Well, the good news is that the system specs will allow you to play Beach Head 2002 on almost any PowerPC Mac. The bad news is that it really doesn't pack a lot of punch graphically. In fact, the high-res option of 1024x768 resolution still only ran in about two-thirds of my monitor and didn't look that much better than the low-res option. The sounds you hear are primarily gunshots and explosions, mixed with the screams of all the dying men you mow down. Yes, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, right? :) The few really cool things in this category would be the mix of explosion animations you can see in the vehicles you're up against. The men just crumple, but tanks and planes and trucks break up in interesting ways and the absolute best is when you score a direct hit on a troop transport and watch it fly into the sky scattering bodies everywhere. And, just after that would be the one where you blow a transport to pieces and leave the troops inside standing around in flames, waiting to be mowed down if you're feeling particularly vindictive.

Beach Head 2002 is a sequel, so while many of you might know the general story, I'll at least say that this is a game of wartime combat. The twist, if you played the first game, is that although the perspective looks somewhat like a FPS, instead of running around in first person mode and tackling your enemies, you'll sit and wait for them to come to you. In a bunker, with some heavy firepower. In FPS style, it's often the case that you're challenged to find ammo and that you'll spend a great deal of time avoiding the enemy and being tactical. In Beach Head 2002, conserving ammo is still a challenge. During early waves (this is a level-based game where you'll mow down all incoming attackers and then advance to the next area...very arcade in its approach) you won't even think about ammo. You can viciously spread a hail of bullets among the enemy and take your sweet time dispatching foes. But, as you progress in the game and enemies get smarter and more numerous, you'll need to ration ammo quite a bit and be sure you're smart in how you dispatch enemies. Given a choice of weapons, you'll have to learn which guns take down which enemies with the greatest efficiency. And, you'll learn that some enemies can really take you out quickly and need to be tackled before you deal with anything else. The variety of enemies is excellent, although with some of the performance issues in this game, it's hard to appreciate them fully. Ground and air attacks gradually wear down your armor, and when the armor is gone it's game over. Luckily, ammo is plentiful and time is fairly generous until the last sections of the game when things get very frantic.

Poor controls are the downfall of Beach Head 2002. Even with the options to adjust settings and tighten or loosen mouse control, it is near impossible to keep from spinning the screen sickeningly at least once in every level. And, even though very few enemies come at you with blinding speed, shooting planes out of the sky is really a huge chore. And, don't tell me it's because planes are hard to shoot out of the sky. Realism is not what the developers were going for here. It's a very 'arcade' feel, and that is fine except for the fact that arcade games don't usually suffer from shabby, loose controls. Coupled with very dated graphics and a lack of variety in gameplay, many may find the controls a deal-killer.

Install was a piece of cake, even with the teeny-tiny manual included in the box for the game. Not being able to run in full-screen is especially irritating, and doesn't inspire much suspension of disbelief or allow you to lose yourself in the experience of playing Beach Head 2002. I tried adjusting mouse response both for tight-loose settings and also for inverted or regular aiming methods to see if anything might help the poor response during the game, but nothing seemed to help. The controls are either dragging and creating a terrible lag that doesn't give you any way to stop and focus fire on a unit, or moving so quickly that the end result is the same. Sure, these things can be worked around and tolerated, but that's not something I need to do these days with more and more quality games hitting the Mac platform. What I would have liked was even the option to control the game with the keyboard, but that didn't seem to be an option. So, as a possible consolation, we find at the end of the manual where the developers give us 'ultimate' cheat codes that will skip levels, give ultimate health and ammo, effectively letting you breeze through and not suffer any undue frustration at any of the technical glitches.

Beach Head 2002 feels more like something your neighbor whipped up in his Programming 101 class than a professional, well-crafted game that you'll want to rush to the store and shill out bucks for. In the console world, just for the hell of it, this might be worth a rental, but for my money on the Macintosh, there are several ways I'd prefer to blow a few dollars. If rail-shooting action is really, really, really your thing and you don't mind a game that looks decidedly 1990, go ahead and make the purchase. But, be ready to deal with a bunch of glitchy glitches. To me, it's just not worth it.