Nintendo CABAL

When I joined and left for the Army back in 1995 I had to fly to the Phoenix MEPS station.  There are several of these located throughout the United States and they service three purposes:

1. Check your aptitude for military service
2. Check your physical qualifications
3. Check your background

Basically you do a bunch of mental and physical testing.  They then tell you what you qualify for in terms of "jobs" and then you pick your "job" and any extras that come with your enlistment (initial station, foreign tour, etc.)  This may have all changed by now, it was 15 years ago when I went through this.

So why am I wasting your time about MEPS on a videogame collecting blog?  It's all about CABAL.

Cabal means to control things secretly.  You usually hear about Cabals in South America as coups come and go as often as the rain.  But it's also a game.

Cabal was the last game I saw and played before leaving for my enlistment.  The game used a track ball which moved a site around on the screen and buttons allowed you to fire and throw grenades.  It was kinda cool... and it kinda sucked.

Just look at this marquee:

Everything looks cool except for the soldiers with the red guns  The artist shouldn't have even bothered.  Let's look at the arcade gameplay first:

Looks kinda neat. You could destroy pretty much anything if you shot it enough times.

Now lets look at another similar arcade game, that also used a trackball, RAMBO III:

This was slightly a step up from CABAL.  The only redeeming thing of RAMBO III the arcade game was that it featured RAMBO.  If it was any other clown it would have been forgettable.  But this style of gameplay would come back to haunt arcades once more with...


NAM 1975' For Neo Geo:


NAM was actually a pretty decent game.

Cabal eventually found it's way on the Nintendo, and it turned out to be a reasonable port...



Thankfully they found a better artist to create the box art.  However this is another example of a war game where the players are distinguished by their colored bandana, and in this case their wrist bands.  Perhaps these to are going to a tennis match after the war.