NAM-1975

"The game that delivers the authentic 'Nam experience - including the robots and death lasers."

If no one back in those lazy, hazy, crazy days of 1990 would have predicted that the Neo-Geo would have games produced and released for it in the twenty-first century, and hang on nearly as long as the Atari 2600 did, well...there were good reasons. No one could have predicted the success of Street Fighter II, no one would have predicted that SNK - the producer of the Neo-Geo and of most of the games released for it - would unleash a plague of SF2 clones that did the industry more harm than good. And - here's the overwhelming reason - most of the early games sucked.

NAM-1975 was one of the launch titles for the Neo-Geo back in 1990, when American self-flagellation over the Vietnam War became so widespread in pop culture that even video game producers looked for ways to get involved. There was even a tie-in game for Platoon released for the NES...and nobody seemed to be miffed about it. Not even over the ability jump over Vietcong bullets, just like Super Mario would. (For some reason, I don't think Oliver Stone was consulted.)

So it must have seemed OK for SNK to take a fairly standard US versus USSR shoot-em-up, staple some vaguely Vietnam-related cutscenes, and say to the world, dammit, we'll show you what the 'Nam experience was like, and that includes the kidnapped scientists, the creepy bald half-blind flamethrower-wielding soldiers, the HINDs, the steamrollers, the robots and (because THIS IS HOW IT REALLY WAS) the flesh-evaporating death lasers. Of death.

The game itself can be summarized as "Cabal, without the washed-out graphics, but with even worse controls." Your soldier faces away from you at the bottom of the screen. Button A is for shooting, Button B is for grenade lobbing, and button C is for running or rolling left and right. Problem is that you'll be using the joystick for both moving and aiming; holding down the fire button will lock the player in place while allowing you to use the joystick to move the crosshairs to whatever object you feel deserves immediate nonexistence. Moving the joystick left or right without holding the fire button will allow lateral player movement...except that your crosshairs scroll faster than you can walk, forcing you to juggle the joystick+fire button mode, the joystick without the fire button mode, and the joystick with the run button modes just to be able to effectively shoot anything. Just to make things difficult, when using the run button it's very easy to accidentally do a slow roll - frequently into a bullet or a grenade. And what seems clumsy in the early going, where your foes display the sapience of shooting galley targets, becomes infuriating in the later rounds, which turn into hopeless mazes of incoming projectiles. And don't expect much in the way of tactics - you can acquire additional weaponry, but you can't stockpile ammo or switch between weapons, so all you can do is open fire with your new-found firearms for a minute or two before you're back to square one.

Only three things make this game slightly memorable - firstly, the graphics, which are fluidly animated, are the goriest I can remember from a Japanese-produced game up until that time. In the course of fighting your controls and/or your enemies, you'll have the pleasure of watching your character shot, knocked into the air by grenades, incinerated, gassed, crushed under steamrollers, grabbed by giant robots, and skeletonized by killer laser beams. You'll be able to do likewise to your foes - lobbing a grenade or firing a missile at a soldier will reduce him to gobs of flesh.

Secondly, this game features what you might call penalty stages - die too many times during a stage, and you might have to face a short but deadly stage featuring, among other things, the aforementioned robots and steamrollers. It's not entirely clear what triggers these stages, and they're probably just there to screw you out of a few more quarters, but, hey, it seemed worth mentioning.

Thirdly (saving the best for last, here), the laughable cutscenes. The scene that plays in attract mode seems to be a Japanese third-grader's rewrite of the opening of Apocalypse Now, retranslated into English. "Do I have go back to the hell again?" asks our portentous, wide-eyed hero, as he mulls his mission to retrieve a Dr. Muckley (who looks like Dr. Wily's long-lost father) and his daughter from the Soviet Uni - I mean, the NVA. In an attempt convince you this really is set in Vietnam (the producers forgot to remove the hammer-and-sickle logos and Cyrillic writing), our hero is wearing the same "BORN TO KILL" helmet that Matthew Modine wore in Full Metal Jacket. And through it all, the unnamed protagonist reads his horrible, horrible lines with the earnestness of an eighteen-year-old telemarketer. At the game's end, should you defeat Dr. Muckley (he turns out to be just as nutty as Dr. Wily) our hero intonates thusly:

"Operation completed. Dr. Muckly intended to destroy the world with his laser weapon. Now we are called heroes...but the hell continues."

And shockingly, the game resolves itself into one of mankind's great anti-war statements. Think about it: The Iliad. War and Peace. Gallipoli. "Dulce et Decorum Est." And Nam-1975.

I can't wait for 'Raq-2013.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/14/05