Army Days (Commodore 64)

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Army Days was made in 1989 for the Commodore 64 and was published by Mindscape as part of the light fantastic bundles. The developer stays uncredited but if I had to guess I would say it was made by Animated Pixels.

The game shows three days of a shooting course. Ending the third day will cause the game to loop back to day one. The difficulty is increasing each day. At the first day targets inside a shooting range are shot. The second day is a round of skeet shooting in the wildness. The player has to avoid shooting wild animals. Shooting two wild animals in the same round will cause the game to end. On the third day an outdoor target practice takes place. The faster the targets are shot the more points are yielded in this round.

In order to pass a level a points threshold has to be met. The requirements grow higher the further the game progresses. When the requirements can't be met anymore the game ends and shows the final score. If the player waits at the title screen a cut scene showing the word "3D" can be seen. As the light fantastic bundle included 3D goggles, I suspect Army Days was supposed to be three dimensional, or to feature such a mode. However I was not able to find anything three dimensional on any side on any of the three light fantastic light gun game tapes.

Personally I don't like the game. The presentation is nice but the game play isn't perfect. In my opinion the difficulty increases too slowly and thus boredom arises sooner than challenge does.

While the cover is pretty drawn and pleasing to look at, it does a poor job representing the actual game as it shows a combat situation rather than tactical fire arms training.