I've been playing and collecting video games since the early 1980's, and while there's something to be said for enjoying the greats of the gaming world, there's no better feeling for me than picking out something I'd never heard of, throwing it into my system, and being unable to tear myself away from it because it was just too damn fun. With that in mind, I thought I'd start up a series about my own personal favorite hidden gems of the gaming world to let people know about the unsung, the overlooked, the ignored, and the downright weird niche titles that had no chance of achieving the heights of a Mario, Sonic, or Zelda.
Military sim games and I have a love/hate relationship: I love watching other people dominate them, and I hate it when they prove my incompetence for command. One must carry a masochistic streak the length of one's own outstretched arms in order to enjoy these things, and it's why I tend more towards adventure titles. That said, there's just something about Vic Tokai's Conflict that keeps me coming back for ritual humiliation. Call it masochism, call it mental illness, but like Captain Kirk to the Kobayashi Maru, I refuse to believe in the no-win scenario that is this game's sixteen separate battlefields.
In my more than twenty-year relationship with this game, I have managed to conquer a mere four of those sixteen fights. Either I'm punching far above my weight class, or Conflict is the Stanford Prison Experiment of video games (where it's playing the role of every guard simultaneously while I'm the only prisoner). No matter what, I still consider it a hidden gem--you'd be hard-pressed to find a better representation of an Avalon Hill-style boardgame than this 8-bit beast.
A couple years ago, I compiled a list of the fifteen most difficult NES games ever programmed. Conflict ranked in at #2. My remarks on this game still stand:
Conflict is programmed to unhesitatingly shatter the morale of all but the most strident tacticians in single-player mode, because no matter what settings you choose or stage you elect to play, the AI always has more resources than you at its disposal. While you’re trying to scrape together enough Fame points to construct a jeep, your red opponent is grinding out surface-to-air missiles, ground attack choppers, and MiG fighter planes.
Continuing on:
Every battle in Conflict is a slog as you work not only to deplete your enemy’s fame points, but also win battles, capture cities and commandeer airfields to boost your own so you can get close to competing. Fights between units are turn-based and tactical, but with a healthy dose of luck (because screw you, that’s why), and until you understand what each command does, when it’s most successful, and when it’s least effective you can forget about winning anything but a dishonorable discharge for gross negligence on the battlefield.
Most military sims present a veneer of fairness, where you and an opponent at least start reasonably matched in resources if not abilities. In games like Command & Conquer, while each side may have slightly different units, they don't normally start you off with a few drones and infantrymen to face down tanks and gunships. Conflict does this on virtually every map: while the blue side and red side begin relatively evenly matched, it doesn't take long for the CPU to start cranking out things you have no hope of countering except through sheer luck. By the time you're able to field jeeps and armored personnel carriers, the computer's cranking out T-80 tanks and holds complete air superiority. Want an example? Of course you do. Here's YouTuber Dugongue working his way through the game's initial skirmish on stream.
This feat takes him an hour and 42 minutes to accomplish, and it's the first goddamn fight on on the cart--there are fifteen more to follow. Playing Conflict isn't just an exercise in strategy and tactics, it's an exercise in patience. And as you can see from the video, the lop-sided aspect is clear from the beginning. His Blue faction begins the game with 5,000 Fame, which is respectable enough to get him manufacturing some ground-based air defense, but his opponent is churning out the best equipment possible. What's more, Dugongue's first encounter with the Red forces ends terribly with the loss of his ground attack chopper...and an additional 1,200 fame points, making that starting deficit all the nastier.
There are optimal strategies when it comes to engaging units with other units, tactics within battle that are more likely to produce results than others, but you can play a flawless game of cat-and-mouse with the computer, get one unlucky hit on the random number generator, and sustain a crippling loss that snowballs into ruin through no fault of your own. On the other hand, it's possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as Dugongue shows in that video, and when that happens, the feeling of elation matches that of watching the Death Star blow up for the first time in A New Hope.
At least until Conflict loads up the next map and goes all "Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith" on your lightsaber-swinging ass. Keyboard commandos who can systematically dismantle Conflict are rarer than polite people on 4chan, but if you aspire, if you work, and if you want it badly enough, you too can survive First Phase and graduate to command your own SEAL team. I know people who have met Navy SEALs, both on-base and in deployment situations. And while dropout rate during SEAL training is somewhere between 60-75%, I've never met any man (or woman--female gamers are no joke around here) who's beaten Conflict. Let's face it, any video game with a greater attrition rate among would-be warriors than BUD/S deserves both my respect and my attention.
So the next time someone boasts about Dark Souls really not being all that hard if you're a real gamer, drop hints about this brutally difficult NES title that only true gamers can complete, and watch their home degenerate into a morass of feces-smeared walls, rotting snack food, towers of empty energy drinks, and couch cushions steeped in the blood of a thousand ruptured hemorrhoids. But, trust me, do this from a distance. You can't imagine the smell.
Conflict a bit too much for you? Well, don't worry--I've got nine other entries in this series, all of which are easier than putting this cart through its paces.
- Part One: Snoopy and the Red Baron
- Part Two: Dark Summit
- Part Three: Metal Marines
- Part Four: Theresia
- Part Five: Obscure
- Part Six: Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder
- Part Seven: Everblue 2
- Part Eight: Star Trek - Invasion
- Part Nine: Disaster Report