Article Type: Preview
Article Date: January 14, 2003
Product Info
Product Name: Vietcong: U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam
Category: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Pterodon & Illusion Softworks
Publisher: G.O.D. Games
Release Date: Winter 2002 (slipped)
Sys. Spec: TBA
Files & Links: Click Here
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Beach Party, Vietnam
It is hard to believe, especially to someone who was born during the Vietnam conflict, but nearly 30 years have passed since American involvement in that controversial mobilization came to an end. Of the estimated 2.6 million American servicemen and women in South Vietnam, 58,194 were killed and another 153,000 were wounded. Staggering losses endured by one of the world’s superpowers and industrial giants, delivered by the hand of a peasant army. While the Peoples' Army of North Vietnam were the primary military forces staged against the combined efforts of the United States and the Republic of South Vietnam, another cunning and lethal soldier joined the fray. The Vietcong, or VC, were largely guerrilla forces operating in the South and ranged from smaller independent cells to entire regiments of regular soldiers serving under the command of communist leaders in the South. As a fighting force, they were deadly effective given that they used their lack of uniforms, knowledge of the landscape, and fierce determination to appear from nowhere, strike a vicious blow, then melt back into the jungle.
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A popular and effective sniper perch  |
“I Loved You in Wall Street!”
Despite a surge in relevancy that brought the Vietnam Conflict back to the forefront of political and popular conscience during the mid-eighties, the combat simulation gaming genre has been particularly slow to develop any titles in that theater. In fact, you would almost expect that some developers would prefer to model the Vietnam environment, as the terrain all but forces most engagements to pit infantry against infantry, and thus avoid some of the pitfalls of the integrated battlefield.
Publishing giant Gathering of Developers and development house Illusion Softworks emerge from the pack as among the first software producers to tackle the late-in-coming concept of first-person squad-level infantry combat set in the dense bush of Southeast Asia. Harnessing the power of the Pterodon rendering system, the authors seek to create the ultimate in breathtaking environments while blending in the tension and strain of surviving in a hostile place against a skilled and proficient enemy.
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| Medics are not yet implemented, but should be! |
Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me please take a moment to remind the reader that this article is a preview of a multiplayer demo version. This is not a review of the final retail product. Thus, certain misgivings that I may have today may be resolved prior to release. In fact, from the time when I took the screenshots for this piece and the time when it went to press, a 10MB Multiplayer demo patch was released, said to contain over two dozen (28, according to the text file that came with the patch installation) fixes and tweaks. For example, one large problem initially was the lack of a means to connect directly via IP address. This has been resolved, and frankly, if it had not, then the multiplayer life expectancy of this title would be drastically reduced. So, now that we are armed with that little caveat, let us proceed into the nitty-gritty.
“Goodbye My Sweetheart. Hello, Vietnam.”
The multiplayer Vietcong demo offers LAN and Internet based gameplay for 2 to 32 players on a single server. Servers are equipped with special command functionality, such as the ability to force auto-balancing of teams, or whether or not to disable the Heads-Up-Display cross-hairs, a feature known as “Vietnam Mode” that is supposed to encourage realism. We’ll get to that little nicety later.
Setting up your multiplayer persona is fairly straightforward. Simply pick a name, then choose a character for your US gaming needs and a skin for your VC adventuring Choose from the classic OD-506 green, tiger stripe camouflage, or basic black pajamas with sandals. And just to make things interesting, you get your choice of headgear, from the classic bamboo hat to dew-rags made from cravats to green berets to Stetson cowboy hats. Yes, you can play looking like Blain from Predator, minus the mini-gun of course.
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| Dew-Rag or Stetson? So many choices! |
All Internet games are found via GameSpy, and anyone who has been playing online action games long enough has formed an opinion or two about GameSpy. My opinion? How do you say “Pain in the butt” in Vietnamese? I’ve always found using GameSpy not unlike trying to tie shoelaces with my catcher’s mitt still on my hand. Sure, it works, sorta. However, all misgivings aside, all publicly available Internet game servers, be they personal computers or dedicated servers, can be found via this engine. The engine allows you to sort by statistic, such as Ping, number of players, game type or map type. As of the 0.97 version of the demo, there is only one map, Stream, which we will look at shortly. One can only hope that this title will eventually include support for filtering or for third-party application support, such as All-Seeing-Eye. Otherwise, you could be in for a bumpy ride with the relatively mundane task of simply finding a game to play!
The three game types that are available in the demo include multiplayer mainstays Death-match (every man for himself), Capture-the-Flag (steal the enemy flag and return it to your own), and ATG, which I don’t really know what it stands for, but the object is to escort (or eliminate) a downed US pilot from his crashed Huey to an extraction point. Sadly, many Capture-the-Flag matches might as well be death-matches. Even after alleged improvements to the game, in which team-killers can be voted off and are marked in red on the communications screen, you are more rarely more vulnerable a target as when you first spawn in to a zone.
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| Note the colored roll on top of the rucksack |
Cowardly, insipid, childish people abound and rather than face the dangerous people moving towards them, they find it more satisfying to shoot those trusting fools who were stupid enough to turn their backs to them. I have personally seen the dialog prompting for a vote to kick a team-killer, but have never seen one work, despite claims that everyone voted appropriately. Here’s to hoping that little glitch is resolved, as it takes very little time of emerging from 30-second respawn limbo only to be mowed down by not-all-that-friendly-fire and face another respawn delay to make you wonder why on earth you are subjecting yourself to such aggravation.
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| What a lonely place to die |
“The Stars…There's No Right or Wrong in Them. They're Just There.”
What terrible forces could drive some lowly players to hunt their fellow teammates? For this answer, we look to the namesake of the map that is included in the multiplayer Vietcong demo… Stream.
The first time the game opens past the load screen and your digital-self steps amid the lush landscape, you will be in awe. Hats off to the Pterodon engine, as it creates a very convincing world, sensorially speaking, in which to game. The map is called Stream because, well, there is a large stream running catty-corner through the level dividing it roughly in half. Within the stream, water gently rolls along, sometimes pooling, sometimes rushing slightly, and sometimes skittering between rocks. Reeds spring up here and there along with some shrubbery growing from shallow points along the bed. The streambed is lined and dotted by a mixed density collection of boulders and rocks, not to mention the occasional log or tree root. The surrounding land is similarly characterized with dense vegetation, thick stout trees, large boulders, caverns, ledges, tree stands, stumps, shrubs, thickets, bushes, grasses, logs, and whatever else you might expect to find in a jungle! Translation? Its wild in there.
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| Fight for the salvage |
The setting is so wild, in fact, that there are ample places for the skilled player to hide. A clever innovation in this game is the ability to lie or crouch behind an obstacle, stay covered and concealed, then to pop-up with your sights drawn (one of the few times the horrid iron sights prove useful), fire a burst or two, then to disappear back behind your cover. The American troops blend in almost invisibly into the grasses and moss-covered boulders, so much so that you rarely see them until they move. Vietcong forces are likewise indiscernible crouched among the shadows of the trees and bushes. Very often you will never see the man who shoots you, and that can become frustrating quickly. It will make the meditative person wonder how anyone ever found the other side and how anyone ever survived an encounter in that place. And this, loyal reader, is why its so much easier, and safer, to prey on unsuspecting players who are trying to play the game the way it is meant to be played.
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| I do believe I gotcha covered |
“Hell is the Impossibility of Reason.”
Again, remember that this is a preview of demo code and that there may be some changes still on the horizon. However, as lovely as the terrain and its features are, they also provide many of the difficulties with this title. So dense is the brush that it is remarkably easy to be attempting to maneuver and find yourself hung up in the branches of a shrub and gunned down. This terrain that teaches your eye to spot movement amid the leaves can betray you as well, for sometimes a pixel may render in and out and look like movement in the distance. You can never really be sure until it shoots at you, and by then, its often too late.
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| Quite the battle for this little rock |
Of course, what is scenery without a desire to be in it? There is one glaring problem with the multiplayer aspect of this title. In my estimation, the game is far too reminiscent of Unreal Tournament if it were set in a jungle. Any basic skill in the game seems to be supplanted by grabbing the most rapid fire weapon you can find and then spraying away madly at anything that moves. Among the weapons of choice are the US classic M-16 and the Soviet-made AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle. Both offer a high rate of fire with good damage. The other king of the battlefield is the Doom veteran shotgun. Why aim when close enough is good enough? Thus, anything that might even be remotely considered strategy, such as use of covering and suppressing fire, smoke grenades, fire-and-maneuver, goes right out the window.
Part of the blame for the failure of the strategy system must lie in the horrible communications window. Even if you could get your teammates, often a collection of individualists and Rambo’s from around the world, to cooperate towards a common goal, there is no good way to coordinate their efforts. The gameplay, being more console action-game-like than a combat simulation, is simply too fast and too chaotic to allow any appreciable application of strategic thinking. Take your fingers away from your mouse long enough to type a message and you are asking for trouble. That is, of course, unless you happen to enjoy being a spawn-campers or some other kind of lurker.
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| Another Flag Capture for the US Army team |
There will be people out there who will argue with me vehemently on my opinions. There will be those who question my skills as a player and thus blame a lack of success for my frustration. I will freely admit that I am not the world’s best player of some of these games. I will rarely be atop the leaderboard in kills, or flag captures, or anything for that matter. However, I am an above-average player, generally maintaining better than a 1:1 kill to death ratio. If you have read anything I have written, you will know that I am a teamwork junkie…the best looking game on the market isn’t worth a spit if it cannot offer the combat simulation enthusiast the proper taste of cooperative, tactical effort. Perhaps I am slightly biased, in that I cannot stand death-match style of gameplay at all, so much so that I didn’t play Doom or Quake multiplayer, but instead, waited for Starsiege: Tribes and Rainbow Six to cut my teeth on multiplayer first-person-shooters. If you need a new stomping ground for your seasoned veteran squad of infantry specialists, I’d suggest you give this one a miss.
“Free Bird!”
I am hoping that the single player will offer a more substantial experience than its multiplayer kin. The environments are simply too exciting to be ignored and the Vietnam conflict is overdue for a quality game in its image. I find it remarkably disappointing that about the best thing that can be said about the multiplayer experience is that the menu music is pretty cool! The tune somewhat reminds me of Pearl Jam’s Black if it were covered by Jimi Hendrix, and that isn’t all bad. Take a listen here and judge for yourself.
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