Green Beret is a difficult game to love, because Green Beret is a difficult game to play. Honestly, it's brutal. Utterly unforgiving, unfair in places, and generally infuriating. Especially since every life lost is greeted by a shrill siren sound that will have even the most understanding spouse reaching for her earbuds (trust me).
It's also a simple game, if a little rooted in the concerns of the 80s... move to the right, murder fools with your knife and your deep fear of communist expansion, pick up the occasional flame thrower or rocket launch to murder more efficiently... win!!!
But how did the home computer conversions handle the absurd difficulty of the coin-op? They'd have toned it down, right? Right??
Amstrad: This port is the worst of the three main ones. There's just something off about it. Maybe it's the loose controls or the insane difficulty, or maybe it's the fact that your green beret looks more like Robin Hood and the communist aggressors look more like merry men. Still, everything from the arcade is represented here. Just not brilliantly. And it is so so difficult...
Spectrum: Next up is the Spectrum. It's a port by the late great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith and it is a really neat conversion. The graphics are bright and crisp, it controls and moves around well, and it feels like the original arcade. But goddamn it's hard. I had to figure out how to use a Multiface, just so that I could poke in a cheat and get to my screenshot spot for this one!
C64: The C64 port is probably the best of the bunch, but not by a long way. It looks and sounds great, definitely the closest to the arcade. It's main problem - believe it or not - is difficulty. Again, it is insanely hard. And it suffers from some unfair hit box issues - if you jump and collide with an enemy on a level above, you lose a life, which feels wrong.
Atari: Finally, a dishonourable discharge for the Atari 8-bit version which is, frankly, a bit of a war crime.
It's beyond hard and enters an entirely different realm of frustration, with your hero wielding the smallest knife imaginable and enemies requiring the intimate closeness of a secret lover before they'll shuffle off this mortal coil
Combine this with invisible bullets (pesky Russian tech) and that awful siren that plays at the start of EVERY life and it's a recipe for an 800XL out the window.
That was a fun read, thanks. You've got to check out the MSX version, it is terribad. But charming in its own cartoonish way.