Platoon - C64 Loading Screen - Nostalgia Overload!! C64 Retro Music Loading Screen (C64)
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Platoon is a mixture of shooter and action adventure by Ocean Software from 1987. It is based on the anti-war movie with the same name by the US American director Oliver Stone from 1986, in which the experiences of a G.I during his period of service in the Vietnam War and the connected combat missions are told. The game re-enacts the plot of the film loosely in several levels which are loaded one after the other. At the start of the game, the player steers a Platoon which has been shrunk to five men through the winding paths of the jungle. The task at first is to find an explosive charge to demolish a strategically important bridge and this way to escape the pursuit of a hostile superiority. If this is successfully done, a Vietnamese village needs to be searched and an entrance to a secret tunnel complex of the Vietcong has to be found, whereupon the second part of the game is loaded.
Now the story is told from the first-person perspective of the soldier wandering through the corridors, who now has to search the numerous rooms for a compass and a flare, before he can leave the labyrinth by an unguarded exit. A nightly assault by the Vietcong follows, which the player has to fend off out of his foxhole.
The final of the game is to find the way to a shelter while being pressed for time to rescue yourself from an attack of the US Airforce, who - not knowing that there are still own troups in the target area - bomb the jungle with Napalm. The only shelter has been occupied by the now gone crazy Seargant of the Platoon, though, who welcomes the player with grenades and MG fire. Only if you make it to eliminate the antagonist within the time limit with the help of grenades, the game will end with the trip home to the USA.
The graphics in Platoon are almost constantly on a high level. Starting with the loading screen and the title screen, which shows the black shilouettes of soldiers against a white background, it becomes apparent, that the graphics department put their heart and soul in it. The jungle labyrinth gets across effectively the disorientation in such a surrounding: without learning the map by heart you will get lost in no time, as all screens look mostly overgrown to the same degree. Deathly traps and snipers are in some places covered by bushes, so that you permanently have to look where you are walking. The sprites profit from the use of HiRes overlays, as already in Combat School and are therefore very detailled and animated flickering-free and pleasantly.
The second level raises the positive impression further and presents itself as the very early representative of the first-person shooter genre. Though there is no scrolling in the real sense, but only a number of different corridor images switched one after the other, but the effect to think you move through a tunnel system is successful. Also the folllowing short trench sequence can convince despite its simplicity concerning the gameplay, as it finally does only depict a revamped shooting gallery.
In the third part of the game the quality of the graphics decreases visibily. The dark flair from the previous level gives way to a mixture of too coloured jungle graphics on a bright yellow background, which reminds more of a flower shop or a landscape park than of a jungle. Especially disappointing are the sprites of the enemies, which could stem from a ZX Spectrum, same as the highly pixelated end screen of the game. Added to this are the notchy controls and also weaknesses in the collision query can be felt. After the good quality of the two previous parts, this section makes you presume that programmer came quickly close to the deadline for the game while designing and it had to be done especially fast.