19 Part One: Boot Camp

19 Part One: Boot Camp was released by Cascade Games in 1988 and is one of the rare cases of a game built on a pop song. Paul Hardcastle's 19, about the soldiers sent to Vietnam, was an enormous mid-eighties hit, and the game took both its subject and its music from it — the chiptune arrangement on the Commodore 64 was written by Rob Hubbard and is comfortably the best thing in the entire program. The model for the playing itself was Konami's arcade machine Combat School.

Four events await you, loaded one after another and played in fixed order. First an assault course with walls, ditches and tubes against the clock. Then a shooting range where cut-out targets pop up from behind walls and bushes and you line them up with a crosshair — except that women and children appear among the enemies, and hitting one costs you a thousand points. Next comes a jeep run along a broken road full of crests and dips, where you collect army kit for bonuses and every collision shaves something off your top speed. Finally there is unarmed combat against the drill instructor.

The assault course demands the most work. Jumps are governed by a power bar you have to hold at the right level by keeping the button pressed, and you will eat dozens of falls before it clicks. The shooting range is the most straightforward event, and the civilians oddly improve it, because they force you to shoot with judgement. The jeep is pure pleasure in speed, and the instructor can be handled by alternating high and low strikes and sticking to hit-and-run.

As a whole it is a solid but unexceptional collection of small games, and the reviews of the day were more enthusiastic than a modern player would expect. The promised sequel, 19 Part 2: Combat Zone, which was to carry your character and score into real combat, never appeared, because Cascade folded in the meantime.

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