Tactician

Tactician is a fixed shooter arcade game, which was developed by Konami in 1981 and licensed to Sega for manufacture and distribution; it runs on a modified version of Namco’s Pac-Man hardware with the video system used in both Rally-X games, first used by Jungler earlier in 1981 (a Zilog Z80 lead microprocessor running at 3.072 MHz with an added Zilog Z80 sub-microprocessor running at 1.789772 MHz, and two General Instrument AY-3-8910s running at the same speed for audio). The player must use a 4-way joystick to direct a ship around the bottom of the screen (with two buttons, the first for firing shots at the enemies, and the second for making barricades by placing small dots around the playfield at the start of each section before the enemies emerge from their bases) – and after thirty seconds, the enemies will emerge from their bases and begin to attack the player’s ship. Unlike in both Space Invaders games, the enemies do not move in a pattern and they do not move together; instead, they fly around all over the screen while firing hails of bullets down at the player.