Blitz was another game designed for the Vectrex by Jeff Corsiglia in 1982. Blitz is very similar in gameplay and look to ‘Barrier’ programmed for Vectorbeam by the then 17 year-old Rob Patton. Below is an excerpt from an article titled ‘Tim Skelly’s History of Cinematronics and Vectorbeam’, and gives insight into the happenings around the time of the production of Blitz and Barrier.
“One day Jim Pierce walked into the lab with a Mattell handheld football game. This was the first handheld game and extremely popular, despite being incredibly simple, with just a few LEDs for a display. Jim thought we should turn it into a video game. I told him that it would certainly stink as a video game and would probably mean a law suit from Mattell. He forgot about it for a while, but when it became clear that Rob had run out of things to do, Jim talked me into letting Rob program it strictly as a learning exercise. That game was Blitz, later Barrier. To make Jim happy, we put it out on test. It did very poorly, to put it nicely, and we stuffed it in the closet.” (Skelly 1999)
Being an Australian I know hardly anything about Gridiron but this game is one of the more entertaining of the Vectrex library. The idea is to manoeuvre your little man around the screen, he is marked by an X, and try to gain 10 yards so as to have another scrum (rugby jargon) and try to gain another 10 yards until you reach the touchdown line and you score a touchdown.
Unfortunately the Vectrex Control Panel does not move faithfully in all 8 directions and I found my passes to fellow team-mates being intercepted when I moved it in a Northeast or Northwest direction. It is cool though when you make a pass which goes for around 15-20 yards and your team-mate catches it. Blitz, I hear, is a good rendition of the actual game and I quite enjoyed it. Blitz sometimes appears on ebay for around $25.U.S.
Score 7/10
Review written by Daniel Foot
Instruction can be found at:
http://www.vectrex.de/download-anleitungen-der-vectrex-spiele/
