Well, I spent my weekend killing about, oh, 1,000 or so Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars. Blew up about a division's worth of tanks, armored personnel carriers and jeeps with mounted guns. Even shot down a helicopter with a light anti-tank weapon. Now, THAT was cool.
Used just about every type of sniper rifle available at the time. Nothing like blowing away your opponent from about 1,000 yards without him having a clue about what's happened to him.
So, all in all, Battlefield Vietnam from Electronic Arts and Dice was a pretty fun little shooter, just the thing for those times when you can think of about a dozen or so people who have really gotten on your nerves over the previous few days.
But that's about as far as it goes. It does not even begin to live up to the hype, which went something like this: Forget about Medals. Forget about Honor. Just survive.
Well, there was none of that kind of suspense. The simulations of that thick Vietnamese jungle bush were pretty lame. Much of the game could have been set in a typical North American deciduous forest for all the player knew. The sounds were better, particularly the ambient noises one would expect to hear in Vietnam.
But, like I said, zero suspense, actually.
I think they blew it when they decided to simply stage several of the war's more famous battles. Of, those, the Battle of Ia Drang and the Tet Offensive, set in Hue (pronounced Way), and the retaking of Hue, were probably the best creations of the game. I think they did a particularly nice job of rendering the Walled City of Hue, for example. And their version of ARVN's efforts to retake Quang Tri near the demilitarized zone later in the war was also very good. By that time, Quang Tri had pretty much been leveled, and it was pretty eerie to fight those building to building pitched battles, with almost none of the buildings fully intact.
But if they wanted to at least get close to the hype, what they should have done was simulate a two-year hitch during the war. The goal of the game would be to go home alive, and mostly intact.
Now, THAT would have been something. They could have agreed on 16 missions or so, which could have been culled from the real battles for reality's sake.
A certain tension would build as you got toward the end of your hitch. What the f*** do you mean sending me on a search and destroy mission when I've just got two weeks left?
And then, just when you thought it was over, maybe your plane gets shot down as you are being flown to freedom. Or maybe your whole squad or platoon gets caught deep in the hurt locker and doesn't make it out. so, you have the choice of going home and trying to forget the war and them, or re-upping for some payback.
That was the other thing. Zero effort to force your character to bond with any of the guys around him. This was one of the things I liked about Project: Snowblind. A few relationships had been built, enough so that you were sorry to see some of the characters die.
The absolute coolest part of the game: The soundtrack. Every cool song you barely remember from the sixties and the seventies is on it. The soundtrack was just perfect.
BV was a bit of a digression from the games menu.
Next up: Pariah, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Area 51, and Chrome.
