Moon Patrol review: the buggy that never stops rolling

A lunar buggy rolls across the surface of the moon. Hills drift by in the distance, mountains further back. A crater opens ahead. You jump. A saucer drops a bomb. You fire up and forward at the same time. The buggy never stops, and neither does the song. Moon Patrol is a game you play with your whole body swaying.

You cannot hit the brakes

The rover keeps driving forward whatever you do. You are always moving into the next problem. Craters must be jumped, rocks must be jumped or shot, and mines show up later to punish anyone who jumps without looking.

The shot is the clever part. Pressing fire sends one bullet forward along the ground and another straight up at the same time. One button handles both directions, which means your attention is the only thing that has to split. Saucers overhead, a boulder ahead, and one press that deals with both if your timing is right.

Moon Patrol is a rhythm game that happens to have guns.

Holes that fall from the sky

The flying enemies are not just targets. One of them carries a weapon that creates a crater when it hits the ground, so the road ahead can change while you watch. That turns the saucers into a real threat to your footing, not only your ship, and it forces you to shoot up even when you would rather concentrate on the road.

There is help. A row of warning lights at the top of the screen flash for incoming air attacks, minefields and enemies sneaking up from behind. Learning to glance at them is half of getting good.

The layered moon

Designed by Takashi Nishiyama, Moon Patrol is often credited with introducing full parallax scrolling to side-scrolling games. It had three background layers moving at different speeds, which made a flat screen look deep. It is the reason the moon feels like a place you are driving across, not a picture sliding past. Nishiyama went on to make Kung-Fu Master.

What it meant back then

In the United States it came out through Williams Electronics, and it was the kind of cabinet you noticed from the doorway of a strip mall arcade. You played as a Luna City police officer, which every kid ignored, and you counted checkpoints by letters of the alphabet, which every kid did not. "I made it to J" was a real brag on a school bus, and a quarter that got you past the first minefield felt earned.

Playing it today

It is still charming and still tricky. The early course is gentle enough to learn the rhythm, and the later sections turn into a busy little dance of jumps and double shots. Play it patiently. Half the skill is looking ahead.