Konami's Combat School joins Arcade Archives

HAMSTER Corporation has released Konami's 1987 arcade game Combat School for modern platforms as part of the Arcade Archives series. The multi-event sports game is now available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

Known as Boot Camp in North America, the game plays like a military-themed successor to Konami's earlier Track & Field. Players control a recruit named Nick (or Joe in two-player mode) who must survive a series of basic training exercises. The events test different skills across seven distinct stages. You'll climb walls on a side-scrolling obstacle course, shoot targets on a firing range, and navigate a canoe through a top-down river crossing. There's also an iron man race that demands absolute button-mashing endurance.

Trackballs and chin-ups

The original arcade cabinet relied heavily on a trackball for its physical challenges. Translating that input method to a modern analog stick always changes the feel of these late-eighties arcade titles. It's a necessary compromise. I'm curious to see how the penalty system feels on a standard gamepad, since the original required furious spinning.

Combat School is notoriously brutal with its fail states. If you barely miss the qualifying time on an event, the instructor forces your recruit to do a set of penalty chin-ups. Succeed at the chin-ups, and you get to continue to the next stage. Fail them, and your military career ends immediately. The original hardware required furious trackball spinning to pull your recruit over the bar, which usually resulted in pinched fingers and loud cursing.

Konami has been a steady presence in the Arcade Archives lineup lately. As previously reported, Konami GT is coming to Arcade Archives, and the publisher's back catalog continues to fill out the weekly release schedule. The digital release includes the standard HAMSTER options for adjusting difficulty, saving high scores, and applying CRT display filters.

Graduation day

The final exam is a hand-to-hand fight against the instructor. If you beat him, you graduate and deploy on an actual combat mission. The game briefly shifts from a sports title into a basic action game for this final sequence. It's a strange genre mashup that perfectly captures the experimental nature of 1987 arcade design.

Home ports of Combat School hit the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum shortly after the arcade release. Those versions swapped the trackball for aggressive joystick wagging. That change led to plenty of broken peripherals. The new release is based directly on the original coin-op code. It's a solid addition for anyone who wants to test their endurance without having to maintain a thirty-year-old trackball mechanism.