Nectaris (1995)

The other day, I was thinking of one of my favourite turn-based strategy games that I used to play on my PC. I couldn’t figure out what game I was remembering. As an experiment, I asked a couple of AI chat bots, but they kept coming up with Battle Isle, which wasn’t the game I was looking for¹. After some more time spent with old-fashioned search engines, I finally found a screenshot and, from that, figured out what game I was thinking of. I was remembering Nectaris (1995).

I loved that game as a kid. I bought it in the year it came out, based on the front cover alone. That Admiral Thrawn-looking character just intrigued me to no end. But what I only learned in the course of finding it again, was, that this version of Nectaris was only one in a long list of games with that name. This series is also known under the name “Military Madness”. The original game was released in 1989 by Hudson Soft in Japan. It was originally developed for the NEC PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16, with later ports to PC-9800 and Sharp’s X68000. I never played this original, as I only owned an IBM-PC and Nintendo consoles as a kid.

The 1995 DOS version is actually a complete remake, developed at Sunflowers Interactive² by Florian Strauch, Tobias Alberts, Tobias Strauch and Mark Vollmann in Germany and distributed in Europe, North America and Japan by Hudson Soft. This version looks very much like the older Nectaris and includes the original levels, but then the game branches out to much more complicated and challenging maps. The new version sees the inclusion of naval warfare and new units. Its AI is also much improved, which makes the game a lot harder. Much of the story of the Japanese original has been done away with or changed. In fact, Nectaris (1995) is pretty much all gameplay without much dressing at all.

After finding out all of this, I downloaded the game again — it’s 1.28 MB! LOL! 😆

As it turns out, Nectaris (1995) runs great in DOSBox. Here’s my dosbox.conf for the game:

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[sdl]
fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=0x0
windowresolution=1280x960
output=openglnb
mapperfile=mapper.map
[dosbox]
machine=svga_s3
memsize=32
[render]
aspect=true
scaler=none
[cpu]
core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=auto
[pci]
[mixer]
[midi]
fluid.soundfont=.\mt32\SoundCanvas.sf2
mt32.romdir=.\mt32
[sblaster]
oplmode=opl3
oplemu=nuked
oplrate=49716
[gus]
[speaker]
[joystick]
[serial]
[dos]
[ipx]
[autoexec]
@mount c ".."
c:
cls
@cd Nectaris
@call start
exit

To emulate how the game looked back in the day on my huge, beige CRT screen, I am additionally using ShaderGlass with the Monitor-VGA-DoubleScan shader from RetroArch (which is included with ShaderGlass). This combo blasted me right back to 1995. Rediscovering this classic has been a lot of fun! Although, I have no idea how I played it as a kid without going insane. It’s damn hard!

Nectaris (1995) is absolutely underrated. It was a total gem at the time and I must have played hundreds of hours, spending whole weekends — with very little sleep — on figuring out how to solve a single map.

But looking back, its no wonder that this game wasn’t a hit when it came out. The 1989-era, SNES-style graphics seem very dated when you remember that it was released in the same year as Command & Conquer — which I also bought when it came out and also enjoyed immensly, by the way. With the release of C&C, real-time strategy games started to dominate the market and left turn-based games like this to be neglected for a few decades. The overall history notwithstanding, I am very happy that I rediscovered this game and that can play it again.

With many modern, high-profile games that are coming out being uninspired sequels or, if studios actually manage to come up with something new, mostly bland mass market slop, I am more and more going back to the gems from my youth on platforms like DOS, SNES and the Game Boy. Because I’m obviously not the only person to have had this idea, there’s a bit of a trend happening in this direction. Which means running old games like this has become much easier than ever before. In some cases, it’s even easier than getting the game to run back in the day, when you had to mess with your AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS and similar nonsense… 🤓

If you’ve recently been thinking of going back some old games that you loved when you were younger, give it a try. It might be much easier than you think³. And you’d be surprised how well these games hold up nowadays!