Triple A

Triple-A is a 1997 PowerPC-only shareware arcade game by Geoffrey Stahl of Dog Star Development. You command a single anti-aircraft artillery battery defending the frontier of your country against waves of paratroopers, special forces, and combat engineers, in the spirit of classics like Suicide and Airborne!.

Gameplay loop

You sit behind your AAA gun and shoot enemy parachutists out of the sky before they touch down and overrun your position. Holding off each aerial onslaught buys time for resupply and lets you upgrade from the somewhat antiquated starting kit to progressively more sophisticated and deadly air-defense weaponry. Levels are unlimited and difficulty climbs steadily, so the only real question is how long you can survive.

Presentation

Despite shipping as solo-authored shareware, Triple-A is unusually slick for the era: more than 750 separate sprite frames produce genuinely fluid action, the soundtrack uses 8-channel stereo panning with realistic digitized effects, and explosions are based on actual digitized footage rendered into sprites against a full-screen pre-rendered background.

Score chasing

The game tracks high scores locally without limit, and at the time of release players could upload their best runs to Dog Star Development's all-time online high-score board - a touch of late-1990s online competition wrapped around a classic single-screen shooter.

System requirements

Triple-A 1.6 requires a Power Macintosh with at least a 256-color, 640x480 monitor. Under System 7.5.1 or earlier it additionally needs Apple's Display Manager 2.0.2 extension. The game is preserved on Macintosh Garden under the Arcade category.