Note ·
Future Cop: L.A.P.D., a duel between genres
One of the most fun things I played on the PlayStation was a side mode in a game about police robots. Future Cop: L.A.P.D. came out in 1998, set in a Los Angeles of 2098, and next to its campaign it had a mode called Precinct Assault. Two players, one arena, one base each. You pilot the X1-Alpha, a machine that switches between a fast hover car and a slow, heavily armed walking mech. You drive out to capture turrets and outposts, you spend what they earn on hovertanks that roll toward the other base on their own, and you buy helicopters to shoot down the tanks coming at yours. The first tank to break into a base ends the match.
What made it work was that you were two things at once. You were the soldier, in the middle of the fighting, escorting your tanks through the turrets and hunting the other player. And you were the general, deciding whether the next credits went into attack or defence. Every minute you spent driving back to defend was a minute your own push went without you.
It was not the first game to try this. Herzog Zwei did something close on the Mega Drive in 1989, with a transforming mech of its own, and the Wikipedia article on Future Cop notes that the difference is that you can help your army reach the other base yourself. Precinct Assault is sometimes counted as an early form of the MOBA, and the genre that followed kept the lanes and the units that walk them. But it dropped the economy and the general, and it went from one against one to five against five. I have not found a game since that does exactly what Precinct Assault did.
The version I would like to build is a one-against-one DotA in a setting closer to Terminator: a ruined city, machines on both sides, one transforming unit per player that is both your hero and your commander. Capture a factory and it produces infantry. Capture a ridge and it holds a turret. Everything you own is something the other player can take, and the only way to protect it is to be somewhere, which means not being somewhere else.
References
- Future Cop: L.A.P.D., Wikipedia.
- Herzog Zwei, Wikipedia.