Remembering Hudson Soft: Military Madness (series)

Whether it's called Nectaris or Military Madness, it's a quality tactical series.

Hudson Soft, founded in the 70s, did just about everything a studio and publisher could do in the video game industry before it was fully absorbed into Konami on March 1, 2012. For the next month here at Retro XP, the focus will be on the roles the studio played, the games they developed, the games they published, the consoles they were attached to, and the legacy they left behind. After all, someone has to remember them, since Konami doesn’t always seem to. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

Nectaris — also known as Military Madness, or even sometimes both names at once, depending — is a turn-based strategy series that has somehow managed to have both a wide number of releases, and few at all. There was only one true sequel to Nectaris, released on the PC Engine CD-ROM²: the rest of what you see out there, from the early 90s through 2010, from the Game Boy to the Xbox 360, are ports and remakes. They aren’t all exactly the same game by any means, but it is a series that Hudson ended up sort of leaving behind when they no longer had their own console, at least in the sense of perpetuating it and figuring out brand new scenarios that would allow for tactical lunar warfare.

In 1989, the original released on the PC Engine in Japan as Nectaris, and was rechristened Military Madness for its 1990 North American Turbografx-16 release. It was ported to the Japanese computers PC-9801 and X68000 as Nectaris, and then a sequel, Neo Nectaris, would appear on the PC Engine CD. The original, with revisions, would be ported to MS-DOS in Europe in ‘95, and Windows 95 in 1997 — Hudson actually ended up releasing this version as freeware on their own website, too. Then there was a Windows 99 port, which was the last of the PC versions of the original game.

A handheld port of Nectaris released on the Game Boy in Japan in 1998, the same year that Matrix Software developed (and Hudson published) a polygonal, updated remake of the original for the Sony Playstation in Japan, and then Jaleco would publish it in North America the following year, with the name Military Madness once again in use. That was the final physical release of any Nectaris/Military Madness game: the rest would end up on various phones and wireless distribution services, and the final console release — for Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 — was a digital update on the original, with the storyline and units tweaked even further. But it was still very much Military Madness, Nectaris, whatever you want to call it, and even managed to combine the two names together into Military Madness: Nectaris.

The box art for the original release of Nectaris on the PC Engine. Image credit: Retroplace

One of the reasons Hudson might have focused on ports and remakes instead of continually releasing brand new entries is due to Nectaris’ focus on tactics. Story was more of a setting than anything: you read the story in the manual or saw it in the opening of the game, and from there on out, the tactics were all that mattered. This wasn’t some cartoony take on war with exaggerated vehicles and character, a la Famicom Wars, nor was it the serious bit of fantasy storytelling that even early Fire Emblem managed to be. Nectaris’ story was its setting, an excuse to be on the moon and fighting on it, too, and the fighting is what the entire focus was on.

That story is one of galactic imperialism, with two opposing factions fighting over the moon’s natural resources. In the original versions of the game, the Allies are in real trouble, as they’re down to the their last few soldiers that aren’t already in prison, and that’s happening while the Axis, which controls the moon and imprisoned the majority of the Allied forces, is planning to blow up the Earth with a Super Atomic Missile to put an end to this whole resource war. In the final console edition of the game, you’re kind of having an “Are we the baddies?” moment, as the precursor to “we will blow up the Earth to end this war” is “in retaliation for the Allied powers making the moon into Space Australia (the prison camp kind), which we rebelled against.” Neither side is any good here, morally speaking, but hey: it still all works as an excuse to wage moon warfare, and it’s not like the story pops up again after this initial intro, either. Tactics is what Nectaris is all about.

The tactics were pretty advanced for the time, too, to the point that Hudson never really updated how they worked over the course of a couple of decades. The game used hexes instead of squares, which already changed the nature of movement compared to other strategy games of the era, and a significant number of these hexes had some kind of terrain bonus (from five to 40 percent) to consider while plotting out where you were going to defend or attack from. There is also an experience modifier that you don’t see calculated before a battle, but it’s happening all the same: basically, the more battles a unit fights, the higher their experience, and it helps make them stronger in future battles even as the number of tanks or soldiers or what have you within a unit drops over time due to damage taken.

Most significant, though, is how your positioning of your allies changes the battles themselves. If you just make everything a unit vs. unit affair, Nectaris doesn’t seem that special (nor will you get very far in it). What you need to do is plot out an approach to your enemies so that you can receive support fire bonuses from adjacent allies that will allow you to cause more damage in a single attack, and, in your best moments, utilize an Encirclement Bonus, which doesn’t increase your stats, but halves the defensive and offensive stats of your opponent. You can attack tank units with basic infantry, and if you manage an Encirclement in the process, that tank is toast, as it has nowhere to run from and is taking fire from all sides.

You don’t have to actually completely surround an enemy unit by placing an ally in every hex around them: you can receive an encirclement bonus with as few as two units, so long as they are on opposite sides of your foe. You can even have an ally with a hex of space in between your other unit(s) and the enemy, so long as the placement of your allies creates a situation in which the enemy has nowhere to “run” to. It’s vital that you master encircling opposing units, as it allows you to take far less damage per attack: fighting from excellent defensive terrain with an experienced unit that also happens to have set off an Encirclement Bonus will get you very far in Nectaris.

The Playstation edition of Nectaris looked an awful lot like the original but only on the map screen. Battles got the real makeover. Image credit: RetroPlace

Just as a little bit of comparison: Fire Emblem wouldn’t release its first game until the year after Nectaris, and that game didn’t even have the famed weapon triangle nor any kind of unit support system figured out at that point. And yet, Nectaris was applying multipliers on multipliers for each and every engagement, and you had to take all of it into account in order to have the most efficient, successful battle possible. If you didn’t, the AI would, and you’d suffer for it. Luckily, you don’t have to guess at all of this: even the original version of the game, in an era where the instruction manual was still king, included an in-game tutorial on the various systems in place. As long as you watched all of that, you’d know how the game worked on paper, and then you’d be able to apply that knowledge yourself.

It was vital that you take advantage of all of these various attack/defense modifiers, too, because the units you began a stage with in Military Madness were (often) all the units you were going to get. You can’t build units in any of these games — there is no currency to keep track of for this purpose. There is exactly one way to ever acquire more units in a stage, and it is never a given that you will actually get them. That’s because many of the maps in Nectaris have factories on them, and the factories are not in the possession of either side yet. Which means you need to race to the factories to claim them before your foe can, and the success of the entire level often hinges upon this happening. So not only are you plotting out your attacks and trying to gauge what the enemy is going to do, but you also need to make sure that you don’t allow them to get near the factories, or else you won’t be able to bring in any reinforcements that will turn the tide for whichever side gets to them.

Take map five, as an example. You begin the stage with nine units to the enemy’s 17. There are six units within factories to be claimed: if your opponents gets to them first, then it’s 23 to nine, and the odds are not in your favor even if you manage to make every other tactical decision a perfect one. If you get them, though, then suddenly it’s their 17 against your 15, and that’s doable even if you make a couple of tactical errors. Factories are also useful as a way to heal units, though, they can’t be on the field while they’re being repaired: they’ll be inside of the factory, like the units you found within it, and you will need to deploy them on a later turn in order to get them back.

All you need to do in order to capture a factory and the units within is to move an infantry unit onto that hex and claim it. Infantry might seem weak, but they are vital to securing factories, and, as said above, in the right conditions, are even capable of taking out powerful vehicles. You can also use infantry to capture the prison camps in each stage, which will end the level regardless of whether you’re outnumbered or otherwise losing terribly or not. These are well-defended and difficult to get to bases, basically, but if you can plot out attacks that draw out and weaken some of these defenses, you might be able to sneak an infantry unit in and win this thing even in cases where you’re a couple of turns away from being obliterated. On the other side, you need to make sure that you haven’t fully committed all of your forces to an offensive, because the AI is sure to send infantry out to the prison camp that you’re supposed to be protecting.

Nectaris arrived on the scene as the proliferation of tactics games was fully underway. Fire Emblem would arrive in 1990, and Famicom Wars came out six months before Nectaris did. Shining Force would arrive on the Sega Genesis in 1992, but it was a different Genesis title that should get the focus here: Herzog Zwei. This wasn’t a turn-based strategy game like the others, but instead was a real-time affair, and one that, along with Nectaris/Military Madness, helped usher in the era of RTS as we know it.

Westwood Studios, the developers of Command & Conquer, actually began their vast influence of the genre with 1992’s Dune II. And Westwood cites, among their major influences for the game that would determine what real-time strategy games were going to be going forward, both Herzog Zwei and Military Madness. The real-time strategy and constant go go go of Herzog Zwei is the obvious thing that was taken from there in order to propel RTS games and Westwood forward, but what was pulled from the Military Madness side is a little less obvious, and also difficult to find because the internet is constantly eating itself and any traces of its past citations.

NowGamer published a History of Command & Conquer in June of 2011 that cited Military Madness as an influence, and the original is now lost. An archived version was pulled out a few months later, but that, too, is lost, as it was hosted via a Google user account that appears to be among the missing now. The original could not be found via Wayback Machine, either, so what we’re left with is basically citations in various video game wikis and also Joe Bostic, co-designer and lead programmer of Dune II, in a Reddit AMA once again saying Military Madness has been an influence on his RTS work.

My guess for what it influenced would be how much went into the calculations for each encounter in Military Madness: again, this was a tactics-heavy game, and it layered so many calculations on top of each other to determine who actually had the upper hand in a given moment. With all the boosts and statistics and calculations involved in an RTS, it’s not hard to consider that Westwood wanted more action in RTS games — hence the Herzog Zwei of it all — but also wanted it to remain nerdy and math-heavy, without beating you over the head with it. Which was really kind of the beauty of Nectaris: the calculations happened before every fight, but you could figure out how to make the numbers do what you wanted them too without having to pull out a calculator yourself.

The original Turbografx-16 version of Military Madness. Image credit: Game PhD

If Military Madness/Nectaris were so good, and so influential, then why weren’t there more Nectaris games? It likely comes down to a general paring down of Hudson’s franchises as they moved away from being a first-party developer, and began spending more time, once again, focusing on ports and developing games for other, larger companies to supplement the major franchises they would focus on. We’ve discussed again and again how development of Bomberman in general ramped up both before and after the end of the PC Engine and its add ons, but there are other examples, too, like Hudson taking over development of Game Boy Wars (the portable version of the Famicom Wars games and precursor to the rechristening of the series as Advance Wars) for Intelligent Systems. Was there time to make new Nectaris entries while Hudson had a pretty good strategy game deal going already, where Nintendo sent them money to make a few games in a very popular Japanese franchise for their still-popular, money-printing handheld? Maybe not! Their success with Nectaris helped get them the Game Boy Wars contract in the first place, too, so the game was still serving its purpose even if brand new entries weren’t being developed.

It might also have something to do with the fact that Hudson Soft seemed pretty satisfied to have just the one idea for Nectaris, and then treat it like it was their version of A Star is Born, recasting redeveloping it for every generation to experience anew with some minor tweaks and updates. The only true sequel came on their first-party console, and only in Japan. Other than that, it was a couple of decades of bringing the original out of the past and into the present with a new look, but same general premise and gameplay.

The 2009, multi-console release was probably never supposed to be the end of the line for the series in that space, but Hudson Soft was fully absorbed by Konami less than three years later, and the latter hasn’t done anything with the franchise since, so it very well might be the end for Nectaris. The good news is that, unlike a number of other Hudson properties, all that is theoretically missing here are updated versions of a game that already exists. So I can be annoyed that there hasn’t been a new Military Madness or Nectaris or whatever they want to call it since Konami fully subsumed Hudson, but I can also recognize that this isn’t quite the same as… well, basically every other major Hudson franchise that Konami has forgotten they own the rights to.

Both Military Madness and Nectaris are available on the Turbografx-16 Mini — the TG-16 Mini actually has the PC Engine Mini games on it, too, with a couple of regional exclusives on each side, which often rules but also sometimes means there are two versions of the same game on the console. If you don’t already have a TG-16 Mini, you should, but you should also wait until they are available once again so you aren’t paying $300 or whatever for a $100 item. More fiscally responsible of you, until that happens, is to download Military Madness onto your Wii U in the next few months before you can no longer buy anything from that digital storefront, or grab Military Madness: Nectaris off of the Xbox 360 Marketplace or Playstation 3 digital shop. It’s my least favorite version of the game, but it’s still Nectaris, you know?

Sadly, Nectaris: Military Madness, the Playstation edition of the game that adds optional (and informative!) cinematics to your battles and brings the series into the era of 3D, isn’t available on the Playstation Network in North America, but it’s easy enough to uh, find, Playstation games and play them on a number of devices these days. So you’ve got that option to look forward to if that’s your thing. And there is a fan translated version of the Game Boy port of Nectaris that you can play, as well. You’re not lacking for opportunity to experience Military Madness, is what I’m driving at, and if you’re unfamiliar but into tactics-heavy titles, you should.

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