Retro Game of the Day! Rush 'n Attack

Retro Game of the Day! Rush 'n Attack

Rush 'n Attack, aka Green Beret, was released to arcades in 1985 and arrived on the NES two years later. A relatively early entry into Konami's stable of popular titles, this was one of those titles which everybody either owned themselves, or played at their buddy's place..

I don't think it's any kind of a leap to consider this game the predecessor to Konami's much more popular Contra series. They both showed up during the same period, they had very similar looking player-characters, each had simultaneous 2-player cooperative action with a military "you alone against the legions of the enemy army" theme - of course Contra had a drastically more science fiction bent, but you know.

Of course, the most obvious difference between Rush 'n Attack and Contra was in your method of attack. In Contra you were always equipped with a standard rifle of some sort with unlimited ammo, and you could power up to all sorts of crazy weapons. Rush 'n Attack merely outfitted you with a knife, with which you could stab away to your heart's content - occasionally you could pick up some sort of power-up (like a rocket launcher or hand grenades), but their ammo count was so limited that they were hardly present in the game.

The game itself was failry straightforward, as many NES games were at the time. Just run and kill and do not die! Lots of repeating backgrounds, but they looked nice enough, illustrating your advancement deep into the enemies' weapon fortifications. End of round bosses were also present (notably the gyrocopter dudes - who writes this stuff!)



Rush 'n Attack sort of got left behind after Contra released and stole all it's thunder, but what we have here is a serviceable, if simple little game. Like many of the titles of the time, it's actually got a fairly difficult setting and seeing the game through will require a lot of patience of the player. When you die you'll be sent back to a checkpoint (oooo people hate that!) - one hit and that's it! A good little game, I might pick it up again someday and actually finish it, we will see.