The first job in creating every video game is to pick a name not previously used by another game. Those are the rules, I think less of games that don’t show some respect and putting a colon in the title doesn’t get my ass off you. APB is a beautiful arcade game that is a mix of a racer and action game with some mild RPG elements. The initial arcade version offered a unique cabinet and controls and BENCH, they let you sit on a bench to play it. The multiplayer online game called APB: All Points Bulletin has the stupidest name for a game in game history and it should be disliked and shunned, while recognizing the very hard work the creators put toward it. I can see how APB as the title of something was alluring, but you have to be strong, especially since APB the arcade game was so great.
APB – the one by Atari – was ported to the Atari Lynx. It is a bold effort for a home conversion that comes up a little short. More on that later. APB had a lot going on for a game you put a quarter in to play, but it’s bright and smooth and playable:
This video on YouTube shows what a gorgeous and thoughtful design the original cabinet had. Flashing police lights! A gas pedal! A steering wheel! You get a sizeable world to explore in the cop car, especially for 1987. The player’s police car is our avatar, and it’s a delightfully large object. I have only ever played the arcade version once and that was over ten years ago, but it’s obvious through that linked video that the motion and controls are smooth and responsive. You get to “be” Officer Bob (it took Atari a bit to start naming their characters; there was the unnamed square in Adventure, the unnamed cursor in Missile Command, the unnamed operator of the death cannons in Air-Sea Battle – “Officer Bob” is doing “Hiro Protagonist” levels of lifting here) who is encouraged by his commanding officer to go out into the world and initially pull over litterbugs and help people who are broken down on the side of the road.
There are donuts on the map that extend time – unfortunately, as this is an arcade game, they can’t have you hogging the machine. The game somewhat suffers from this, but many games from this time period would be better if reworked (Gauntlet and Xenophobe come to mind) to not have a ticking clock.
APB has what I’ll call a “Xevious” style of interactivity for drivers in certain cars, although I don’t know how famous Xevious is and if that clears things up much. As you accelerate your car, there is a sort of disembodied piece of text on the screen that says “PULL OVER.” As you go faster, it gets a little farther from your car. When you see a filthy litterbug throwing their garbage on the roads that our taxes pay to maintain, you line up the PULL OVER text and then hit the button (“siren”) to make them pull over. The text is sort of like the target, in other words – so it is possible to try to pull over or harass innocent people in this game, and doing so gets you a demerit. A consequence for a cop screwing with a wholly innocent person turns this game into science fiction these days, making it the first game to require updated genre tags 38 years later.
It is at least nice that the game tacitly acknowledges that beating a suspect is wrong, and the Chief is going to do something about it if he approaches the interview room. On the other hand, it seems like he put a framed picture of his own face up leading to that room, so who is the bizarre narcissist lacking a grasp of societal norms here? Not necessarily Bob!
APB is divided into days (which is where the minigames take place). On day three, you can pick up a gun by driving through a speed shop – to clarify, there are various places of business that you can drive into. (I am writing and reading and editing, and on day number 12 of working on this article it occurs to me that there is so much going on this game. It was probably wrong to think I was going to talk about its gameplay quickly. This may be the most complicated arcade game of the 1980s.) The buildings you can drive into have open roofs, which is nice, so you can still see your car. You can get equipped with the gun by doing this. I want to say that Grand Theft Auto 3 has a similar kind of gameplay, although my memory is that when it came to getting a new paint job or avoiding the cops, you sort of hung out in the building, rather than just drive through it. I don’t think there is a limit to the number of bullets you can fire, but you don’t want to shoot innocent people, unlike GTA3.
While the gun lets you start shooting at anybody, APB starts giving you a roster of the town’s most wanted criminals to begin the days. Some of these criminals are dealing drugs! This was a horrible crime in 1987. We also have crooks like “Candy Goodbody” who is wanted for “hooking.” I get that they wanted to keep it light so I am not really criticizing their choices here. There are mini games in between levels for the arcade version, where you can, er, attempt to beat a confession out of a suspect before your supervisor enters the interview room.
Going between MAME (crazy fast) and the Lynx (very plodding) is tough. I tried with the Lynx version, I really did. All versions of APB end when you obtain 10 demerits, but in the Lynx version the pedestrian cars don’t move like cars do. They don’t. They will run into you and give you a demerit and the driver intelligence isn’t quite there all the time. They will sometimes just sit around waiting for you to do something, and that something is usually to bang into them.
The biggest problem that I have with APB is that I can’t get a mental map of the game world and get back to the police station for a bonus, after completing the goals. I don’t have a good sense of direction. You can let time expire to advance, but you don’t get bonus points that way. My second biggest problem is that APB works as an arcade game because you can have your foot on the pedal, one hand on the steering wheel and one finger to press “Siren” or “Fire”. The Lynx had two main action buttons and ergonomics hadn’t yet been invented yet, so they are square buttons that require a good deal of force to activate (at least on my Lynx) and you can’t really press two of them at the same time. So you are in this mode where you stop accelerating when the first button isn’t pressed, because you want to press the other button for the siren. I could not get far enough in the game to see how they handle the gun – the Video Game Critic says that it’s the “OPTION 1” button – I have posted a picture of the layout of the Lynx so you can see how preposterous that is. That said, having the gun button be an intentional act and requiring decision and thought would be wonderful for real life. APB, however, is a video game.
There is another video of the Lynx version showing APB being played with demerits clearly off, but I haven’t seen how to enable that for the Lynx. I have the GameDrive for it, so adding the game was a matter of copying the ROM over, but I bought a sealed copy at some point as well a while ago. A sign of a good economy is when I, meaning me personally, the person writing this, have the spare cash to purchase trifles like that without a deep dive on the game. In whatever we’re in now, this game would never leave the shelf. The Lynx is interesting as a historical artifact. It was revolutionary in ways we might discuss later. Its version of APB desperately needs a gas pedal attachment. The arcade game remains a classic and is a great example of how the unique controls offered down at the arcade were generating the most interesting games in the world.
- APB was played over MAME32 and an Atari Lynx.