NAM (video game)

NAM, sold under the name Napalm in Walmart retail outlets, is a commercial Build engine first-person shooter video game set during the Vietnam War, developed by TNT Team and published by GT Interactive Software.

NAM
North American cover art of NAM
Developer(s)TNT Team
Publisher(s)GT Interactive Software
Director(s)Dante Anderson
Producer(s)
  • Dante Anderson
  • Nicolas Lavroff
  • Greg Williams
Designer(s)
  • Lado Crnologar
  • Heikki Korva
  • Tuomo Korva
Programmer(s)Matt Saettler
Artist(s)
  • Lado Crnologar
  • Heikki Korva
  • Tuomo Korva
Writer(s)
  • Lado Crnologar
  • Heikki Korva
  • Tuomo Korva
Composer(s)Atom Ellis
EngineBuild
Platform(s)MS-DOS
Release
  • NA: July 31, 1998
Genre(s)First-person shooter
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer

NAM was later re-released on Steam on November 6, 2014, with Retroism and Night Dive Studios as the publishers.[1] It was released on gog.com on March 20, 2020.[2]

The direct sequel, World War II GI, was released in 1999, again developed by TNT Team and published by GT Interactive Software.

Gameplay

The game is very similar to Duke Nukem 3D. The game consists of 34 levels divided into four episodes; there are two single player episodes with fifteen levels and two multiplayer episodes with nineteen levels. Very little was changed in regards to controls, movement rate, physics, and CON (control file) language. The only immediately noticeable change in the game code was the removal of the remote detonator for weapon 6, the grenade, which was a pipebomb in Duke Nukem 3D. In the game, there are AI marines which will help the player in some levels, each with different classes and specialties. Mines are present in most levels, requiring players to activate his mine detector.[3]

Plot

The player assumes the role of Alan "The Bear" Westmoreland, a United States Marine Corps Sergeant. The story begins with a deadly Viet Cong raid, where Westmoreland is left to survive of his own accord. The player must deal with various firefights, ambushes, booby traps, snipers, air strikes, anti-personnel mines, and more in order to finish their way to the end of each level.[3]

The player is placed in the center of the Vietnam War in 1966, playing as Westmoreland, who is a very deadly and highly trained U.S. Marine. Westmoreland is under the command of the Central Intelligence Agency and has undergone genetic engineering to become a super human war machine. He is given standard military orders, and is usually placed alone or with small teams, pitted against overwhelming odds. To prove himself a successful experiment, he must survive several tours of duty in order to show that the side effects of the serum can be overcome.[3]

Development

It originated from the creation of TNT Team's 1997 total conversion mod for Duke Nukem 3D titled Platoon. It was picked up by Infogrames, who put them to work on a remake with more professional art and some custom source code modifications by Matt Saettler, product manager for Blood, which resulted in NAM. The game was released on July 31, 1998. U.S. Marine Sergeant Dan Snyder, who helped pioneer computer simulation training for American troops with a Doom army mod, was a consultant on the project.[3]

Reception
Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
GameRankings39%[4]
Review scores
PublicationScore
AllGame[5]
CGW[6]
GameSpot4/10[3]
IGN3/10[7]
Next Generation[8]
PC Gamer (UK)72%[9]
PC Gamer (US)53%[10]
PC Zone28%[11]

Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it one star out of five, and stated that "This horrendous Duke Nukem 3D conversion should have stayed on the Net as freeware."[8]

The game received "unfavorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings.[4]

gollark: I'm hoping an update of the software and restarting it should fix it, but it had *better* not make a habit of this.
gollark: My webserver seems to have decided to stop webserving and just has some cryptic error about goroutines and a stack trace. What joy.
gollark: The bug (at least in the form everyone was using) was affecting iOS.
gollark: It's not a kernel one, it's in their text rendering library.
gollark: In the "effective power" one, the problem was apparently some issue with processing text for display in shortened form in notifications where it accessed the wrong memory address, which made the entire process doing that exit, and apparently for some bizarre reason when the notification process exited it brought the entire OS down.

References
  1. "NAM". Steam.
  2. "5 classic games from Ziggurat Interactive join GOG.COM today". gog.com. March 20, 2020. Retrieved March 29, 2020.
  3. Gregson, Chris (August 5, 1998). "NAM Review". GameSpot. CBS Interactive. Retrieved November 29, 2015.
  4. "NAM for PC". GameRankings. Retrieved March 30, 2017.
  5. Smith, Nick. "Nam [sic] - Review". AllGame. Archived from the original on November 16, 2014. Retrieved March 30, 2017.
  6. Carter, Tim (November 1998). "Spittoon Platoon (NAM Review)" (PDF). Computer Gaming World (172): 280. Retrieved March 30, 2017.
  7. Bates, Jason (August 12, 1998). "Nam [sic]". IGN. IGN Entertainment. Retrieved March 30, 2017.
  8. "Finals". Next Generation. No. 47. Imagine Media. November 1998. p. 160.
  9. "NAM". PC Gamer UK. 1998.
  10. Poole, Stephen (October 1998). "Nam [sic]". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on March 6, 2000. Retrieved March 30, 2017.
  11. "NAM". PC Zone. 1998.
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