DEATH TANK ZWEI | THE HIDDEN CLASSIC & FORGOTTEN REMAKE

Death Tank on Xbox Live Arcade was released in February 2009 by Snowblind Studios and is a remake of one of my favourite games ever created. Despite the Sega Saturn being about as popular as a Tesco beef burger and selling a fraction compared to the Playstation - it’s rival at the time, it had some brilliant games exclusive to the system. One of these was so exclusive it was even hidden inside a game as an unlockable. Death Tank Zwei came hidden inside Duke Nukem 3D (wait, it gets stranger), and the only way to unlock it was to either have another save game from another Lobotomy game i.e. Quake or Exhumed (or PowerSlave as it was named outside Europe) or shoot every urinal in the game. Once you had achieved this might feat, you then could select Death Tank from the main menu. I have to add, PowerSlave (aka. Exhumed) also had the original Death Tank locked inside though I am unable to find any information or pictures of what this differs from Death Tank Zwei. For my friends and I, Death Tank Zwei was not only a great game but a ritual. We would all crowd into one unlucky parents’ living room or spare room (if they were so lucky) at weekends to hijack the largest TV in order to play. Not only this but when eventually loading the game (which could be a nightmare when the memory card would sometimes stop working), the theme tune was so ‘kick-ass’ and metal, it had the whole room headbanging along all knowing that a couple of hours of excitement and laughter lay ahead. Using the Sega Saturn’s multitap extension, up to 7 players could play at once though getting tangled up in the mass of gamepad wires was a health & safety hazard unissued by Sega.

To put it simply, DT is a game similar to Worms in which each player controls one tank in real time. You move left and right (slowly) by pressing the shoulder buttons and adjust the angle and power of your shot with the d-pad. Every few seconds, the large red arrow above your head would turn green which meant your shot was ready. This differed on time depending on what kind of weapon you had selected, for example a nuke would take two or three times as long to load but deals a massive amount of damage as well as explosive radius and blinding whiteness. The aim was to be the last one alive at the end of each round and in between rounds you are able to spend the money you earn by killing people (or money drops from planes) on new weapons which you can select in the next round. Killing more people meant getting more money but killing the person at the top of the leaderboard would earn you a bonus. On paper and just looking at the game it seems like the most simplest idea in gaming, but it worked - brilliantly. It was not only hilarious but was also a real test of skill, especially when there were only two players left battling it out with just regular shells, trying to fine tune their aim to be the victor. The variety in weaponry also added to the assortment of fun, and some were experts at using the hover coil to float over an opponents head to then launch a MIRV (a shell that splits into four) directly above themselves, then moving aside to let the split shells all land at once on some poor chump’s head. Though, blasting that cheeky bastard out of the sky with a well aimed nuke was even more rewarding. There were also fond memories of the next round suddenly becoming a ‘Blitz Round’ (key the ‘hey kids, here’s comes a blitz round’ announcement)  in which your gun reloads in milliseconds resulting in the round being a blur of madness.Those were good times in a world where online gaming was yet to grace us.


Jumping ahead 12 years after the release of Duke Nukem 3D on Sega Saturn, Erza Dresibach, developer on Death Tank Zwei from Lobotomy Software worked with SnowBlind Studios to develop the new and updated ‘Death Tank’ for Xbox Live Arcade coming fully equipped with Xbox Live integration, updated graphics, mods and a host of other features. It was what my friends and I had all been waiting for and was one of the few games that I bought without even playing the trial - which in fact, was the full game for a limited amount of rounds. Though handicapped by the Xbox’s ability to only allow four controllers active at the same time, it made up for it in online play and starting a game with just a few people locally soon became a full game as people began to ‘jump in’ as Microsoft puts it. Visually the game was a huge huge improvement which one can clearly see by the screenshots. Dust and wind sweeps across the detailed landscape and explosions and physics are bright and accurate. The shop also remained quite similar with a few new weapons being introduced and then even more through a patch such as fiesta MIRV or mighty Spark Ball. Many of the game mechanics and elements were also the same, the aiming, rules - which could be modded but the blitz round was replaced with ‘theme rounds’ in which every player’s current items are disabled and only those that it allows are given to everyone. For example ‘Nukes and Curse only’, giving everyone unlimited nukes but a black curse meaning shells home in on your tank. It added a lot of diversity and enabling only themed rounds is also good fun as well as being a challenge. Also for the first time in Death Tank history (if it really has one) is a single player / co op mode. Though not all that exciting, it allows one or two players to take on wave after wave of enemy tanks that get more and more skilled. It’s not exciting in anyway particularly but is good practise - though just creating a single player game with AI is where the fun always is. Multiplayer is truly where the game holds strong though, allowing for 8 players online with team options and even tournaments. Gone are the days of a group of 7 squeezing on a sofa in order to play, the online does adequately make up for it and even when there are just a few friends on one Xbox, you can add AI to make up for those friends and memories past. 

Despite it’s endless fun, comedy, variety and canned nostalgia, Death Tank just didn’t ‘jet pack off’ on Xbox Live. I am certain that this is due to it’s hefty price tag on launch of 1600 MS points. That is a lot of money, especially for a game that seems at first to be so simple. It took only months for the crowd of online players to thin out and trying it now is just a ghost town of inactivity. It’s a crying shame because it’s so good and so true to the original and the online play really does (did) make up for the lack of Xbox controllers allowed on one screen. I have searched online for those who still play but it’s nothing but dusty shuttered windows of memories past with the most recent posts or comments of the game being in 2009. I wish I could spread the word about this game, perhaps there is a community still out there who play regularly but this is an absolute classic that was hidden in the past and now forgotten in the future. If you have four friends and four controllers, give it a go. It’s 1200 MS points now (not much of a reduction from its original price) but if you can recreate the fun these games have given me - it’s worth it.