Military Madness: Nectaris Review (Xbox 360)

There have been plenty of old-school games remade for Xbox Live Arcade by simply brushing up the graphics and adding multiplayer or other features. But Military Madness is an odd one; it’s a remake of a remake. The original Military Madness, a turn-based strategy game set on the Moon in the near future, was released in 1989 in Japan (known there as Nectaris) for the PC Engine system. For our younger readers, the PC Engine was called the TurboGrafx-16 in North America, and was a game console that predates the Xbox and the PlayStation. Crazy, right?

Military Madness was remade for the PlayStation in 1998 as Nectaris: Military Madness, and that remake involved a lot of 3D models and, for the time, flashier graphics. But the fundamental strategy gameplay remained intact, keeping the game’s hardcore fans satisfied that the depth and intelligence would not suffer due to some better presentation values. While those graphics were better, the same basic art style was kept—just extrapolated into a third dimension.
Now we have Military Madness: Nectaris for the Xbox 360 and other current-generation systems. The naming convention has come full circle, unless Hudson makes a sequel and calls it “Military Nectaris: Madness”. This latest installment in a series of remakes—with really long gaps of time between installments—does pretty much what the previous remake did: clean up the graphics, add some features and keep the core gameplay intact.

That core gameplay is the biggest saving grace about Military Madness: Nectaris. It’s an old-school take on the turn-based strategy genre that works particularly well on consoles. But as suited as it is to a non PC-gaming environment, turn-based strategies on a console are still as much of a novelty today as they were in 1989 or 1998. Other games that came after Military Madness were heavily inspired by it, but went on to much greater success. Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance comes immediately to mind.