How Jungle Strike reminds us good citizens of our civic duties

Jungle Strike (1993)

Jungle Strike (1993)

It’s the citizen’s dilemma: if somebody shot at your country’s president, or your king or your head of state or whatever hobnob title they held - would you jump in the way and take the bullet? At times like this, I’d love to be able to slow down time and take the old rulebook out, just to check - what exactly are one’s civic duties?

In other words, what are we good citizens obliged to do in our country’s society? Let’s start with the obvious: we must obey the law. This one’s always a bit of a grey area for me if I’m honest. As I grow older and wiser, I’m drunk in public a lot less often, and even when I do stagger home, my voice is always too far gone to sing and wake everyone up.

I even have some subscriptions to online streaming services now - that’s right, a lot less daily piracy for me. I’m not the worst road user out there, though I’m often surrounded by contenders for that title. In any case, I never drink while driving and I almost never speed, and in the end that will surely make the difference in my favour.

What else must a good citizen do, when called upon by their country? There’s jury duty of course, but this is where my country’s actually the one letting me down; I would love nothing more than being called up to go on a jury.

You had better believe that I can sit there for hours on end, letting my attention wander - I spent enough time in school and college honing that particular skill. If I got a particularly harrowing case, all kinds of grisly axe murders for instance, I could get the whole year off work - with pay. The government needn’t fear; the moment that jury summons comes through my door, I’m there.

What’s next - ah yes, paying taxes. I’d avoid this particular annoyance if I could. Anyone would. Unfortunately I’m taxed at source, so I don’t even get the opportunity to shirk my civic duties. I’m definitely at risk at falling foul here though, my last tax balancing statement showed me as owing a whole 11 cent in income tax.

That kind of tax shortfall doesn’t register with me, but it made my IRS-fearing wife have kittens. But anyway, what do I get in return for paying taxes for years on end? I mean it. Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what has taxation ever done for me?

So you can see why I’m particularly hesitant to lay down my life for elected officaldom - God knows I do enough for my country as it is. Maybe if I had the chance to travel through time and take a bullet aiming for one of the all timers, your Gandhis, your Mandelas, your JFKs. Then I could consider it, if only to cement my place in history. But eating some lead for some country bumpkin here in Ireland, who gets five years in parliament to draw a rude wage and contributes nothing? Noooo thank you.

This is also why I struggled to get into Jungle Strike initially. I grew up with its sequel, Urban Strike, specifically because we could never lay our hands on the incredibly popular and well-known first title of the series, Desert Strike. It seems that, of this 16-bit trilogy that adorned SNES, Mega Drive, Amiga and many more consoles, Jungle Strike found itself sandwiched between those two, a bit forgotten in all the explosions and excitement.

Well, I and many others have missed out on a little gem here because Jungle Strike may be quite a bit better than you remember, in the same way that Desert Strike is most likely worse than you remember. Desert Strike only gave you one vehicle - though admittedly, it was the indomitable Apache helicopter with an accurate-to-life loadout, so you didn’t need anything else.

This time, in Jungle Strike, you pilot a fictionalised, upgraded helicopter called the Comanche. But not only that, this marks the first time you can get out of your chopper and into other vehicles, including a motorbike - interesting, but not a great choice when stacked up against an attack helicopter.

There’s also a hovercraft which can lay sea-mines, which is also interesting although sometimes unwieldy and hard to use. But best of all, you can pilot an actual fighter jet, with unlimited fuel and ammo somehow. The only drawback with the jet is that is does suffer terribly from Smash-Into-Wall-At-High-Speed syndrome.

The first level of Jungle Strike throws you right into the action. No really, your helicopter is parked outside the White House and you’ve got to quickly get your arse in gear to repel the terrorists, before the president and the United States government gets it, no time wasted at all.

Wow, that’s a bit more demanding than doing a piddly bit of jury duty, isn’t it? Not so sure I’d be as quick to jump into the fray, even if that was my duty as Top Chopper Man - for a job like that, I’d definitely be wanting payment upfront. Do Top Chopper Men have to pay taxes? Doesn’t that seem a bit unfair…?

You’d want danger money as well because the difficulty of Jungle Strike can sometimes lean towards the Desert Strike area of unfair bullshit: if you fly too near to areas that are designated “Danger Zone”, the enemies become nearly unkillable, not to mention they’ll fire back at you with twice the power, and with a rate of fire that outpaces your Comanche’s rotors.

Of course the right answer is to avoid these Danger Zones until you’ve completed other objectives which then open up the map, but it seems to me that you often have to trespass right into these Danger Zones to keep going, which tends to result in your demise.

Even so, the difficulty is much more manageable this time around, and passwords given to you after each of the levels (of which there is 9) meaning you won’t lose all that much progress when you inevitably do get shot down by the terrorists. It also helps that there are quite a few more environments and areas to fly around in this time, rather than just staring at desert over and over again.

You’ve got downtown, you’ve got the jungle proper, you’ve got coasts and islands, you’ve got a particularly tough and memorable mission that has you in the dark, and you’ve got a snow-covered mission. I would come to prefer Urban Strike’s approach of taking you all around named areas of the US, but Jungle Strike did it first in terms of presenting you with different environments.

The game’s plot, by the way, involves taking down the villainous duo of a madman terrorist (son of the first game’s villain) and a notorious druglord. It is every 80s action film you’ve ever seen that didn’t feature Aliens or Predators, and for something as over the top of these baddies you absolutely need a capable attack helicopter to match them.

You will gun down thousands of their followers, minions and soldiers over the course of Jungle Strike, and you will love doing it. But it’s funny - I get a pain in my arse just defending the President, while these guys are willing to lay down their lives for their insane leaders, quite literally taking on a Comanche helicopter with their little pea-shooters. And do you know why? Because badguy henchmen don’t have to pay taxes, they don’t have to vote, and they certainly don’t have to do jury service. There may be a lesson in there somewhere, folks.

8 August 2025