Equally, there are no demons to face, no face-hugging monsters or pissed-off aliens. Nope, your real enemy is a far more terrifying prospect - skinned over your basic evil bastard is one of the most highly trained killers in the world: another US Marine. These guys might be modelled on the digitised image of a GI Joe doll, but they're not called Leathernecks for nothing. Round a corner to find yourself eyeball-to-eyeball, and you can almost guarantee that you've celebrated your last birthday.

For all this added realism, though, what soon became clear was that while Marine Doom was a fine attempt to provide an inexpensive fireteam simulation, videogames offered far more than the opportunity to corner an enemy in a forgotten part of the battlefield and replace their brains with lead shrapnel. Sure, Marine Doom enabled trainees to make mistakes without consequences and to learn how to react in a fire-fight, replete with the confusion of a genuine battlefield. Better still, it enabled them to develop leadership skills and tactics that would not only keep them alive, but that would equip them to go on and win. It was these qualities that encouraged the Marines to take their interest in videogames a little further.

Head to the US Marines homepage now and it's a short and well-travelled hop to the Wargaming Catalog and the Tactical Decision Making pages. Here you'll find not the latest trigger-happy, viscera-exploding, code-fests that you might hope for, but some of the most thoughtful and strategic war games to be produced in the last few years.

In fact, faced with a line-up of Panzer General, Steel Panthers, TacOps, West Front and Sid Meier's Gettysburg, it's tempting to suggest that the Marines are a little dull. Though you'd have to be seriously lacking in the will to live before you'd suggest such a thing to their faces, America's finest aren't necessarily sounding like the rugged chaps you'd expect to find defending the free world. Try not to imagine them on their nights off, playing Risk and avoiding the boisterous antics of the British squaddies next door...

Continued next week with a look at the games that are being specifically designed for the military, yet find themselves on sale to the public...