Shoot ’em up, Private.
PLAYERS: 1
PUBLISHER: Taito
DEVELOPER: Taito
GENRE: Shooter/Light gun
RELEASE DATE: May 1989
Let us all bow our heads and remember Operation Wolf the way I feel it would want to be remembered: in the arcades. Shooting soldiers, tanks, boats, and helicopters was far more rewarding with the arcade cabinet’s swivel machine gun (complete with re-coil!). For intense shooting games, like Operation Wolf, the one-shot Zapper can’t compare: it’s slow, unwieldy, and will have you shooting wildly at the screen. Still, despite the Zapper’s limitations, I can’t deny that I squeezed some fleeting enjoyment out of this NES port. There’s a childlike ridiculousness that emerges from shooting the Zapper a hundred times a minute just to kill a handful of enemies; for the first couple levels, my inner eight-year-old was giggling like an idiot. Once Operation Wolf gets harder and the on-screen chaos increases, shooting haphazardly no longer works and the game face plants into a fjord of frustration. At least with the arcade, the gun was powerful enough to handle the steadily increasing difficulty. The Zapper, God bless it, just doesn’t have the firepower. If your finger trigger is quick, steady and true, perhaps you can get further than I. Just remember, you’re not getting any younger. Operation Wolf isn’t a good enough game to justify arthritis.
C-
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5 replies on “#459 – Operation Wolf”
This is definitely one of those titles that I too felt should have stayed in the arcade. The NES version just never did right by it imo.
I played the crap out of this a kid. Although I figured out quickly that the gun wouldn’t cut it, so I used the controller. It’s a decent game that way. Not great but on your scale I’d give it a B-.
Yeah, using the mouse on an emulator isn’t a bad way to go either. I was probably a little hard on it, in retrospect.
As a kid I couldn’t make it much further than the second level. I never played it in the arcade, but I can only imagine it would be superior.
Still the amount of time I rented this based on the cover and the blurb on the front, only to get it home and be terribly disappointed is embarrassing.
Sleepyweasel
I always just played using the controller. Easier to use grenades for one, much less tapping A is faster than the zapper.