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Army Men: Sarge's Heroes

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes is a 1999 third-person shooter video game and the fourth entry in The 3DO Company's Army Men series, which are based on the green plastic figures of the same name. Its Nintendo 64 and PlayStation versions were developed and published by The 3DO Company. The port for the Dreamcast was developed by Saffire and published by Midway, while another for Microsoft Windows was published by GT Interactive.

Gameplay
, and cups (the one in the center having a blue vortex). This is all in a room with a pink-and-white wall.|In the third-person shooter, soldiers of the Green and Tan Army fight each other on a variety of 3D environments, including those in Our World (the human world). One such setting is a desk with the portal being the opening of a coffee cup (middle). Synopsis ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes'' is a third-person shooter where players take the role of soldiers in 3D battlefields. In Their World (the setting for the plastic soldiers) The Green Army, led by Colonel Grimm, has members of the Bravo Company, its best troops, and Grimm's daughter Vikki, a top reporter for the official Green Army newspaper Green Star News, captured by the Tan Army, led by General Plastro. On the Green Army's base, the game's first mission is the leader of the Bravo Company that did not get captured, Sargent Hawk, getting Grimm, his mentor, to an escape chopper. This is all the while the invading Tan Army and other Green Army soldiers attack each other, where Sarge also helps his fellow men. In Our World, the plastic soldiers are tiny in proportion to the space and battle in areas of a typical American suburban household, such as the countertop of a kitchen, sandbox, backyard, living room, bedroom, garden, and bathroom. In Their World, foes are the Tan army's soldiers (which dies in one or two hits), tanks and helicopters, while in Our World, enemies include a big spider. ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes'' features variations on 13 weapons that equip the player, most of which require the rescue of commandos that each have a unique set of weapons: an M16 rifle, M60, sniper rifle with a scope for zooming, shotgun, grenade, grenade launcher, C-4, flamethrower, artillery launcher, bazooka, mortar, satchel charge, and mine detector. Collected extra weapons are removed from the inventory by the entrance of the next world. Via simple objectives, the Boot Camp mode, which takes place on a practice range, teaches the player how to platform, use the weapons and push down the levers. Some tasks can be only be achieved with certain equipment; soldiers on mountaintops can only be killed with snipers, and those in bunkers with grenades. Additionally, some lands are filled with hidden mines solely detectable with the minesweeper. Other scenarios allow multiple choices of weapons to take out opponents. For example, when destroying a tank, it is longer but safer to lay mines around it and then activate them with a grenade throw, than directly destroy it with a bazooka, where missing the shooting could gain the riders of the tank attention to the player character. All weapons besides the default M16 rifle are out of the soldiers' bag if a life is lost. == Background ==
Background
In the late 1990s, following the failure of the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console, The 3DO Company transitioned to developing and publishing only software. The move started with the Nintendo 64 multiplayer game Battletanx and the tactical PC game Army Men (based on the green plastic toy soldiers of the same name), both developed by separate teams, released around the same time in 1998, and landing in the top-ten of sales charts. The 3DO Company were influenced by this success to create more Army Men games, with its producers and creative staff conceiving a variety of gameplay styles, such as air combat (Army Men: Air Attack) and war strategy (Army Men: World War). This spawned a multi-million-dollar franchise. As journalists for Game Informer analyzed, the franchise capitalized on a nostalgic revival of toys adults used to play with, like the Army men as well as Mr. Potato Head and Slinky Dog, caused by a film that featured them, Toy Story (1995). 3DO's founder Trip Hawkins, IGNs Dean Austin and PlayStation Pros Will Johnston attributed the game series' continuing commercial success to the demographic of video game consumers, mostly consisting of men, who had fond memories of playing with the green soldiers. Before ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, the series had covered multiple genres and platforms with two tactics games, the first game and its sequel Army Men II (1999) which were both released for PC and the Game Boy Color, and a PlayStation third-person shooter, Army Men 3D (1999). Wrote Joe Fielder of GameSpot, Army Men 3D'', the series' first console entry, "lacked a great deal of spit and polish but had enough going deep down to make you hope for a sequel, albeit one that was much improved". == Development ==
Development
Conception and design ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes'' is the second creative director project for Michael Mendheim, who, like Hawkins, transitioned from Electronic Arts (EA) to The 3DO Company; he joined during the company's transition to solely a game developer and publisher, being creative director for Battletanx. Hawkins and Mendheim established Sarge's Heroes as the franchise's inaugural character-oriented action-adventure game, taking inspiration from the style of Super Mario (1985–present) and incorporating mission design akin to GoldenEye (1997). A PlayStation version was announced a month later on April 6, with the clarification that it would not be a sequel to Army Men 3D but another version of the previously announced Nintendo 64 game. Mendheim's reason for the focus on a narrative starring characters with personalities and gameplay mechanics was as a blueprint for potential toys, TV series and comic books that would form a transmedia universe Mendheim desired. This direction was influenced by the Mutant League games he worked on at EA, which included Mutant League Football (1993) and Mutant League Hockey (1994) and spawned a cartoon show of the same name (1994–1996). On the PlayStation, Bob Smith was technical director; Mendheim called him "a Gods' God", in comparison to Geisler who was simply a "God". The PC port was made solely by a team at Aqua Pacific that consisted of four programmers: Garry Hughes, Paul Riga, Craig Weeks and Don Williamson. A pre-alpha version of the Nintendo 64 game was reviewed in a "Hands On" feature by IGN, published on March 5, 1999. It summarized that split-screen modes for up to four players were planned but not yet implemented. When it came to visuals, the frame rate was reported as smooth, the environments vastly superior to Battletanx. Far more important was the character animation, which Mendheim exclaimed in an interview with Next Generation that "we're putting our chips on [it]." == Release and promotion ==
Release and promotion
On the night of March 4, 1999, The 3DO Company held a hidden "pre-E3 bash" in San Francisco. It featured numerous surprise attractions, one of them a playable version of the Nintendo 64 version of ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes. Army Men, in its second year of existence in 1999, saw five games: Army Men II, Army Men 3D, Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, Army Men: Air Attack and Army Men: Toys in Space, the latter three released at the end of the year. Army Men: Sarge's Heroes was the first Nintendo 64 Army Men game, released in 1999 in North America on September 28 and Australia in November. It is the third PlayStation Army Men game after Army Men 3D and Army Men: Air Attack (1999), and was part of a wave of sequels released between 2000 and 2001 that also include entries for series like Crash Bandicoot (1996–present), Tomb Raider (1996–present) and Twisted Metal'' (1995–2012). == Reception ==
Reception
Critical response Although Mendheim, two decades later, remembered the contemporaneous reviews of ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes'' as "decent", aggregates of professional review scores paint a more middling picture. Upon its October 1999 release, the Nintendo 64 version debuted at number four on Video Software Dealers Association's console game rental chart, above Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) but below the chart-topping Pokémon Snap (1999) and two PlayStation games, Driver (1999) and WCW Mayhem (1999). In Patrick Hickey Jr.'s feature on the development of the game in the 2022 book The Mind Behind Playstation Games, it was reported that its Nintendo 64 and PlayStation versions combined sold 1.3 million units. In an interview conducted for the book, Mendheim stated it was a number-one hit on the Nintendo 64 chart and a top-ten hit for that of the PlayStation. == Legacy ==
Legacy
Many later Army Men games, including 3DO's final game for the franchise Army Men: RTS (2002), would star all of the characters introduced in ''Army Men: Sarge's Heroes. A spin-off game starring Vikki, Portal Runner (2001), was released on the PlayStation 2. Army Men: Sarge's Heroes spawned two sequels of its own: Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 (2000) and Army Men: Sarge's War'' (2004), the latter of which was developed and released after The 3DO Company's selling of the franchise to Global Star Software. == Notes ==
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