How to play Moon Patrol online
- Speed up / slow down: right and left arrows
- Jump: X (the upper buttons)
- Shoot: Z (the lower buttons)
- Beginning or Championship course: the = key (the keypad’s # button)
- One or two players: the – key (the keypad’s * button)
- Start: Enter
- Pause: P
- Continue after a game ends: when the word CONTINUE appears, press 2 to carry on from the section where you were lost; Enter restarts from the beginning instead
- Player 2: J and L for speed, M to jump, N to shoot
- Restart, full screen and save states: move the mouse over the screen to open the emulator’s toolbar
Gameplay
You are a Luna City police officer patrolling Sector Nine in a buggy that never stops rolling. The ground throws craters, land mines, rocks and rolling rocks at you, tanks sit in the road, and UFOs hover overhead dropping bombs that blow new craters in front of you. Enemy missiles can also arrive from behind. You jump over what you cannot shoot and shoot what you cannot jump.
Each course is split into 26 segments lettered A to Z, grouped into five sections (A–E, F–J, K–O, P–T and U–Z) on a gauge at the top of the screen. At the end of each section the game compares your time with the average: if you were quicker you get 1,000 points plus 100 for every second you saved. Finishing a whole course is worth 5,000 more. You start with four buggies and earn extra ones at 10,000, 30,000 and 50,000 points.
| Obstacle | Jumped | Shot |
|---|---|---|
| Crater | 50 | – |
| Land mine | 50 | – |
| Rock | 100 | 50 |
| Rolling rock | 50 | 50 |
| Tank | 100 | 100 |
| UFO | – | 100 |
| Enemy missile | – | 500 |
The two courses
The Beginning course is meant for rookies and the Championship course for experienced drivers; obstacles get denser along either beat. According to AtariProtos, the enemy missiles and the moon plants that block your path only appear on the Championship course.
Tips
- Speed stretches your jump. A slow buggy barely hops, so make sure you are moving quickly before a wide crater.
- Clear two obstacles with one long jump when they sit close together.
- Don’t fire early. Your lasers only reach a short way ahead; wait until the rock or tank is close.
- Kill the bombers first. UFOs that drop missiles dig fresh craters right in front of you.
- Missile from behind? Jump it, then shoot it once it is in front of you.
The story behind Moon Patrol on the 5200
Irem’s arcade Moon Patrol, designed by Takashi Nishiyama, reached Japan in June 1982 and North America that August through Williams Electronics. It is usually credited as the first side-scrolling game with full parallax scrolling, the mountains and city moving at different speeds behind the buggy. By January 1983 it was one of the five top-earning arcade games in North America.
Atari took the home rights. The 5200 cartridge, model CX5241, was written in-house by Scott Smith with graphics by Courtney Granner and sound by Robert Vieria, while the 2600 version was contracted to General Computer Corporation. Smith kept the parallax effect by changing the scroll rate at certain scanlines, and AtariProtos rates the result one of the better arcade conversions on the system, though it notes a bug that lets a well-timed buggy jump into the middle of a large crater and out again. Smith has said a prototype was hacked to run on the Atari 8-bit computers and circulated on bulletin boards before the cartridge went on sale.
