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cowlitz14: I'm a senior citizen newbie who really has little experience with computers but I want to try a game, one that does remind me of the carnage of Vietnam or which I was a part.
Actually the lack of Vietnam themed games in GOG is something ive never really paid any attention to before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_in_games

I think like none of those are in GOG, not that i would have tried to find all of them.

I am mostly sticking to WW2 war games myself, as they are not only more common - but are a bit more related to Finland that Vietnam ;)

Well then again, "not all wars are equal" - i mean like the Korean war for example is something that is even more rare in games than Vietnam.
It's not Vietnam, but Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault is a decent WW2 game that I thought did a good job with things like the D Day landings. Quite sobering to play actually - eg taking 10 attempts before you make it up the beach, then thinkingof all the soldiers doing it for real who only had one go at it...
Welcome to GOG cowlitz14!

Glad to see you got the answers you were looking for.

Great response community, you are the best.
Korean and Vietnam wars are rarely making an appearance in games.

The ones that i can recommend are not made by an american company.

One is the Vietcong ( three games in the series: Vietcong + Vietcong: Fist Alpha expansion and Vietcong 2 ) and was made by a czech company. You will need the patches for those ( the initial releases were buggy as hell, but props to the devs for solving the bugs ). Vietcong series, especially the first ones, seems the closest to what you are looking for.

The other is Men of War: Vietnam, a strategy with some real time tactics involved. This one is made by a russian company.

Funny enough, the american companies seem to avoid the setting like the plague. And when they do touch the subject is hit and miss. Which pains me, because the best persons to make a game in that setting should be the american companies. They have tons of documentation at their disposal, living veterans to tell their stories, movies to depict the time period in every aspect. Maybe, it's still a painful subject for US, dunno...

None of those games are vailable on GOG. Vietcong can be found only in the retail shops ( hard copy ), Men of War: Vietnam is available on Steam, though.

I didn't include Call of Duty Black Ops 1 + 2 here, because:

a. it's like seeing a bad Vietnam movie
b. only small parts of the games are dedicated to the 'Nam war.

Battlefield games are for multiplayer, so if you don't like competitive multiplayer, those are not for you, either.

Everything else is mediocre at best.

And, yeah, welcome to the place where old games get a second life.
Post edited January 04, 2014 by wolfsrain
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F4LL0UT: UNLESS you have deactivated all of the default safety measures and use an account with full admin rights, that is.
Even then. I've had too many problem with PF. I don't know why anyone would want to install there. There are only so many times where you spend hours trying to figure out why your stupid game won't work only to finally discover that it's PF causing the problems, before you learn never, ever, ever to install there.

If you do you won't get anything for christmas.
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BlueMooner: Even then. I've had too many problem with PF. I don't know why anyone would want to install there. There are only so many times where you spend hours trying to figure out why your stupid game won't work only to finally discover that it's PF causing the problems, before you learn never, ever, ever to install there.
Frankly I've had trouble only once and that was when I accidentally ran a game "as administrator" which resulted in my saved games, which were located in the folder where the game was installed, "disappearing" because they were moved to another folder. That's the only time I've ever had issues with a game being installed in "program files", though.
Welcome, cowlitz14!

I too think it's fantastic to see the patient and to-the-point responses you received to help you out. Love the community.
Because of reasons that I will explain later in this post, I'll begin with the boring stuff: welcome to GOG, enjoy your stay, and don't hesitate to ask if you can't figure something out. We are a helpful bunch for the most part.

If you want an old game with a Vietnam vibe to it, you may want to give Cannon Fodder a go, depending on what you're looking for - it's not about Vietnam, really, but it begins in a generic jungle area and moves on to other locales later. It's available on GOG, so if you got the hang of how games are installed and run around here, you should be able to get that one working as well.

So, Cannon Fodder. According to GOG, it was released in late 1993, and I genuinely think that it has aged pretty well. To be honest, I find the juxtapositions in the game really rather disturbing, but that is precisely why I love it. I'm going to open up some of the themes in the game here, so if you want to figure them out yourself, please stop reading now. No hard feelings. Still interested? Right, bear with me.

You can probably see from the screenshots that Cannon Fodder is kind of cute, especially for a war game. Admittedly, Cannon Fodder is hardly unique in this respect (the Nintendo Wars series springs to mind), but the style is as important for the overall effect as is the fun gameplay. Even the title music is called War Has Never Been So Much Fun (unfortunately missing in the version of the game that GOG got, hence the YouTube link), the really rather grim lyrics ("go for you brother, killing with your gun / leave him lying in his uniform, dying in the sun") sung to a happy-happy-joy-joy pop tune. Everyone in the team has a name, not unlike real soldiers, and even though they have precisely zero personality beyond that, it's enough to make you care about them at least a little bit (losing Jops after ten missions stings)... and yet, they are cannon fodder, cattle to the slaughter, serving only to die. Between missions you are taken to a kind of sit-rep screen which you can find among the GOG screenshots; recruits queuing up for their turn to lay down their lives, with the graves of their fallen comrades littering the scenery where poppies sprout. A slow, reverent tune plays in the background, while a comic relief at the top shows the ratio of own casualties to enemies killed. I think it's a very stirring and morbid scene.

And yet, war is ever so much fun.