Games from my childhood: Jungle Strike

I grew up with the Sega Megadrive, and I have no qualms in stating categorically that it was better than both the NES, and the SNES. Better graphics, better sound and, of course, better games – or in this case, versions of games.

One of my earliest gaming memories is of the Strike series – isometric helicopter shooters that were both challenging and fun, and tied together with a large helping of cheesy plot. Man, do I love a good cheesy plot.

The three titles, Desert Strike, Jungle Strike and Urban Strike (I’m ignoring Nuclear Strike, as it A: wasn’t on the Megadrive, and B: was rubbish), were great fun. They were simple shooters combined with a decent amount of objectives, be it rescuing stranded troopers or destroying nuclear missile silos, and the controls were easy enough for my 7-year-old mind to grasp.
Good thing too, these games were tough!

Of the three titles Jungle Strike was my favourite, so I’m going to focus on that one. Here’s the intro, which has a bit of plot too.

And if you want the rest of the cracking theme song, you can find it here. Although the Urban Strike theme more than eclipses it’s cool techno beats.

I love this game, it kept me amused for hours. The basic plot revolved around two rent-a-bad-guys who want to blow up America because… well… because. Ibn Kilbaba, son of predecessor game Desert Strike’s antagonist, and Carlos Ortega, a “notorious South American drug lord” have nukes and are prepared to use them, and it’s up to the player to track them down and finish the fight.

Starting off in Washington DC, the game takes in jungles and deserts as you hunt the wily pair down, eventually coming full circle and leaving the player holding off wave after wave of suicide bombers in the ‘burbs of DC. Also, the person who uploaded this is rubbish and keeps bouncing off buildings… I was way better, even at seven.

The gameplay is deceptively simple – fly around and shoot stuff – but there was also a fair amount of strategy in there too, as your Comanche chopper only has a certain amount of armour, fuel and ammo and you need to keep picking up supplies, or find yourself out of lives pretty damn quick. Also, you sometimes got to take the controls of other vehicles, like this nifty stealth fighter!

Sure, the graphics and gameplay seem amazingly low-tech these days, but back in the 90s, in the golden age of 16-bit action, they kicked arse – and still do, if the copy I’m running on my PC’s emulator is anything to go by.

In some ways, it would be good to see gaming go back to this – simple, fun shooting, with no ulterior motives.