First of all, let’s note a familiar frustration. If I go to the Wikipedia page for Green Beret – named after the distinctive headgear of the US Army’s special forces – I get redirected to a page for something called Rush’n Attack. This is an originally Japanese game published under a title in English, played across much of the rest of the world under the same title in English, and yet said title is treated as a footnote because the game got renamed as something else for America. Addressing that kind of exclusive perspective on history is one of the founding impulses of this blog.
Green Beret is another one-person-versus-an-army arcade conversion, which offers an alternative to shooting pixel people without names, in that they are a little bigger and less pixely, and in that you mostly stab them. You can pick up the odd flamethrower or rocket launcher to turn on them too though, so no need to miss out completely. Green Beret is a side-scrolling 2D game of a kind we haven’t really met to date, a midpoint between the zoomed-out precision platforming of Jet Set Willy et al and the zoomed-in walking around and fighting of Way of the Tiger. It is a move from left to right with a couple of platforms you can jump or climb up to. There’s no complicated exploring but it’s definitely an improvement on Way of the Tiger in pacing terms, throwing evasive decisions at you thick and fast and with a more satisfyingly solid feel to its combat.
The implications of the decision to make the knife your main attack point are interesting. Commando had a bunch of soldiers shooting curiously underpowered guns, but Green Beret has bases largely defended with no guns at all. Instead the Russians (for it is they) employ bouncing, kicking ninjas as one of their most effective tactics. Those guys are a serious annoyance, with the way their bounces dominate the soundtrack nicely highlighting both the extent of the threat and the way that they break the pretence of making any kind of sense as a real world portrayal.
That kind of detail means Green Beret comes off a lot more abstract than even Commando, for good or bad. Mostly bad, I think. The mix of real iconography – your lives are represented with a hammer and sickle icon, though that is surely the wrong side? – and pure fantasy falls awkwardly between parody and celebration, uncommitted to either. More than anything else so far, the trappings the gameplay comes clothed in are not to its benefit.
