NAM-1975 launched alongside the Neo Geo MVS in 1990 and shipped as the pack-in title, which made it the calling card for SNK's expensive new hardware. It is also the only Neo Geo release that skips the system boot screen in its attract mode, a small oddity that hints at how early in the platform's life it arrived.

The design follows Cabal. Your soldier runs along the bottom of the screen while enemies pour in from the depth of the scene, and you shoot them using an on-screen reticle. The catch, and the thing that decides whether you get on with the game at all, is that the stick moves the soldier and the crosshair together rather than separately. Aiming is therefore a matter of repositioning your whole body, and repositioning means walking into whatever is being fired at you. A fires, B lobs a grenade, and pulling the stick diagonally throws a dodge roll. Once the screen fills up, that roll is what you are really playing.

The plot is period pulp: two American soldiers, Silver and Brown, go back into Vietnam in the war's final months to pull a kidnapped scientist and his daughter out of enemy hands and find out who arranged it. Six stages, each ending in a set-piece confrontation, and a second player can drop in at any point.

The craft has held up. Sprites are large and well drawn, the digitised voice samples still land, and explosions carry weight in a way most 1990 arcade games did not manage. The weaknesses have held up too. The music is forgettable, the difficulty spikes hard, and a fair number of deaths come from the tied-together movement and aiming rather than from anything readable in advance. It is also short, which is correct behaviour for a coin-op and less satisfying anywhere else. Approach it as a well-made launch title and a piece of Neo Geo history rather than as the best the format produced.