Games I remember, with a remake - Green Beret

Over the next few months I'll be doing articles on the games that I remember and I'm sure many of you will do as well. They will take us back to the time of squealing tapes, or slow loading floppies, a time that many of us enjoyed and when developers put so much gameplay into such small data sizes. You'll be able to play the remakes and relive those times as if they were just released today. Well today it's time to look at Green Beret, an action, arcade platformer from way back in the mid 1980's.

Green Beret or as some will know as Rush'n Attack was an action arcade game released by Konami in 1985. Green Beret is remembered for its Cold War setting and its reliance on the player using a knife to dispatch enemies. But that's not all, you were able to collect many different weapons including the flame thrower, however it was one of the hardest games I had ever played for it's time. I so fondly remember that siren going off, with enemies coming in from the sides.  It was hard for the fact that if you got touched by an enemy, you'd die, there was no health bar to rely on. Although you did have lives! I never got past the helicopter mission, but the levels had so much detail, from bridges, to rocket launch pads to bunkers.

There were four stages in Green Beret, including the Marshalling Area, Harbour, Air Base and Siberian Camp with each level becoming progressively harder! Remember me saying how hard it was? I never got past the first level, and those dog enemies, unforgiving!

The story of the original Green Beret was that the player took on the role of a United States special operations soldier infiltrating an enemy military base which, as hinted by the name, resembles a Soviet military complex. However In the arcade version, the plot is to save several POW's from being executed by firing squad.

During my time, I was stuck with the Amstrad CPC 464 and yes a green screen, today we'd probably call that night vision. Green Beret was released on a multitude of systems : Arcade, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Famicom Disk System, MS-DOS, MSX, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, so most of you had colour.

So what about the remakes?

Nerlaska's remake of the classic arcade Green Beret has 3D graphics but with the original gameplay, though in my opinion the 3D graphics take away most of the nostalgia feeling of Green Beret.

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The other remake Green Beret Fenix is much closer to the original but with higher end graphics, however the remake is very buggy, so don't expect a smooth experience, it may not even start up on some systems.

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Of cause you could always play the original game as it was intented, exactly how many of us remember it. What's more you can even play it online in your browser, it's that easy thanks to cpc-live.

Click the picture ;)

I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I did writing it, expect more remakes to come and a look back at the times that were so good to us. Apart from the squeal, ahhhh make it stop!