Always get the big tank! ALWAYS!

Front Line is one of those games I used to play back when we had a FamiCom. What I remember the most from it are the marching snares at the start of the game and the sounds of the funny walk animation of our dude fighting his way to victory.

The game is a top-down vertical-scrolling shooter. You start at the bottom of the screen on foot and slowly progress to the top, killing enemies that spawn anywhere. Your only weapons are your pistol and a grenade. The pistol can only fire one bullet on screen at a time, while the grenade serves as a throwable weapon and it can lob over trees, but it flies so slow before exploding and its blast radius is laughably short.

Keep going up and eventually you'll arrive to an open field with enemies now driving tanks. There you'll find one of the two tanks that will spawn which you can drive; A weak and fast small tank, and a strong and slow large tank. Both fire one projectile on screen at a time, and their only difference is firing rate and armor.

The small tank fires quickly but it gets instantly destroyed by any enemy fire in one hit, while the big tank fires large shells slowly but can take a hit before exploding. You can repair the big tank by exiting and reentering it again if it gets hit, but do it quickly or else you'll lose the tank if it explodes, or if you're too slow to exit a second hit from an enemy shell will destroy the tank sooner (with you in it!)

Tip: ALWAYS get the big tank. If it spawns the small tank, it's worth taking the risk and just skip it. Once the small tank is offscreen one of the two tanks will spawn again, just pray it's the big tank.

Reaching the end is an enemy soldier on top of a tall platform, and the only way to kill it is by lobbing a grenade. Once dead, a jingle plays, gives you a bonus score for succeeding and the game is done, which then loops again from the beginning. The game has no end since that's the nature of its source: the arcade. It's purely for hi-score.

The game is good to play for a few minutes. It's so slow and tedious you'll eventually get bored and play something else. This game is a 2/5 for me.

Two years before the birth of my favorite PBS documentary series, two monumental arcade shooters released in Japanese game centers. We mostly talk about Namco's Xevious today, but that's not to say Taito's Front Line is just a footnote. Real-time games had toyed with replicating the modern ground combat experience before, from Konami's tank excursion Strategy-X to the more tactical, stealth-focused Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner. The former stuck true to the reflexes-driven loop of contemporary vehicle action, whereas the latter hinted at a more realistic approach, boiling the essentials of wargame combat down into an accessible format. It's really Taito's game that first united vehicular and infantry play into a cohesive whole, albeit with many rough edges and quite the jump in difficulty.

Front Line stars a non-descript 20th-century doughboy thrust into the action, with no squad or commanding officers to lead you through the battlefield. This front observer's got just a regular automatic rifle and seemingly no end of grenades, but also an aptitude with commandeering armored cannons on treads. Fighting through interminable waves of conspicuously Axis-like troops and juggernauts requires players to manage their distance, time shots and lobs correctly, and find a sustainable rhythm in the heat of battle.

I make this sound all too simple when it really isn't. Each loop, from the starting woods to the enemy HQ's boss, demands concentration and, often, the kind of luck any frontline soldier hopes for. One can tangibly feel the do-or-die atmosphere of battlefields even in a game as early as this. You won't ever find me calling this "gritty" or "visceral", but the simple audiovisuals and play dynamics mask a somewhat effective depiction of the entropy and senselessness found in a mid-'40s skirmish.

Front Line's creation is usually attributed to one Tetsuya Sasaki, but sources for this escape me. The most prolific person in games with said name worked at Alfa System as a producer, in fact. Whoever developed this '82 board sure didn't have the prominence of Tomohiro Nishikado. Ever since his most famous work Space Invaders, the corporation had deal with naught but imitators and less noteworthy successors to that missing link between the shooter and ball-and-paddle genres. A refresh was due...but how to accomplish it?

Adopting a loose WWII setting, with players controlling a G.I. fighting alone and within either light or heavy tanks, helped separate this game from the crowd. The critical and commercial success of two distinct but rigorously designed arcade shooters, this and Namco's sci-fi classic, set a precedent we see in triple-A shooters today. In one corner sit the futuristic, generally single-mode action of Vanquish or Returnal. In the other resides all those (alt) historic combat titles, from ye olde Call of Duty to everything with a Tom Clancy label slapped on.

Unlike Xevious, however, there's a few too many missteps and needless frustrations throughout Front Line which hold back its potential. First and foremost are the graphics themselves. Character sprites and environments all stick out without becoming garish, but it's often hard to distinguish enemy shots from your own, especially because all gun-fire dissipates after a split-second of travel. Just as loathsome is how the game handles scrolling: you have to move way too close towards the screen edge before the playfield adjusts, meaning AI soldiers or tanks can get cheap shots in on you as soon as they appear. The player's neither able to jump or dash out of the way when a potshot's heading their way, nor is the walking speed all that fast to begin with.

I'd forgive Taito's team for this decision if you could survive more than one hit, but that's just not the case. So this adherence to one-shot-and-you're-dead verisimilitude crashes right into the reality of stiff, limited player agility which itself doesn't reflect what this soldier's likely capable of. Keeping track of crossfire works great when you're in the middle, but definitely not when this game forces you towards the edge. Loathe those tank hitboxes, too, though the ability to cheat death through a quick ejection removes most of the sting there. After that, it's just a frantic jog to the nearest undamaged hunk of metal, assuming nothing guns you down in the meantime.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had no choice but to use said scrolling technique to make Front Line work within hardware limits of the era, though. Both this and Xevious crested new highs of on-screen color, sprite processing, and fluid action that impressed Japanese audiences. They couldn't have had more different approaches, though, with Sasaki's vision of a dour, muddy and torn warscape contrasting hard against Masanobu Endo's preference for green plains, sleek metallic bases, and the Nazca Lines. Anyone would have noticed similar audio design between the games, though, trading out melodic chiptunes for repetitive, dehumanized SFX and short jingles. These developers understood how to strike a balance between highlighting their products on the arcade floor and keeping players immersed without annoying their senses. In short, I'd rather expose my eardrums to all the shrill footsteps and explosions here than 1942's insufferable drill march.

Likewise, the spartan game loop used in Front Line feels tuned to an extent rarely found in Golden Age designs. This unfortunately works against players more often than not due to the scrolling problems, all because the computer fighters can handle it better than us. Yet I get a kick out of rotating that dial (or analog stick in my modern MAME environment), then letting loose bullets and pineapples on these bucketheads. There's much joy here in managing clumps of foes, weaving between their projectiles, and mastering these early but responsive twin-stick controls. Actually surviving to the end of a loop is still way too hard for comfort, but I can understand why this became so popular with Taito's domestic market at the turn of '83.

Front Line may lack the variety, evocative world-building, or fully intuitive playability of its close competitor Xevious, but I still recommend trying it to understand the roots of the history-futurist divide in shooter games persisting today. Here was evidence that Taito's new and veteran creators could confidently emerge from the specter of Space Invaders and Qix, soon followed by other divisive experiments like Chack 'n' Pop. Hints of the following year's Elevator Action also crop up in this predecessor, too. For example, jumping out of tanks after being hit to avoid the explosion parallels frantic hopping between shafts to find cover from henchmen. Hell, that even sounds like a distant inspiration for Metal Slug's escape hatch mechanic.

Like Namco's similarly beloved '82 blaster, though, this arcade icon made little headway overseas, with North American and European arcade-goers rebuffing these more skill-oriented shooters. (I wish the same excitement they had for Konami's Scramble or Super Cobra extended beyond.) Western gamers instead cottoned on to more contained twin-stick standouts like Robotron 2084, and eventually to SNK's Ikari Warriors once this control paradigm had become familiar. Even so, this early innovator would itself reach us in Capcom's more popular Commando, helping to popularize difficult action-packed World War faire in arcades and at home.

You can find Front Line in some recent company compilations these days, or just fire it up in MAME like I did. The dual dial interface maps fairly well to a DualShock 4, among other gamepads, and the game's hard enough that I won't fault anyone for needing save states (especially since there's no continues!).