Atari's Battlezone

Atari's Battlezone was an arcade game developed by Ed Rotburg and released in 1980. It uses vector graphics so that the game is viewed in a wireframe.

When developed and released, the game became so popular that the United States Army ordered specially modified versions of the game to help train Bradley Tank pilots. Due to the association with the U.S Army, many staff members refused to help develop the game, even head producer Ed Rotburg, at first, refused to be on the game's board. Battlezone was also the first 3-D environmental landscape game to be produced at the time.

You can see the wireframe view, and the 3-d environment. 

The objective of the game is simple, survive. It has the standard "survive as long as possible" gameplay. The longer you survive, the more tanks you can destroy and the more points you score. Also, there is a flying saucer that will appear when you are most likely in a firefight with an enemy. Though the saucer is worth a lot of points when shot down, it was origanlly developed just for a distraction.

I personally did not enjoy in the game. One of the biggest factors was the aiming radical. This is because of its shape and size. That is, even though the radical is big, if you do not have what you are aiming at  in the dead center of the radical you will miss. As you can see from the picture above, the radical is bigger than the enemy that you are aiming at, but as previously stated if you do not have the enemy tank in the center of the radical you will miss the tank. Also, another factor of the game I did not like was the "smart" missiles that the enemy tanks fired at you. Even though you had to be dead accurate, the enemy has missiles that will track your every movement. To some, this adds an excited difficulty to the gameplay, but to me it just makes the game have an unfair just towards the player.

Even though I did not enjoy the game, it is still an historic landmark for current first person shooters.

References:
http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=battlezone&page=detail&id=210
http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/battlezone
http://andysarcade.de/battlezone.html