Game Footage

This was it. This was The Big One. This, in my opinion, was the game that made the other magazines sit up and take notice. This was the game that started the Magazine Tape Wars. YS got a few knocks for Road Race - one or two people had picked up on the fact that it was an Ocean reject - so YS somehow got the rights to this little beauty and stuck it on the cover, probably whilst saying "Eat this!!"
    Elite produced a gem of a game. Not that it was technically an exclusive for YS - it was released a couple of months later on the Six-Pak Vol 2 compilation - but it was still a bit of a scoop. Batty is a Breakout clone, and followed closely on the heels of Arkanoid, which revolutionized this sort of game by adding loads a variety by providing various pick-ups. Batty absorbed the good features of Arkanoid, beefed them up a bit, jazzed up the gameplay and the graphics, and produced an out-and-out classic.
    Aliens were added. "So what?" I hear you cry. "So did Arkanoid." Ah yes, but did they drop bombs at you all the time, usually in the same place as where the ball is coming down to land on your bat? Batty also had random magnets which switch on and off to twist your balls. Sorry, which twist the path of your ball's flight. The pick-ups were along the same lines as Arkanoid - duplicate balls, extended bat, catch ball, smash ball, etc - but there were also bonus points to be snapped up, and one which killed all aliens on sight. One natty feature was that you could pick up a rocket pack which zoomed your bat up the screen and into the next level - just like in the second YS movie on this site.
    The twists mentioned above certainly raised it above all the other Breakout games, and onto the same level as Arkanoid, but there was one thing which shot it into the stratosphere: the simultaneous two-player option. Each player controls one bat which could only move in one half of the screen (there's a barrier right in the middle so you can't cheat), and together you must keep the ball in play, and the person who last hit the ball gets whatever points that ball earns until it's hit again. That introduces a bit of tactics as you try and keep the ball on your side of the screen and try and out-score your opponent. Very, very nifty, let down only slightly by the fact that if the ball goes out of play, both of you lose a life.
    A classic. It was never bettered, although Arkanoid II came damn close.

Ratings given by other magazines

8/10    Crash Review

Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database

YS Cross-references
		Batty (in Six-Pak Vol 2)	YS23	9
		Batty/Hit-Pak	YS24	NEWS
		Batty (in Frank Bruno's Big Box)	YS38
		Batty/Encore	YS43	89
		Batty (in The YS Official Top 100 Part 2)	YS71	No.65
Some info from Sinclair Infoseek+SPOT*ON