‘Night Raider’ the player took on the role of a crew piloting an American designed torpedo bomber known as the Grumman Avenger, and the mission is to sink the Bismark, which was an actual battleship that was responsible for sinking many Allied ships such as the battle cruiser Hood.

When playing the game, the player was expected to take on all the roles of a bomber crew, such as flying the airplane, navigating to the correct destination, fending off enemy attack and successfully deploying the torpedo. The Avenger could only load one torpedo at a time so it was crucial to aim the weapon properly. There were no second chances should you miss on the first attempt.

Piloting the plane involved moving around the controls with your joystick. These controls were typical of flight simulators. You had controls for airspeed, altitude, artificial horizon and an inverted T-bar to show the position of the rudder, brake, throttle, ignition and torpedo. However, this game was never intended to be a full simulation (or as close as you could get with an 80s home computer) and was instead a slightly more forgiving arcadey kind of experience.

Having said that it still required some skill not only to fly the plane and aim the torpedo, but also to successfully navigate to your destination. This entailed a constant switch to a map screen in order to check that you were en-route. If you happened to get into combat, the cross-hairs would lock the plane onto a certain course and checking the map necessitated taking the cross-hairs off the screen and risking attack from enemy forces. Oh, and you had multiple objectives in that you had to defend your own fleet while also attempting to sink the Bismark.

The game had pretty good graphics for the time. Bagging a German fighter would send it on a dramatic downward plunge trailing plumes of smoke. If you played the 16-bit versions you got some extra frills in the form of digitised speech from Hitler celebrating the Bismark’s first successful kill, and from Churchill delivering his famous speech about lifting the curse of Hitler from “the brow of men”.

So, all in all this was not a bad little game. It was the sort of thing you would play if you wanted a more technical challenge than a simple arcade experience but at the same time could do without wading through an instruction manual. I do not know if anyone remembers the ‘Dam Busters’ videogame but if you do you have a good idea of what this was like.

Thanks to Gremlin for the screenshots.