Rainbow Six Rogue Spear. Those who know feel the chill running down their spine. Yeah, this game also was a big part of my childhood. Somehow, I remember tastes and scents whenever I think about this game. I remember the flat I lived in when I was a kid and where our PC stood. It’s strange, but I remember reading one of my dad’s military magazines (I would dare to say Soldier of Fortune, but it was something else for sure), and even though I understood almost nothing, I saw a huge photo (like the whole page) of a SWAT dude in full combat gear, just like in bellowed Rainbow Six, and it was enough for me to be glued to this magazine. I remember it was late fall and, as it always happens during the late fall, it was raining cats and dogs. It was dark outside, but I was too stubborn and stupid to turn on the lights. Instead, I read the magazine thanks to the only source of light in the room – huge, old TV. And the TV in the living room ran Walker The Texas Ranger.
Rainbow Six Rogue Spear was my first real tactical FPS. It was the first game that introduced me to the world of hardcore tactical FPS games. Games where every bullet counted, where the way you planned and thought was much more important than the way you shot. Games where stakes were ultimately high and one misstep could ruin everything. And I was a dumb kid who knew shit about everything related to thinking, planning, and counting.
As I already mentioned before, I was raised on Doom, Quake, Blood, and other fast-paced FPS games. Those kinds of games where you shoot first, die last, and go guns blazing into the room with little to no planning and making corrections during the encounter. Delta Force, which I was one of the introductory games to the world of tactical FPS, was played following the same logic. So, when I got my hands on the game with cool soldier dudes in cool gear (masks, ballistic vests, camouflage of all shapes and colors), I was ecstatic.
I remember the first playthrough as if it was yesterday. I installed the game, ran the first mission. And I think I even can recall the name of the first mission – The Box of Pandora. There, your team has to free hostages from the acolytes of the world’s best-known religion of peace. The first map was a giant museum. And I believe I still remember it up to this day in more or less full detail (says a lot about playing it, right?).
Anyway, I didn’t read the briefing; I ignored the intel; I went straight to the load-out screen. There, I looked at my team, and it was the first thing that stayed with me for very long. All operators had photos, names, nationalities, biographies. All of them had skill-set and some kind of stats. And there were dozens of them. After Delta Force, where you could choose the avatar of your operator, and that was basically it, here I had real people at my disposal. Anyway, I chose them based on their looks. I think by default it gave you team lead by Dingo Chavez, but since I didn’t read Rainbow Six yet, I had no clue who the hell he was and was quick to swap him for Daniel Bogart (I think I spelled it right). In comparison to Chavez, he seemed as cool as a cucumber, stoic death-bringing machine, the right man for the job.
Then I went to the equipment, and that’s where my young self got lost. There were dozens and dozens of weapons. There were handguns, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, precision rifles, sniper rifles, sub-machine guns, grenades, some cool tools. I spent at least half an hour choosing my favorite gun (surprise-surprise, it was MP5) and side-arm – Sig Sauer P226 (my childhood dream).
After the weapon, I moved to the most important choice – the uniform. Now, it was the first time I was given such a choice. If to put it straight, the choice of uniform was rather complicated. Why? Well, there was a lot of it, even though, to some extent, it was organized. You had three types of armor – light, medium and heavy. Light meant your operator basically ran into the shootout in a light combat vest with no ballistic helmet. Medium – your operator was geared up like an average SWAT dude from the magazine. And heavy meant your operator looked like a dude from French GIGN – heavy body armor covering shoulders, neck, crotch; helmet with ballistic glass. And to those three modes, there were numerous camouflage options – gray, navy, coyote, urban, and all the colors possible, as long as they were taken from real units (yeah, no pink or whatever is popular now). Besides that, there were jungle warfare options with boonie hats, winter warfare options with hoods, and bio-warfare equipment with gas masks. When you’re only starting to play, the choice seems really complicated. But I will tell you something – I’m not sure the armor really had this much impact on something. I think operators moved slower in heavy armor and had a tougher time aiming, thus I always chose light to have the speed advantage in the majority of situations. And other uniform options were specific to the tasks.
Planning stage? I skipped it. Didn’t understand anything there – some layout, some dots, arrows, and all that jazz. Nothing special. I wanted to play, not observe some dumb map, alright? I was Delta Force, Doom, Blood, and Quake veteran, I knew how to handle myself in dangerous environments. I pressed play.
And regretted it almost instantly. Spawn point on the stairs of the museum. I’m in the lead of the blue (or red?) team. I skipped the training, so obviously, I felt lost. I didn’t know why the crosshairs flew all over the place whenever I moved the camera. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see the weapon (I found a button to turn on the 3rd person view, and the game became even better for me since I could see my cool operator-dude in all the details). Why did I move so slowly? And why did opening the doors take so long?
Anyway, the first enemy on the balcony across the hall took me out, took out the guy behind me, and wounded the other half of my team (I think there were 4 or 5 of us). I switched to another member of my team, now I knew where the enemy was. I tried to get him, and long story short couldn’t hit him at all. His reaction time and aim were way beyond mine. I couldn’t keep the aim straight on him. My other teammate flatlined him since they didn’t skip combat training like I did. I lost only two people while trying to take out one guy. Not bad for the first time. But my triumph wasn’t long. Another guy walked out from the bathroom, yelled something, and put both me and my other teammate out of our misery. Somehow no one got our six, and it played a trick on us. Long story short – the mission failed.
I didn’t expect such an outcome. I tried a few more times, and each and every time, it was a decisive failure. Finally, I think I found a way to send operators on their own while I didn’t control anyone and just observed the operational stage of the mission. They aced it. Didn’t lose one operator, saved the hostages, and neutralized all freedom fighters. And they used the initial pre-planned waypoints. Now that was something – a game where I could just observe how operators did all the job while enjoying how cool they looked. Little did I know it was just a one-time occurrence, and it so happened that none of the friendly AI messed up, and enemy AI appeared in the places it should. Every time after that I tried to send them on their own, they died miserably.
Just to save us all some time – I tried many times more, and my shooting wasn’t good. But later, I found a legitimate cheat code – auto-aim. Yeah, here you could turn it on, and your operator would find the target on his own. Just like this smart gun in the Aliens movie. All I had to do – press the left mouse button to take a shot. With such an approach, I quickly found out that handguns were the best weapon. They had the fastest target acquisition time (at least it looked to me like that), and in general, it didn’t even matter much what weapon you used since all of them were rather fatal both for you and for the enemy. Since then, the game had become much easier. Now, don’t get me wrong, it still was the hardest game I had ever played, but at least now I had some fighting chance.
Now it’s time for dumb stories. The first real challenge (even more real than all the other challenges) in the game happened when I reached the level where you had to use stealth to infiltrate some mansion and bug the telephones (yeah, stationary telephones, people used them some time ago). The problem was – you couldn’t engage with the security, and you couldn’t be seen. Now, Splinter Cell wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t play Metal Gear Solid, while I didn’t know about the Thief series, so I knew shit about stealth. But I had my way. And my way basically meant that I used the dumbest solution possible.
Yeah, here comes the story where I turned the brightness all the way down and used night vision, thinking this way, enemies couldn’t see me. Felt myself like ork kommando from Warhammer 40k – a strong believer in my own invisibility. To make things even more dumb and awkward, I refused to go on alone. Instead, I put as many people as possible in my team (I love to believe there were 8 or 10 operators with me, but I’m not sure), got us in the heavy combat gear with machine guns and assault rifles. And we went there. Yes. 8 or 10 armored to-the-teeth operators were infiltrating the mansion and bugging the phones. And we succeeded. Now, I know it was just kid’s luck, and perhaps I just got lucky with AI (to be honest, it was far from bright in this game), but back then, it seemed like the real way to deal with the problem.
In fact, I prefer to think it looked a little bit different. Like, there stands a PMC security guard in his white shirt and black trousers. Looking cool and so 90s with his MP5 and shit. And then he sees ten heavily armed operators in full combat gear and night vision goggles crouching and running toward the mansion. They don’t attack, they just move along the fence, enter the mansion, do their thing, refuse to elaborate, and leave. Now, do they pay this guard enough to get involved with clearly deranged thugs armed with military-grade equipment and ready to go ballistic if something goes wrong? I don’t think so. And I believe that’s actually how it happened. The security guard was scared shitless and preferred to look the other way than to get involved with a team of certified psychos.