Operation Hanoi is a blatant Operation Wolf clone from Players Software for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum. It looks and plays almost identically, right down to the visual style, explosive grenades, and kill quotas. There’s not even anything to distinguish that this game takes place in Vietnam rather than South America (though to be fair, the original Operation Wolf often looked like it took place in southeast Asia too). The only distinction is that it moves the right status bar to the bottom of the screen (as with the console ports of Operation Wolf), and the levels only scroll left-to-right, whereas Operation Wolf scrolled in both directions. There are also only three stages, making it half the length of the game it’s based on. Still, despite its shamelessness, it’s mostly competent, especially since it was sold at a discount price.
Commodore 64
Incidentally, there were some European companies who ported Japanese arcade games then decided to make their own sequels, like Ocean’s Target: Renegade and Renegade III (spun off from Technos’ Kunio-kun series) and Sales Curve’s SWIV (based on Tecmo’s Silkworm). However, Operation Hanoi has nothing to do with neither Taito nor Ocean, the company that ported Operation Wolf / Thunderbolt to PCs, and instead came from budget publisher Players Software. It was designed and coded by Phillip Ruston, who also developed about half a dozen other games for the Commodore 64 between 1989 and 1990, including the Commodore 64 version of Wanted, a clone of Capcom’s Gun.Smoke.
