 The night shift in space control is a dull, thankless job but here you are doing it anyway; usually the final hustle and bustle of the day dies down well before midnight and after that there's just a couple of routine scans of local space to perform before you get a couple of hours to read your book or perhaps take a sneaky nap under the comms desk. Tonight is going to be different however, because that first scan finds six worryingly massive spacecraft making their way into the galaxy and, as you watch aghast, the outermost planet of a nearby solar system is surrounded and then smashed to tiny pieces!
The craft proceed to harvest the parts with small drones before moving on at a frightening rate and not stopping their task even for those worlds in the system which have life on them. You've well and truly raised the alarm by now but these things need to be stopped as soon as possible; matching might with might just isn't an option because there just isn't anything even approaching the scale of these attackers, but a lone Battle Eagle fighter just like the one fuelled and ready to fly in docking bay 4 stands a chance of being able to slip through the defences to destroy the reactor core of each ship. As the engines spin up to flight speed and the Battle Eagle's computer runs final system checks, you fasten the pilot's harness and find yourself wondering if you'll get a chance to finish that book...
From the game's titles page, pressing fire on a joystick connected to port 1 will begin the mission. The player controls their spacecraft using a joystick connected to port 1 of the Atari Home Computer; the various directional controls will cause the on-screen craft to move accordingly and pressing the fire button will rain super heated plasma towards the incoming enemy forces.
Trivia: There are two versions of the game in the archive, one is the original ABBUC entry and the other (which should be considered the final version) has one of the levels relocated based on feedback after the competition. Battle Eagle relies on a GTIA-specific graphic mode so will have issues on a late model Atari XE machines with the GTIA bug.  |