Desert Storm is a first/third person shooter, developed by Pivotal Games and released by Square Enix on 13.9.2002. The player controls a team of up to four soldiers, each having a special training background and therefore competences. These four are:

1. Squad Leader,
2. Sniper,
3. Weapons Specialist and
4. Infiltration Specialist.

These four characters can be controlled either directly, in a first person or third person shooter manner. You can also give other team members (characters) orders, such as taking a position, following the current team member or hold their fire. It is possible to switch those characters by pressing the keys 1 to 4. So you can play any character of the team. Characters not currently played by the player himself are controlled by an AI. It is essential to use the special abilities of all four squad members in combination properly in order to achieve various missions.

The theme of this game is the gulf war, the so-called »Operation Desert Storm« (hence the name). Therefore the missions are placed in Iraq during the gulf war. The player can pick either the US Delta Force or the British Special Forces SAS. Gameplay wise this decision does not really matter as both consist essentially of the very same characters with other skins and names but aside from that, they play the same way.

The game is part of the Conflict Series, incl. its immediate successor, Conflict: Desert Storm 2.

The original CD version requires the following:

• Operating System: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP,
• CPU: Pentium II / 400 MHz,
• RAM: 128 MB RAM and
• 8x CD-ROM drive.

The game is known to work on a Pentium III with 866 MHz, a Riva TNT2 graphics card and 128 MB RAM. But the game experience improves massively by using more RAM and of course a real graphics acceleration card. So the above specifications are really the bare minimum, when playing on a graphics resolution of 640×480.

GOG and Steam list the requirements as follows:

• Operating System: Windows XP or Vista,
• CPU: 1.8 GHz,
• RAM: 512 MB
• Graphics Card: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended) and
• HDD: 2 GB.

This setup ensures good game play when playing with normal resolutions up to 1280×960.

The Steam version lists the compatibility only for Windows XP or Windows Vista while GOG extends it up to Windows 7 and 8. The original CD version runs well on Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP as well as Windows Vista and 7. In general it does not run well on Windows 10. Not running well in this case means specifically, that there are certain parts on the maps, that immobilize the player permanently. In missions with at least two controllable characters this can often be overcome by sending the affected team member to another location. In this case the AI takes over movement and somehow frees itself from this position, whereas the player has no chance of doing that himself. But there are known incidences where the character is stuck permanently, so that the mission essentially cannot be played to its end. Therefore it is best not to play DS on Windows 10.

The game does not allow to use wide screen resolutions. Only automatically derived 4:3 resolutions are made available to the player.

The game can still be bought via Steam and https://www.gog.com/game/conflict_desert_storm. However the game is not suitable for Windows 10 in any version, neither the original CD version nor the current download versions of GOG or Steam.

The game does not offer a coop mode for the campaign but (team-)deathmatch maps which can be played on the local network.

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