Retro spotlight: Jungle Strike

Turn off your brain and shoot some tanks.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Jungle Strike — and the entire Strike series, really — don’t feel like shoot-em-ups in the way most people consider that term, and yet, that’s what we’re supposed to call these games. It works, in the sense that you are, in fact, shooting things up, and doing so while piloting a craft of some sort — usually a United States military attack helicopter of some kind, but also a variety of other temporary vehicles that have different guns attached — but that’s about it as far as comparisons go. Jungle Strike is presented in an overhead-ish, 3D-ish perspective, for one, with complete freedom of movement in eight directions. Enemies aren’t constantly coming to you, so much as you are flying to them, away from them, etc., and they certainly aren’t in waves of any kind. And the game’s levels don’t even feature music! What kind of self-respecting 1990s shmup doesn’t feature music?!

I say all of this like I’m criticizing Jungle Strike, but really, its genre designation — one that exists mostly so there isn’t a “Strike” genre that differentiates the few games that play like this in existence from the rest that have the same kind of flying and shooting elements and are all more convincingly under the shmup banner — is my most significant problem with the game. Well, OK, that, and that it’s the kind of military and United States propaganda that drives me up the wall, but that stuff is easy enough to ignore in the same way you can watch the movie version of a Tom Clancy novel and have a good time even if you know much of the framing is total bullshit. Or, uh, a Tom Clancy video game, I guess. That guy’s stuff really got around.

Jungle Strike features you, the chopper pilot from Desert Strike, in their next mission: taking down the son of the guy who definitely wasn’t supposed to be a stand-in for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and to make it even more clear that wasn’t really Saddam, know that this game takes place in South America, and involves a drug lord, too. And also former Soviets in the level with snow in it, even though the Berlin Wall has already fallen and you’re in South America, because the game required another cliche. Like I said, just stop using your brain and go pew pew pew with the fictional Comanche helicopter, and try not to get mad at the insinuation that Bill Clinton, who sure loved to fire missiles at anything he felt like even if he wasn’t officially declaring war in the process and was such a conservative Democrat that his rise to the White House changed the entire nature of the party he represented, cut into the defense budget in a meaningful way.

I am clearly still working on taking my own advice here, but I’m not alone on this. The Amiga Power review from 26 years ago complained about how the game “harangued” the player, saying that “Throughout the game you're battered with uneasily right-wing US politics,” and Amiga Format pointed out that, “Perhaps mindful of the somewhat xenophobic overtones of Desert Strike (evil General Kilbaba, Middle Eastern despot), the first mission sees you, amongst other things, attempting to rescue agent Akbar, a friendly turban wearer, though jingoism remains rife.” The gameplay is worth the aggravation, at least, or, another way of putting it is that you can just skip all the cutscenes and play. Hey, if right-wingers can listen to Rage Against the Machine without realizing the songs are being critical of them and everything they stand for, I can play Jungle Strike while being aware that everything outside of how good the systems feel is full of shit.

As for the gameplay… the first stage is simple enough, with little in the way of difficult tactics to consider. Terrorists are attacking Washington D.C., and are doing so, almost entirely, with normal vehicles converted into weapons. Heavily armored RVs with mounted missile launchers outside of U.S. monuments, station wagons turned into mobile bombs meant to strike embassies in town, and barricades setup with the goal of intercepting and blowing up the presidential motorcade on its way back to the White House are some of what you’ll have to deal with. After this stage, which serves as an introduction to the game’s concepts — reading up on what missions entail, finding them on your map, refilling your ammunition, fuel, and armor, and the various ways you can do the latter (picking up armor item units, or dropping off rescued/captured people at landing zones) — things will get a bit more complicated.

In the game’s second stage, you’ll be introduced to alert zones, which are going to cause significant damage to you — and take less damage from you — until you find out how to turn off the alert systems. You’ll also find a level with far more enemies in it, which means those armor and ammo upgrades are about to be a lot more meaningful than they were in your introduction to the game — and those foes aren’t using makeshift weapons of war, either. We’re talking gunboats, scores of rocket launcher-wielding footsoldiers, and nuclear submarines sitting around waiting for the plutonium shipment you’re going to have to intercept either at sea or, if it’s already been delivered, on the coastline as it drives away in the back of a truck. Also, you’re in an experimental hovercraft for most of this stage: Jungle Strike occasionally pops you in another vehicle, like this one, the police bike that is equipped with missiles for some reason, and also a bomber jet that mostly works but sure does not control as smoothly in this 3D-ish space as the chopper does.

You can tell this tank is relatively weak because it doesn’t even have treads, never mind camouflage paint.

Each region does its best to feel very different from the last, while introducing new enemy types to consider, and therefore, different strategies and levels of stress you should feel while taking them down. For example, stage three has you making inroads into South America, and finding yourself in a desert environment, where a military base and training ground for the war lord’s troops exists. This stage ramps up the alert zones, features enemy radar you need to take out to limit those alerts, loads of POWs to rescue, and makes high-powered and heavily-armored tanks the bane of your existence from here on out.

You’ll also fly at night in the jungle, in the daytime in the jungle — hey, jungle is in the game’s title — as well as in the aforementioned snow, in a city, and then back in D.C. to wrap things up, as your foes take their last desperate shot to make the United States pay for their intervention. Things might not start out too difficult, but they will ramp up. You’re going to lose, and have to learn from the mistakes that caused you to lose, until you’re able to complete this game. Or you’ll enter a password that gives you 99 lives, that can work, too, though, that’s no way to learn the game’s systems.

You are well-equipped and extremely mobile in your Comanche chopper, but you are vastly outnumbered. The enemies you will face also often outgun you, and your only salvation lies in the fact that, while they are often restricted to the ground and wheeling about, you can fly in eight directions, strafing your way around obstacles, away from projectiles fired at you while you fire back from angles they can’t hit you from until they rearrange their guns or drive around far longer and in more indirect fashions than you need to. The star of the game, the one you are actually playing as, is the game’s pilot: you also control the chopper’s co-pilot, the gunner responsible for pulling the trigger and dropping the winch to pickup passengers and various items, but the Comanche’s primary pilot is the star for a reason. Be as fancy of a gunner as you want, but you won’t get very far if you can’t strafe and weave in and out of danger, because, after the game’s comparatively slow start, danger surrounds you at every turn in Jungle Strike.

The chopper’s pilot is also the only one who remains throughout the game. You’ll find yourself rescuing or meeting up with new co-pilots throughout the game, and they have different, but often better, skills than the last one you deployed. Some fire faster, some fire more accurately, some do both of those things exceptionally. Others are extremely fast with the winch, which is great when you need to make a pickup in the middle of a firefight. While you can’t control, in-game, who your co-pilot is — when you pick up a new one, which is often a required mission in the stages with one, they become your co-pilot — you can select who you want your co-pilot to be from the main menu before starting a game. So if you want to use a particular co-pilot, you can: just select them and then enter the password for the level you want to start in. If you want to try to challenge yourself to complete the final level of the game using the initial co-pilot who can’t shoot fast or straight, then by all means, have at it.

There are a whole bunch of games in the Strike series, all with their positives and negatives, but Jungle Strike has long been my favorite of the bunch. This isn’t a dismissal of the others, either — Desert, Urban, Soviet, and Nuclear all have their reasons for being enjoyable experiences — but Jungle Strike feels like it’s the most balanced and, despite its difficulty, the one that compels you to push toward being able to complete it better than the others. Later entries messed with the feel of moving around and the map just enough to lose some of the enjoyment you get just from flying as fast as you can to your destination, and of course additional entries in a series necessitate just adding more and more into the equation. Jungle Strike might be a little simpler than later games in the franchise in some respects, but it’s got more going for it in terms of depth and pacing and feel than its predecessor, without overburdening the player in the process.

Let’s go back to the idea that this is a shoot-em-up even though it has little in common with shoot-em-ups as we know them. And let’s start with the lack of music. Jungle Strike does have music, but it tends to be for in-between missions, or during an in-mission cutscene. The music is good, too, the kind that perfectly suits the unique sound hardware of the Sega Genesis, but there just isn’t much of it. That’s not to say that audio doesn’t play a significant role in Jungle Strike, because it does. The absence of music only allows the sounds of your chopper flying through the sky, the roar of enemy missiles, the alarms that ring out when you enter an alert zone, the explosions that occur as you put buildings and enemy vehicles in your sights, to take center stage. It’s rare that I admit this, but more music might have made this game worse: the sound design worked perfectly as is for what High Score Productions was going for, in highlighting the sounds of war and destruction, and music would have simply been something that distracted from that. This is significantly different from your standard shoot-em-up, in which the music ends up being part of what puts you in the zone you need to focus on dodging and firing and surviving, and is usually only a distraction if it isn’t good, which is one of the reasons shmup soundtracks end up mattering so much. In Jungle Strike, through, the steady turn of the Comanche’s propellers is all the ambient sound you need to push you forward.

The gameplay is nonlinear, which, for one, shmups tend to scroll either vertically or horizontally, and do so in a fixed manner without play input. You can do the missions out of order for the most part, though, doing so will in some cases make them more difficult: attacking an alert zone before you’ve disabled whatever is allowing alerts to be made, for instance, will make life difficult, though not impossible, for you. There aren’t any power-ups, either: you simply have the weapons equipped to the Comanche: nine powerful Hellfire missiles capable of destroying even the toughest targets with a blast or two or three, Hydra rockets that are one-quarter as powerful but can be shot rapid-fire style to allow you to strafe and overwhelm a target, and basic machine guns that feel useless, or for targets you can take out with time on your side and no fear of damage, until you get a co-pilot who can fire those things at a rate that’ll put a hurting on even the toughest foes.

You can restock your armor, your fuel, and your ammo, but you can’t exceed the capacity thresholds for any of the above, and if you run out of fuel or ammo upgrades, well, you’re screwed. You can lose a life and refill your fuel that way, but lives are in shorter supply than every other resource, and you can find yourself losing a couple in quick succession when things go really wrong. Co-pilots are the only real upgrade, and they aren’t making you more powerful: just faster. You still need to be able to deftly pilot your way out of any situation placed in front of you, regardless of how rapid-fire your shots are.

While Jungle Strike initially released on both the Super Nintendo and on the Sega Genesis systems, it was so much better received on the latter, in a way that’s kind of surprising to consider in retrospect. The two systems had their differences, but as far as multiplatform goes, those differences were often one of preference for things like blood or no blood in Mortal Kombat, or the sound design. There are exceptions, of course: the SNES might have had a plethora of amazing games on it, but it was more prone to slowdown than the Genesis, especially when it came to shoot-em-ups — maybe that’s how Jungle Strike got this genre designation! Jungle Strike simply runs better on the Genesis than on the SNES, and the colors and graphics work better, too: things just look a little… off? Overly, weirdly, smoothed and stretched out? Though it is all a little brighter in the SNES version, nothing looks as well-defined as in the Genesis one. Personally I think the difference in the two versions is overstated in their respective GameRankings scores — the Genesis’ versions average review score is 85 percent, while the SNES iteration sits at under 72 percent — but I also spent part of my morning making sure the title screen image I grabbed was from the superior-looking Genesis version, so, you know. I’m not saying there aren’t any meaningful differences, either.

Jungle Strike also ended up releasing on MS-DOS, various Amiga platforms, the Game Boy, Game Gear, and even the Playstation Portable systems, but the originals seem to be where the best version of this game existed. Whereas the ports of Jungle Strike’s predecessor, Desert Strike, were received and produced differently, with more than just graphical upgrades being made on those other non-Genesis platforms, Jungle Strike’s differences had more to do with whether cutscenes were full motion or not. Jungle Strike didn’t even necessarily take full advantage of the potential for graphical upgrades, and even the reviewers of the various PC versions admitted that it was a game designed more for “console gamers,” due to their lesser attention spans. I’d take offense as a console gamer, but the only PC games I really consistently play are Civilization and Crusader Kings and such, so… shit.

Jungle Strike is hard to find in the sense that it’s not really releasing on modern platforms, but it is easy to find in the sense that old PC games tend to be available for download on the same internet that you are reading this on now. And emulating games from the fourth generation of consoles is a breeze, too, if you’re into that sort of thing. The whole Strike series could really use the release of a collection on modern consoles and computers, but then again, I do not want to see it succeed to the point that we get new Strike games that decide to indulge even more into right-wing militarism, especially not when things have escalated on that front as much as they have in the past nearly 30 years.

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