 If I were to make a list of the 13 games that were somehow always available for rent while every actual good game was checked out, that list would have games like Smart Ball, Arrow the Acrobat, Yoshi's Cookie, and Super Battletank. Oh no, I'm sorry, that's Gary Kitchen's Super Battletank War in the Gulf, released in June 1992 and developed by Imagineering. This might be their best Super Nintendo game, with adventures of rocks, monsters, of Rocky and Bowenkel, home improvement, the home alone games, family dog, and your favorite in mind, race driving. Believe it or not, Super Battle Tank is a tank combat sim, and you play as the commander of an M1A1 Abrams tank in the middle of the Gulf War, driving around various desert landscapes to carry out 10 different missions which consist of navigating through mine fields, finding and destroying enemy missile launchers, and of course making other tanks go boom. You use the L and R buttons to steer the tank, the X and Y buttons control your speed, B brings up your map, A fires your weapon, and select allows you to switch weapons. The main screen makes it seem like you have a ton of stuff to manage, but it's all pretty self-explanatory. Plus, the manual points out everything you need to know in case you're confused, although I have to mention, this is one of those games where if you're searching alphabetically for games, you gotta always double check G for Gary Kitchen, or G for gotta hit when games do this. Your tank is equipped with four types of artillery, you got your regular machine guns, laser guided shells which are labeled in the manual as fire and forget, boy is that ever cheerful. You can also create a smoke screen, which is useful, and of course you fire your main turret. What's nice is that when it comes to getting from place to place and spotting where enemies are located, you don't have to keep flipping between the map and your normal viewpoint. The map screen allows you to keep moving, kinda like in Doom, although this map makes it look like you're actually playing combat for the 2600. It doesn't help that it feels like it takes forever to get from point A to point B. The first mission just has you taking out tanks, which are also moving around, and you can see now why this game maybe isn't so great. The combat can be pretty goofy, especially when you're dealing with moving targets and you have to deal with night settings like this. It's hard to see what you're even firing at, and it doesn't help that the sprite scaling isn't so great either. I have to waste all this ammo just to light up the screen so I can see. I'll give Super Battle Tank credit, it sets a good foundation for a decent game or at least a decent home console. Tanks him made in 1992, does that mean it's aged well? No! This is one of the examples of a passable game at the time, made for product, but there's really not much here to recommend in this day and age. There's basically zero strategy here. You just roll up, do what you need to do, and you don't even need to roll out. Instead, this guy interrupts things, and you know he's a guy in charge because he's a dumpy looking guy wearing Desert Camo. He also looks like Charlie Kelly's Uncle Jack, which is kinda weird. Plus, he's just rocking his head back and forth like it's Dana Carvey doing his Dennis Miller impression. Super Battle Tank got a sequel simply titled Super Battle Tank 2, released exclusively for the Super Nintendo in January 1994, once again with Gary Kitchen at the helm. Hey, who is this guy anyway? Well, he made games for Activision in the early 80s for Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, but he's also notable because he, along with contemporary David Crane, was one of the first game designers that insisted on being credited for his work right there in the title. That's cool, but it's just, you know, kind of a shame that the games those guys designed for Super Nintendo weren't terribly interesting. Anyway, Super Battle Tank 2 is a sequel, all right, and for the most part, it's more of the same from the first game. This time, it's 16 missions, with one big difference being that you can switch to a mounted machine gun outside your tank, which makes it much easier to take out helicopters and fighter jets. To the game's credit, it's faster paced, plus it's easier to aim at and actually hit moving targets, but there's still barely any strategy here, and it's just really kind of a dull playthrough that, again, would have been slightly more interesting in 1994 when it came out. So yeah, both Battle Tank games are great examples of titles that were okay, average-ish Super Nintendo tank sims for the time, but they just kind of stayed in that time because there's just not much here. Unless you're interested in finding out how eager some folks were to cash in on the Gulf War, seriously, it was like that whole conflict had its own free license. It even had its own trading cards. If you insist on playing one of these games today, you're better off playing the sequel. The original game is just clunky and slow, and that can be said for the Genesis, Game Boy, Game Gear, and NES versions of it as well. The sequel is at least a little faster paced, but still, both of these games are examples where, if you don't play these, you're really not missing anything. All right, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.