Operation Winback

 N64, Operation Winback (1999) game

Another N64 game done and dusted. This was one of those titles I'd always been interested in playing, but could never find, or find for a reasonable price (even on ebay), and like 'Rocket: Robot On Wheels,' remained unattainable until recent years (although I still haven't got the latter in my collection!). I could say it's very much of its time, but the drab greys and browns that make up most of the visuals had certainly been proved unnecessary by such examples as 'Perfect Dark' and 'The World Is Not Enough' in the First Person Shooter genre, but even in Third Person Action games such as 'Hybrid Heaven' they achieved a better graphical range, so 'OW' didn't have an excuse, coming in the middle of the console's life. It actually reminded me of certain sections in 'Ocarina of Time' - whenever you're creeping around maze-like areas that are walled off. Being compared to a 'Zelda' game would ordinarily be a great compliment, but those parts were a little lacklustre, dull and showing the limitations of the machine, so it's really not a positive comparison, though I can say it was made up of similarly pleasantly chunky figures and objects. The music, too, was entirely unmemorable and basic, though like 'Zelda' it does include the nice touch of context sensitivity - most of the time it's quite quiet and restrained, but when health is depleted it starts to heat up and become quite energetic to match the rising intensity, so that was a point in its favour.

There's not much to be said for the story, such as it is, which is really only an excuse to stitch the various levels together and provide a brief rest from the action, generally scenes of your character meeting up with his various teammates only to decide to split up again. I'm sure it was more to do with the pain of having to program AI allies, which this game being released when it was, would have still been a technical challenge, although I think 'Turok: Rage Wars' came out that same year, and while that was geared entirely to bot battles in dedicated arenas, you'd think a good coding team might have been able to handle at least one coop member - I'd suggest including 2-player cooperative play, but the graphics were muddy enough as it was that shrinking the size of the play screen down to half would only exacerbate the problem. The way these team members moved in and out of the picture made me highly suspicious that someone was going to be revealed as a traitor, so that wasn't a very big surprise (after all, you can't rely entirely on your main villain to be the threat if he's called 'Cecile'! What kind of threatening name is that, or did they do it for a joke?). But yes, it made very little sense for all these various squad members to be working individually when they could simply storm through as a team.

Sense in story and weak graphical clout were only a couple of issues that stood out for me. Another was the decision to make it a third-person perspective in the first place as I'm sure it would have been a much more accessible experience had it been seen through the eyes of Jean-Luc Cougar, your dramatically-named hero character (who looked a little like Chris Pine). For one thing the bad camera wouldn't have been an issue, but here, you can often find yourself fighting it or running into scenery - the unique control scheme where you hold R-Trigger for auto-aim, then hammer A to fire, was a bit clumsy (and it's clear why the auto-aim is so integral since otherwise it's almost impossible to react quickly as your sight swings wildly, but also slowly, making you vulnerable), the camera not always being in the right place for you to see just round the corner where your auto-aim has locked on - the result is you can be firing at an enemy you can't actually see and only know he's been dispatched by the auto-aim breaking off. You also can't adjust the camera once you've locked on, which is a frustration, and as for multiple targets... Well, you can have an assailant running at you whom is obviously the most dangerous and you want to shoot, but the auto-aim has locked onto someone else. You can switch between targets, but it's not always responsive enough, and in the panic of a charging foe it often appears easier to simply disconnect, turn tail and run. But here's another problem, albeit one that makes the game more realistic: you're much more vulnerable from behind, sometimes being killed with one shot.

The game really doesn't want you to run away because if you do the camera can sometimes go haywire as you're trying to adjust to your new direction and I had many a death through camera malfunction which would easily have been avoided if the game had been played through Cougar's eyes. There's almost no point to the third-person style, it's not like you can lay flat on the floor or crawl to present a smaller target (you can crouch and roll, but that's it), nor can you climb even small obstacles at waist height! It's gaming convention, I know, that simple actions aren't possible because they'll upset the carefully laid traps and advancement (similarly only certain parts of the environment can be shot), and the game is very linear with little in the way of offshoots, just the occasional blind alley or room you don't absolutely have to enter, though usually these places have extra equipment such as ammo, torch or medical kit. But the real reason for the perspective is so they could include irritating sections where you have to time a roll to duck under a laser beam to progress. This was yet another vast irritation to me since they generally come in multiples and you have to get each timing just right to get past them. If you touch one it's instant death! Yes, another gaming convention, I understand, but it's fully frustrating. The only balm is that they generally give you a Checkpoint just before so you don't have to travel a long level only for instant death because you mistimed a roll.

In that sense the game was actually pretty easy. It's mostly a question of taking cover, then leaning or jumping out to pump the bad guys with bullets, take cover again and repeat. Levels tend to be fairly short until you get near the end when there are thirty or forty minute jobs, though part of that is working out where the enemies are going to attack, and once you know all the patterns it's not too difficult. Medical kits that replenish health are scattered around, not liberally, but enough to make it far from a daunting prospect to reach the end of most levels. There is a bit of tactical play regarding these kits, since unlike ammo you can't pick them up and take them with you, you either use it there and then, or if you think you don't need it quite yet, memorise where you left it and go back for it, though it's a risk since once you're through a Checkpoint you can't go back unless you restart the level from the beginning. I will say as another positive, your man is well animated, even if it weirdly cuts off when you climb a ladder for example, though perhaps that was to do with loading the next section? But once you've got used to the clunky control method you do feel some liberation, crouching, walking crouched, popping up to hit an enemy, rolling, peering round corners. But it still irks you can't do simple things like climb up onto a crate.

Things are kept fairly simple when it comes to your arsenal: you have your basic pistol, a shotgun and an automatic. You can also find the occasional silenced pistol, though I didn't find it of much value since you don't get any replacement ammo and can burn through it quickly. Equally, the rocket launcher was a nice touch, but cumbersome to use and you often find yourself being exposed for longer as you go through the operation of firing and watching the shell shoot off. Your pistol has unlimited ammo, so that's not very realistic, but if it had then the game would have been much, much tougher (you get extra points for completing a level with only the pistol or without using any medical kits). Most of the time it's almost easier to use the pistol, even though it's less powerful (and has a shorter range - it's important to reserve some machine gun ammo in case you do have enemies in the distance), because you know exactly how many bullets you have and how long it'll take to reload - the annoying thing about reloading the larger weapons especially is that it takes time for the animation to play out and if you get hit in the meantime that prevents you reloading, so you can be desperately trying to fill your gun with bullets only to keep getting shot, which is when you feel the best course is to simply run away, the camera fights you, then you get shot in the back and die! Most enemies are fairly simple propositions to deal with, but the scary ones are the guys with knives who come charging at you and often one swipe will kill so there are moments of high tension. Also the gun emplacements which just rattle away, obliterating health when all you're trying to do is work out how to get past them, but it adds to the puzzle element.

The environments aren't exactly varied, hence the complaint about it all being rather brown or grey, but there is enough difference between them to mark them out as separate areas, be that wading through sewers or dodging between crates in warehouses. It even starts outside as your goal is to traverse various parts of this building that's been taken over by terrorists. I can't say I really took in the story, you're acting on behalf of the government to stop these terrorists taking control of some satellite or something, but narrative isn't its strong point. Actually I'm not sure what is its strong point! I do have a slight nostalgia as I think back through all those tricky bits I had to redo over and over, and if it wasn't for that the game would have been very short since my total playing time, adding up all the levels, came to a paltry 5 hours, 56 minutes, but that doesn't take into account the endless numbers of attempts - I was able to complete it in the space of one month so there was probably more like twenty-forty actual hours of playing time. But I can't say I really enjoyed it until the last two or three levels when it became a lot more involved, challenging and varied. If the whole game had been like that I'd have added another star to the score, but although I was playing it on Normal difficulty, most of the levels weren't too much of a challenge, very repetitive and a stop-start style of gameplay rather than flowing. Part of that was getting used to the controls, admittedly, and I'm not judging it based on modern ideals, just comparing it to other titles on the machine which showed what was possible.

It could be glitchy, occasionally crashing, although part of the reason seemed to be it didn't like the Expansion Pak being in the N64 (which isn't so good seeing as that came out the same year!), so for the first time in I don't know how many years I had to replace the Jumper Pak which I never thought I'd be doing! It could still crash on occasion even after that, but wasn't as unreliable. Sometimes it was just my own stupidity that caused me pause: when I first picked up a 'magazine' I went into my inventory to see it, forgetting ammunition comes in magazines and it wasn't some glossy read! The inventory could have been a greater part of the game, too, but I rarely checked it or used what was there. You have a torch which can be useful in dark areas, so that's another nice touch, and plastic explosives that can be laid and then shot or activated to explode, but it was a bit fiddly so I rarely used it. You unlock 'Max Power Mode' on completion which enables all weapons with infinite ammo from the start, though it would only serve to make the game even easier, and you also unlock characters for multiplayer. That's something which may have been fun back in the day when there were three or four of us playing N64 games regularly - I fired it up just to see what it was like. Unfortunately, as you'd expect judging by the rest of the game, there aren't any computer controlled bots to play against, it's humans only, and it really is a bit hard to see when the screen's quartered (2-4 players are possible), so I don't know how well it would have gone down when I think back to how even bright, colourful third-person combat games like 'Jet Force Gemini' and 'DK64' weren't very popular. You can't even save to cartridge but are required to have a Controller Pak, the mark of technical inefficiency in a game.

In terms of the end of the game, beating the turncoat was fairly easy, though Cecile was a little more of a challenge. The dialogue throughout is all a bit melodramatic with added swearing and blasphemy as if they thought that made the game 'grown-up.' But there isn't any blood or gore so it doesn't fit with the visual tone. Then again it's best to leave aside the 'qualities' of the story which is all told in text rather than actual speech. Interestingly there are little speech samples as enemies shout or grunt so it's not like there's no human speech at all. I imagine the game was inspired by such titles of the late-90s as 'Metal Gear Solid' with its weird boss characters to fight and an emphasis on sneaking around, and it made me wonder why more software companies didn't use 'Goldeneye' as their model? It seems obvious, but it shows how much talent and expertise were behind games such as that classic. It also made me think of 'Splinter Cell' which came a few short years later on GameCube, another third-person action game of creeping around with the same style of 'music,' though more options in the physical department. I hasten to add that 'OW' isn't a bad game, though its initials do sum up a lot of feelings inspired by it. It's the sort of thing I can imagine going back in ten years or so to complete on Hard, but isn't something I'd particularly look forward to playing again. Which is a shame because it did go sit in my mind as something well worth exploring for the right price - perhaps I'd have enjoyed it more closer to its time, but even then 'PD' and 'TWINE' put it to shame.

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