And they certainly did, at least at the campaign level. This is the best campaign, overall, in the game, and worth going through all the others - even the bad parts - to get to play it.

Unfortunately they didn't save the best mission for last; they chose, very ill-advisedly, to end the campaign, and the game, with a very silly one - but even then not actually bad; and anyone who doesn't want to run it doesn't have to, since there's nothing else beyond it.

And a couple of the other missions really don't make any sense in context, and should have been part of a different campaign; but they're still quite good in themselves. So I still say this is the best campaign, overall, in the game.

Various locations in occupied Czechoslovakia.

Time to assemble the A Team if you haven't already done so. I've always used my old team of Broadhurst, Elliot, Lauer, and Mulholland (Attorneys-at-Law - sorry, sorry) but if you wanted you could put together a superteam using your best men from the various other campaigns. Last time I ran this I really wished I'd replaced Lauer with Foreman. Well, whatever you want to do.

Your men will need just about all of the HD2 soldierly qualities. One man will have to have quite a high stealth rating; all will have to be good shots, and have good endurance. About the only thing I can think of that doesn't come up is lock picking.

Equipment:

You will have to have one silenced Sten and one MP-40. Give both of these to your highest-stealth man, Sten in his hands and MP on his shoulder, but only two clips for the Sten. Give him a large first aid kit and a pair of wire cutters, both on his belt, and fill the rest of the belt pouches with MP-40 ammo. Put some more MP-40 clips in his backpack, with a compass and a knife, and that ought to take care of him. Don't even give him a helmet, it'll just slow him down.

One man, as usual, will need a sniper rifle - preferably the Enfield - with plenty of ammo. The other two should have Thompsons or Stens; they won't need a huge supply of ammo, though, since they're going to be switching to the MP-44 later in the mission.

Each of the other three men should also get a large first aid kit (at last they make four of them available), a compass, and a pair of wire cutters which should be stowed in his backpack for now. A few grenades apiece would be worth taking, but only the fragmentation kind, not the contact sort. That's all.

The SAS, as far as the record shows, never operated in Czechoslovakia. But then we've already been through all that.

The basic premise - pursuing a Nazi war criminal because he's got some secret documents - is pretty shaky, and it gets even farther-fetched later on. Success in a couple of missions depends on advance knowledge that you wouldn't have in reality, and on the bad guys acting like total morons. Of course that last is common to all these games. (And to most war movies and novels.)

The first three missions do hang together and make sense, though, and build up to a very satisfying ending. In fact this is where the game should have ended; the third mission in this campaign, when you hand the captured Nazi over for trial, would have made the perfect climax.

Instead the designers chose to go on to a couple of missions that, while not at all bad in their own right, don't have any logical connection to what has gone before; and, worse, make absolutely no sense in the supposed context. This is the first week in May, 1945. The war is over for all practical purposes. The Germans, with very few exceptions, were by this time falling all over themselves to surrender to any American or British troops they could find, anybody but the dreaded Soviets.

And the exceptions were holdout groups of Waffen SS fanatics, who would have put up a far more organized and determined resistance than these clueless stragglers; and wouldn't have been running supply convoys in any case. (Even if they could find the fuel, which is very unlikely.) Anyway, what would be the point of having four guys take on such numbers, when the Americans and the Soviets were moving into the area in overwhelming force? Four guys find a town with some Germans still operating, they'd just call in an air strike followed by the nearest US armored unit.

Not that these are bad missions. They're quite good ones. They're just in the wrong time slot. They're in the wrong campaign.

Rather they should have been set in northern France in 1944, as part of a campaign also including that excellent one with the GIs in the bank. Put those three together, throw out that stupid horse shit with the island fortress, and you'd have had one hell of a great campaign.

Oh well.

All that being said, there's nothing really outrageously wrong about any of these missions - except the last. That one, however, is pure Space Bat. The idea of an armed confrontation, let alone a full-scale gun battle, between British and Soviet troops in 1945 is the stuff of alternative history. It could have happened, perhaps, under the right circumstances - though the British soldiers involved would have been in deep and abiding shit and certainly would have faced a court-martial - but it didn't, and if it had the history of our world would have been very different.

(There's also the idiot factor again. If the Soviets had indeed wanted to snatch something from a British team operating in their area, why not simply drive up in a friendly way - hello comrades, we your good allies! Come have drink vodka! - and get them out into the open, off guard, and then scrag them and dispose of the bodies discreetly and deny everything? Why attack them while they're behind formidable defenses? It's not just stupid, it's crazy.)

But then as I say you don't really have to run that last mission, and in fact I recommend against it, and you can have lots of fun with all the others, so what the hell.