'Nam 1965-1975

The seventies in Indochina aren't exactly the material for a pleasant afternoon at the computer. 'Nam 1965-1975, however, meant business — here you don't play for liberation or victory in the classic sense, but for survival in a swamp that takes everything.

You play as a commander of American units during the Vietnam War. You get a map, soldiers, supplies, and orders that aren't always the same. Strategy plays out in turns — you move units, give them commands, shoot or hide. The goal is to fulfill the scenario the game assigns you, but mainly to stay alive. The language is English, the interface isn't exactly friendly, but for early nineties computers, the game is unusually ambitious.

The core of 'Nam lies in the fact that war here isn't a game with a clear winner. Units are vulnerable, ammunition runs out, and Soviet advisors or Vietnamese units behave predictably only to a certain extent. Visually it's not stunning — a few pixels, tables with numbers, sounds like from a computer ten years older. The key is tactics. One wrong move and you have half your platoon shot to pieces because you sent them without cover. The next move and you discover supplies ran out before you thought.

Strategy as such had its moment in several games of the eighties and nineties, but 'Nam goes against the grain. It's not heroics and clear lines. It's not fun in the traditional sense either — it's more like a frustration simulator that occasionally surprises you with small victories. The game doesn't play gloriously, but wearily, as if it knew what really happened in the jungle.

Today 'Nam is a relic on disk that'll take a while to learn the controls and set the right mindset. Pilots can play it in a browser without problems — a DOS emulator handles everything needed. It's not a game you'd take as entertainment for a few evenings. It's more like an artifact from a time when computers were trying to do things that had weight.