guerilla war / guevara! for the nes

the original title is GUEVARA!, but the american version (which carefully avoids all mention of cuba) is the perhaps more aptly-titled "guerrilla war." the identically-clad soldiers that stand between the bearded protagonists and the liberation of "the country" come from everywhere: out of manholes, buildings, down alleyways, out from the jungle. the scripting in this game is heroic: these guys have a really diverse set of behaviors, and their movements impart a sense of place to all of the environments the players traverse.

they also die, by the hundreds. they die in trenches, they die retreating, they die with their hands upraised in surrender, they die alongside the hostages they've carefully arranged to dissuade you from shooting them. but so do you: player one and player two have bottomless continues and die from bullets, bazookas, and blind collisions with dumb, charging enemies. by the end of the game they've spent about as many lives as they've taken. it's almost, for one of countless battle-the-army games from the end of the eighties, an effective portrait of the stupid brutality of war.