The time it took for Desert Strike to make it to the Amiga meant that by the time it did, the sequel was ready to go on Sega’s increasingly successful Mega Drive console. There are different ways that Electronic Arts could have gone for that sequel. They could have made Desert Strike II, or at least changed the second word of the name. Desert Stramash? They took the more obvious option, which was to change the first word and the setting. That still leaves a lot of other choices. They could have taken the more realistic elements and run with that, possibly to Yugoslavia? (I didn’t say it would be a good choice). What they did was to take the parts of Desert Strike which were clearly preposterous and amp those up instead, and you have to say, it is definitely a choice.
This time, the game gives you an opening cutscene in which its nefarious Middle Eastern madman type gets together with its nefarious South American druglord type to plot revenge against those damn Yankees. Two racist stereotypes for the price of one! It continues with a sub-action-movie level of sophistication, and plot-convenient and utterly unconvincing dialogue along the lines of “Without your heroic efforts, the free world would have been forced to submit to the insane demands of a dictatorial madman” and “Don’t shoot me, I’m just a patsy. The druglord gave me a map and told me to meet him in his jungle fortress…”
Note there that, despite the title, you don’t start in the jungle. You start in Washington DC, killing the terrorists that have surrounded major landmarks and stopping others from destroying the president’s limousine. In 1993, the possibility of producing a fully realised city in a video game was a very long way off, but the Washington DC of Jungle Strike is a fascinating place to think about. There are big empty green spaces and but a few buildings, including the White House, the Monument and some gas stations. There are no people or cars out on the streets apart from the terrorists you need to kill, and of course later on the president, whose security really aren’t doing their jobs well. Washington DC is a place which only exists to the extent necessary to be a recognisable backdrop for raining death on the foreign and untrustworthy.
There is also a distinct lack of other helicopters or friendly forces out there. Terrorists have captured much of the nation’s capital city, but only you, the player, have been sent in. Now, action movies are guilty of this kind of thing a lot too. However, a tight focus on the hero over a series of events as they improbably do everything necessary to save the day is a very different matter from spending hours on a continuous shot of one helicopter and making your way around a virtually deserted city. You’re busy circling and shooting and replenishing, but I found that I wasn’t busy enough not to think about the bizarre distortions of the world.
As well as mixing things up location-wise, Jungle Strike also offers some variety on the gameplay – at some points you get to control a hovercraft and shoot everything, instead of controlling a helicopter and shooting everything! The multiple weapons, multiple objectives, multiple resources to manage, work nicely together to give some variety to “go here, shoot some things” even if there’s no getting away from just how much of that there is. And the cartoon plot isn’t that big of a problem in itself. It is at least absurd on its surface, even more so than Desert Strike, which doesn’t mean it can’t be harmful, but does put a different spin on that. And this is only one series. There can be competing narratives out there. One series doing this isn’t so bad, right?
Mega Drive chart, Edge 001, October 1993