Combat School

Did You Know?

• In Japan, Game Machine listed Combat School on their July 1, 1987 issue as being the fourth most-successful table arcade unit of the month.
• Your Sinclair magazine compared the arcade game favorably with Konami's earlier Olympic video game Hyper Sports (1984).
• Cabal, released several months later, had similar trackball controls to Combat School.

Gameplay

The game is controlled with a trackball and two buttons, whose functions change depending on the event. Players can face a computer-controlled opponent or another person. Player 1 controls Nick, a brown-haired recruit in an orange shirt, while Player 2 controls Joe, a blond-haired recruit in a blue shirt. There are seven training events to complete. If a player nearly fails an event, they get one chance to do a set number of chin-ups as punishment to continue; failing too severely results in an immediate game over. After clearing all seven events, the player graduates from basic training and is sent on an eighth and final stage: a single-player, side-scrolling mission to rescue the U.S. President from armed terrorists. In this stage, the player must use all skills learned in training to fight terrorists. There are no continues or extra lives, and the player dies from a single hit from anything, except during a hand-to-hand combat segment against the terrorist leader. This makes the final stage extremely difficult to complete.