Cold War (video)gaming

I was having a clear out of old games and whilst I was amazed at the amount of dross I had managed to keep hold of through two house moves, I also found a couple of time-hogs that, once upon a time, I considered brilliant. And funnily enough, they are both set in the modern Cold War period (what I class the 1980's)

First up is M1 Abrams Battle Tank for the Sega Megadrive.

This arrived with the aforementioned console for Christmas 1991, along with the pack-in game Altered Beast. As much as I liked the (almost) arcade perfect conversion, it was quickly put to one side as I pretended to be Captain Sean Bannon (I had just finished re-reading Team Yankee for the third time) and took on the Soviet invasion.

As you can see, it's not the best looking game ever (bear in mind the original PC version is 27 years old), but it was a revelation to me as a teenager. Ok, it was stupidly hard at times, and the T80's were a swine to kill but I enjoyed it. It's arcade-like in its tone, but if you ramp up the difficulty level, it's surprisingly realistic for the time, especially when you consider the hardware it was running on. Now you can still play this game as it is available via abandonware and ROM sites but for obvious legal reasons, it's up to you to search for them. The copy I had still worked when plugged into my last working Megadrive.

On the topic of Team Yankee, I will be looking to try out the Flames of War  Team Yankee game at some point in the future. I have heard both good and bad about the ruleset so will probably pick it up at the York show next year. Once the TWATS have had a go at it, I'll let you know what I think of the system.

The second game I came across was LHX Attack Chopper. This was also on the Megadrive and it was kind of like a companion game to F15 Strike Eagle 2 which I had for the Amiga. LHX looked pretty similar to F15, with the exception of playing a little slower (understandable given it's a helicopter!). Here is a video of the game in action. It was a tad more cerebral than F15, however, a hell of a lot easier to play than Steel Talons, which took a greater arcade view of helicopter combat but forgot to make it playable. Hey ho.

Thinking about it, there were more games that covered the period too. For flight sims, there was Falcon, F18 Interceptor, F19 Stealth Fighter and MiG29. Naval Combat was covered by two games, 688 Attack Sub and Harpoon, both of which will be the subject of a future post.