Pitch: Blast infantry, armored cars, tanks, and helicopters to save hostages.
Operation Wolf is a light gun shooting gallery game set somewhere in South American. To be honest it is kind of easy and boring. You can shoot bullets and rockets, though the latter are in very short supply for much of the game. The levels pan left or right and enemies enter from basically any direction. There are generally enough to keep you on your toes, but sometimes the number of enemies dries up, especially at the end of a level. It's just kind of weird. The last bit of the level will scroll by with almost no enemies popping out. It's fine. Part of the novelty is playing with a gun controller (in the arcade) and that experience is missing in this console port. (Maybe this console version is compatible with the Namco's Guncon but I don't know. I don't have one anyway.) I don't remember if I actually died during the whole playthrough and if I did, it was only once.
Operation Thunderbolt, the sequel set somewhere in north Africa that came out a year later, ups the ante a little too much. The game adds stages that scroll into the screen, which is a neat technical display but it can be tough to tell exactly where bad guys are. Not that you have time to really aim at specific enemies. Operation Thunderbolt throws WAY more bad guys at you at once, to the point of being ridiculous. And whereas the occasional enemy in the first game would throw a grenade or knife or lauch a rocket at you, the bad guys in this game do it all the time. Constantly. I died so much. Operation Thunderbolt does add a second player character (Operation Wolf was, well, a lone wolf game) but the amount of stuff thrown at you is still absurd.
At the end of the day I think I enjoyed the measured pace of Operation Wolf to the absolute mayhem of Operation Thunderbolt. You can get through either by pumping quarters but in one game I felt in control and in the other I had to spray bullets and hope for the best.
Comments
Cary Woodham
02/18/2021 at 08:32 PM
Operation Wolf was HUGELY popular in arcades. Pretty much every arcade I went to back then had one, and there was even a version on the NES, which is pretty amazing since there weren't too many light gun games on the NES. Operation Thunderbolt wasn't as common in arcades, but I still saw it lots of places.
The next game in the series was just called Operation Wolf 3. I only saw it once in an arcade, and that was only a couple of years ago! The last game in the series was called Operation Tiger but I've never seen it.
Did you know that Operation Wolf made a cameo in a recent movie? I saw it in a mall arcade scene in Wonder Woman 84! When I saw it I was like, "Wait a minute, if this movie is set in 1984, what's an arcade game from 1987 doing here?" That's why the movie bombed (OK not really). Only other things I have to say about the WW84 movie is that it was way too slow for a two hour long movie, and Gal Gadot ate her spinach.
daftman
02/19/2021 at 10:38 PM
By the time I started going to arcades the ubiquitous game was Area 51. Man, was that ever a quarter muncher! Too bad about WW84. It's so neat when a film or show pays super close attention to little details and such a shame when they don't.
Cary Woodham
02/20/2021 at 08:36 AM
Yeah Area 51 was in a lot of places. I even saw it in grocery stores!
To be fair, I doubt too many people would notice that Operation Wolf arcade machine in the movie, much less care about its release date.
KnightDriver
02/18/2021 at 09:51 PM
I played these on that collection. Infinite continues got me all the way through. It was fun, if just dumb fun. I may have even played one of them in the arcades way back in the 80s. You need a lot of quarters to beat those games, which is the point. They want them quarters.
Super Step
Contributing Writer
02/20/2021 at 01:09 PM
How very 80s.
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