"Not just a forgotten great game...some nostalgic old skoolers will wish they could remember it too!"

When we're all very young we have some desire to be leaders, or famous, or something important. For some this morphs into influentiality or career climbing or even taking over conversations. Most however just sit back and crack jokes about how they never 'had it' or kiss up to those who do. Pity they never had the chance to play Tac-Scan. Before the more complex RPG machinations rocked my world, and while I longed to play quarterback but wasn't good enough, the occasional game of Tac-Scan gave me that special leadership twinge.

Tac-Scan didn't just let you control two ships, either. You had a wedge of seven ships that remained solidly in the center. Turn a knob and they rotate, causing the enemies to come at you from different angles. In fact the enemy could come from off the screen and back if you spun around, another thing that impressed me. You can re-fire if your first shot seems off, with more ships giving a more lethal swath of lasers. As you lose your ships, this blast becomes less intense. With eight extras on top of that, there were chances to re-enforce with just one button push. An extra reserve ship would appear every 20000 points, and friendly ships would fly down, to be caught in the empty berths and join your team.

This allows for some major blunders. It's possible to lose your fleet with several ships in reserve, and it's game over. Or you can mistakenly place an extra ship far away from your remaining pack. And a quick swerve may cause a missile to come off the screen and take a ship out. Of course beginners will refill their fleet immediately, but more experienced players may find an optimal number of ships for their strategies.

Tac-Scan itself cycles through three stages. In the first, your wedge of ships is shown in overhead view. Swerving is drastic, and it's pretty easy to cut an enemy down. You start out with a standard caret but move on to less strategically favorable formations, such as a straight vertical line(firing straight ahead is a dud) or something unevenly spaced. The enemies do the usual(even then) faster and firing more bit,and near the end this blue pod comes out and targets your ships with a long wicked laser line.

Then your ships kick into overdrive, and the view is only partly overhead. You can't swerve any more, and enemies stay at the fringes. Shots get bigger as they get toward you from a vanishing point, and although the best bet is to play it safe I always seem to get caught up in the action and lose a ship or two more than I should. After a flatter 'boss' pokes at you with a laser, there's a token finale with a tunnel of polygons to steer through, rendered a bit transparent by a red line to avoid if you get too close to the edges. The polygons seem to be coming from an edge but as long as you don't bother to look where you're going, you're OK, as the game just shakes your ships side to side, really. Then you settle into a new formation, points per enemy ship go up, and you do it all again.

But I don't think the idea of starting with fifteen ships was what originally suckered me. Watching the background stars turn at your every whim or the ships changing perspective was a step above the falling stars of Galaga, which still impressed me. And there were several more colors than Asteroids, and your ships were more detailed too. Having a legitimate enemy to kill helped as well. It was all demarked in GI Joe fashion(good guys blue, bad guys purple) until the bosses, whose intentions were pretty clear. And Tac-Scan left Battlezone in the dust by allowing much quicker turns and not being so green. A green screen was great for my Apple IIe but not for a big, bad video game. Plus the letters and numbers on the screen were a nice improvement on those old LCD calculators that used to enthrall me, producing previously unseen letters such as 'X.'

The sound even surpassed what I'd expected. The constant gentle roar never risked being distracting, and the behind the cracking of enemy ships and your own was the spectre of the grand finale, your final ship breaking apart in slow motion. Between levels, ships also went into overdrive. Tac-Scan stood on its own for a couple of years before I downloaded the sample noises, but despite the annoying wait while downloading 3 MB I quickly got hooked again.

Maybe the reason I've never been terribly enamored of the Blue Angels is that I got to play Tac-Scan first. Seven coordinated ships, and they even fire, which is what any seven year old knows high powered air or space craft are supposed to do anyway. The spontaneous extra ships are a nice bonus, and the change of views and tasks means that the game will never be too repetitive. And there aren't that many enemies, but it never gets as out of hand as in Tempest's later levels. You can even play chicken for a spell if you want. These are just a few reasons why Tac-Scan is on my 'forgotten classics that even connoisseurs don't remember' list.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/00, Updated 08/28/03