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Sometimes you discover excellence in totally unexpected places. When my dad purchased a shiny new Japanese Mega Drive in 1990, I was immediately overawed by the likes of Golden Axe, Super Monaco GP and Thunder Force 2, but it would be an obtuse and almost unfathomable action strategy hybrid with a crazy German moniker which would consume the vast majority of my time over that particular Christmas break.Techno Soft's Herzog Zwei was bundled with the console when my dad bought it, thrown in by the desperate storeowner at a discount purely because he was struggling to shift copies. I became acutely aware of why this was the case when I booted it up for the first time - it was quite unlike anything I'd previously experienced in my admittedly brief career as a gamer, with mechanics so alien to my 11-year-old mind that even the poorly-photocopied sheet of translated instructions failed to fully dissipate the cloud of befuddlement. Bloody-minded determination and some sage advice from my gaming-savvy dad ensured that the irksome veil of confusion would eventually lift, revealing one of the most compelling strategy titles ever crafted.
Techno Soft's unassuming effort - a sequel to an MSX and PC-8801 title known purely as Herzog (which means "Duke" in German) - is cited by many as the first true Real Time Strategy game. However, it does a good job of hiding this fact behind the company's trademark brand of "shmup" action; viewed from an overhead perspective, the game is uncannily reminiscent of sections in stablemate Thunder Force 2, which had launched on Sega's 16-bit console just a few months earlier. It's likely that this shared lineage is what led many players to come away disappointed - while Herzog Zwei certainly provides plenty of tense action, it's a long way from being a traditional blaster.
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