The particularity of the game? It is ONLY playable with a mega big-ass fucking joystick of death:
On this joystick, ALL the buttons are useful: the buttons to fire all the cannons, the pedals to move forward, brake and do side jumps to avoid missiles, the wheel to change the radio frequency, the windshield wipers for when the windshield is stained, the fire extinguishers if you catch fire… And of course the sacrosanct button for the ejection seat at the top right.
Just starting your VT is a real ritual:
Closing the cockpit, lighting, activating the survival systems then starting the engines.
The game is VERY difficult: if your VT is destroyed and you forget to eject, you are dead. The game erases your save and you start from the beginning. Brutal. It is also intended to be very tactical. We may have a VT, but the enemies have them too. You load the weapons you need at the start of the mission and that’s all you’ll have until the end. It’s up to you to manage your ammunition to defend yourself until the end of the mission. There’s also a second fuel tank that you can add, and then jettison when empty to go slower.
And why create a thread for that? Because the game is playable over LAN. Up to 10 players can compete in 5 vs 5. Well, I suspect that not many people must have a Steel Battalion lying around at home… But I know I have two: mine and the one from a friend who lives near me.
If people here are interested, do you mind that we’re trying to organize a LAN of this? If there are several of us, so much the better, if we only have two copies of the game I’ll see with my friend that we crash a video game event in Liège.
In France they have an association that organizes a LAN Steel Battalion twice a year with 10 copies of the game. I tell myself that it could be fun to reproduce that in our beautiful country on a smaller scale. Already just 2 vs 2 it can be epic
