I picked this up as a kid at random from a computer game store at the mall in the late 90s because I thought the box art looked cool. Little did I know I had just stumbled across one of the absolute finest military tactical/strategy games ever made. The Close Combat series was originally intended to be a computer game version of the acclaimed 1980s tabletop wargame Advanced Squad Leader but they ended up changing the name while retaining many of the systems and design philosophies of the board game. The graphics weren't great even by 1997 standards but the game has aged surprisingly well and I've been coming back to it every couple of years for over 2 decades now. This is set in Operation Market Garden (the failed Allied campaign to invade Nazi-controlled Holland and parts of Germany in autumn 1944) and comes with a lot of great historical and documentary materials as context for the campaign missions. This is a deceptively complex and difficult strategy game and you grow to care about your individual units and soldiers as they engage enemies in brutal hand to hand combat clearing buildings or lie pinned and cowering in a field surrounded by the corpses of their fallen squadmates. This is a steal at $5 for anyone interested in WW2 history or military tactical and strategy games in general.
