1738: Aces High

After I beat Ace Combat 4 a few days ago — spectacular, incidentally; a game that still holds up marvellously well today, even on a big-screen HDTV — I moved pretty much straight on to its sequel Ace Combat 5, or Ace Combat: Squadron Leader as it is inexplicably known over here in Europe.

While superficially similar, Ace Combat 5 is definitely a more refined package on more fronts, though both games remain well worth playing in their own right.

To clarify: Ace Combat 4 had an interesting, unconventionally told narrative and gameplay that, more often than not, boiled down to “score [x] number of points before time expires”, with the odd break for “destroy all the marked targets before time expires”. This is a huge simplification, of course, because it was the context in which these missions took place that made Ace Combat 4 interesting rather than the actual mission objectives themselves.

Ace Combat 5 mixes things up a bit by having a wider variety of mission objectives. 17 missions in, and I’ve only just had a “score [x] number of points before time expires” mission; prior to that, I’ve had everything from “capital ship” battles against submarines to air support missions flying cover for an aircraft carrier escaping a besieged city, and one particularly memorable (if challenging) mission where you had to locate a downed member of your squadron, then support the rescue helicopter as it came in to pick her up.

Ace Combat 5 also tells its story in a different manner to its predecessor. While Ace Combat 4 framed its narrative as a letter written from someone who knew the primary antagonist to you, the player, Ace Combat 5 tells a more “present-day” tale about the jet fighter squadron which you’re a member of. Like Ace Combat 4, you gradually become known as a legendary pilot that enemy forces speak of in hushed tones, but there’s a lot more humbleness and humility about it this time around; there’s a strong emphasis on questioning the actions you’re being asked to take in the war, and whether what you’re doing is really justified. It makes for some compelling drama both during and between missions, and it’s a big part of what makes the game so interesting.

Flying and fighting is an absolute joy, though, and that’s what really matters here. Each plane feels noticeably different from the others — though all kind of throw realism out of the window in the name of fun — and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The different weapons you’ll be flinging around all have their own little quirks and idiosyncrasies, too, and it’s interesting to gradually learn which plane (and attached special weapon) is most appropriate for which situation. Plus there’s a fun little “levelling” system whereby scoring enough kills with a particular type of plane unlocks better variants in that family tree — you can gradually upgrade from the F-15C Eagle to the F-15E Strike Eagle, for example, and you can do this for an impressively wide selection of real-life planes.

I’m impressed quite how good the game looks, too. It features native 16:9 support, for one thing — something you couldn’t rely on in the PS2 era, even with widescreen televisions becoming more widespread — but its visuals lack that muddiness that many PS2 titles often have when viewed on an HDTV. It’s not pin-sharp, no, but it looks good — and my goodness, does it ever move smoothly, maintaining a solid 60fps at all times, even when all manner of scary shit is going on around you.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty smitten with this series. And, as I think I’ve said previously, I’m sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out when it first came along.

1730: Distant Thunder

I’ve been playing a bunch of Ace Combat 4 (known variously as Shattered Skies or Distant Thunder depending on where in the world you are) and, frankly, I’m gobsmacked.

This is a game that came out in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, sporting visuals that are still reasonably impressive (albeit low-resolution) today, and which run at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, though, it’s a game that manages to be utterly compelling, addictive and thrilling while treating the player with respect and, at the same time, telling an interesting story in a rather unusual manner.

Given what I’ve experienced of Ace Combat 4 to date, it’s easy to see why Ace Combat veterans were a little miffed at Assault Horizon — though I maintain that was an enjoyable enough game in its own right.

Ace Combat 4 is a lot more distinctive than Assault Horizon, though. While the newer game is clad in that unmistakeable “triple-A veneer” that makes a lot of modern games look gorgeous but lack a clearly defined visual identity compared to their contemporaries, Ace Combat 4 is immediately recognisable (although some may argue its interface takes more than a few cues from Metal Gear Solid).

At heart, it’s a solid jet fighter sim that throws the odd bit of realism out of the window in the name of fun. Your plane carries an implausibly huge stock of missiles, for example, which is useful, because you’ll find yourself shooting down an awful lot of planes and blowing up an awful lot of ground targets in each mission. You can’t just fire them off willy-nilly, however — well, maybe you can at ground targets — since enemies will dodge and evade missiles, just like you can. To get a solid lock, you need to manoeuvre carefully behind an enemy and keep them in your sites as you fire off the missiles — and, unlike Assault Horizon with its Dogfight Mode, you have to do this manually rather than pressing a button to do so. It’s a lot more challenging, but also a lot more satisfying, too.

The missions are far less scripted than Assault Horizon, too — though that’s not to say they don’t have interesting things going on. Throughout the first part of the game, you’re often under threat from the enemy forces’ superweapon Stonehenge, for example, and when you’re warned it’s about to fire you’d better make sure you’re hugging the ground if you don’t want to be blown to smithereens. In one particularly memorable mission, you have to fly back to your base while Stonehenge is firing at you, and the only means of getting low enough to stay under its devastating blasts is to fly through a rather perilous canyon.

I’m impressed with the storytelling, too. The game runs two parallel storylines throughout its campaign — one presented in a rather faceless manner to the player, a la many flight and space sims over the years, and another much more personal tale from the perspective of a child living in an occupied city. As you progress through the campaign, the effects of your victories are mirrored in this parallel storyline, until in its later stages you’re referred to more explicitly, particularly after the mission where you shoot down the primary sort-of-antagonist-but-not-really’s wingman. I haven’t yet finished the game, but the smart money is on an epic final confrontation between Mobius One (me) and Yellow Thirteen before the credits roll.

I’ve been having an absolute blast so far, then. I don’t think I’m far off the end of the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing what its sequels have in store.

Now why didn’t I discover this series thirteen years ago?

1727: Warwolf One

I beat Ace Combat: Assault Horizon this evening. (Looking at the clock, it’s nearly 2am… I guess I was enjoying myself, huh.)

I’ve already said a lot of the things I want to say about this game in yesterday’s post, but having played the whole thing through from start to finish now, I feel I can talk about it with a bit more confidence.

The thing I most want to talk about, I think, is what it was clearly going for and whether or not it was successful.

What it was clearly attempting to go for was a dramatic military-style story with a personal angle. And, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it failed. Not miserably, but it still fell very short of what I can only assume were the team’s ambitions.

To put this in context for those of you unfamiliar with the game, let me explain a little. The majority of Assault Horizon casts you in the role of Colonel Bishop, an ace fighter pilot who is wracked with recurring nightmares about facing off against a “shark-faced” rival ace. (Indeed, the first level is a dream sequence that — spoiler — you re-enact for real later in the game, only things turn out a little differently.) Bishop becomes embroiled in a war between the free world (the real world, unlike many other Ace Combat titles) and an army of Russian rebels. (This latter aspect allows the game to follow the Unwritten Law of Jet Fighter Games, which is that you must spend the majority of your time shooting down MiG-29s and SU-27s.) Said Russian rebels have access to a weapon called “Trinity” — an incredibly powerful nuclear device that you see the devastating effects of firsthand in several of the early levels. Naturally, it’s up to Bishop to put a stop to all this nonsense by flying shiny planes very fast and blowing lots of things up.

Except it’s not just up to Bishop; there are also a couple of other characters who provide a vehicle (no pun intended) for the other types of mission you’ll be flying aside from air-to-air combat and air-to-ground assaults. One guy flies helicopters, so you get to play as him during the helicopter missions; the token ladypilot flies bombers, so you get to play as her during the few bombing missions — including a pretty cool “stealth” one where you have to avoid enemy radar cones.

The setup is fairly interesting, then; Bishop has the potential to be an intriguing character, confronting his own personal demons over the course of the story and developing into someone “human” as it progresses. Unfortunately, this potential is left largely unrealised; a short monologue at the end of the game suggests that he has learned something from his experiences, but the rest of the game’s narrative really didn’t make that particularly clear.

Things are worse with the other characters, who pretty much only appear to be there for the sake of it. Ladypilot is shoehorned into a rather hasty apparent romance plot in the final scenes of the game, having spent the rest of the game showing no form of interest in Bishop whatsoever, and Helicopter Man is… well, he flies helicopters.

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity is the “villain”, who is teased a little early in the game — the “shark-faced” pilot from Bishop’s dreams — and then introduced rather hastily towards the end. He’s given little in the way of explanation, and his own personal motivations are pretty much used to bludgeon the player over the head with to say “This! Is! Why! He’s! Evil!” at one point. He’s a pain in the arse to shoot down in the final mission, so there’s a certain degree of personal satisfaction in blowing him up, but this finale could have been so much more interesting if there were a lot more interaction between him and Bishop throughout the game. It is a poor antagonist who only reveals himself in the final chapters of a story, and it leaves Markov feeling like a rather weak adversary for Bishop.

Despite all that I’ve said above, however, Assault Horizon was an enjoyable experience in the way that a good action movie (with equally ill-defined characters) is. The missions were varied and fun — though a couple dragged on a little too long — and the presentation throughout was immaculate; the PC version looks lovely, and the action is accompanied by some wonderful music and excellent voice acting just to add to the whole “movie-like” feel.

It’s just a pity so many opportunities for interesting narrative development were squandered, leaving the whole experience feeling a bit hollow afterwards. I’m not sorry I played it, as on the whole I did enjoy it immensely, but now my appetite has been well and truly whet for the earlier — apparently much better — installments in the Ace Combat series, which hopefully I will be getting my hands on very soon.

1726: Assault Horizon

Following on from yesterday’s post, today I decided to give Ace Combat: Assault Horizon a try, partly because I was impatient to get started on my journey through the Ace Combat series, and partly because I was conscious of the fact it had been in my Steam library since one sale or another and I had never even installed it, let alone tried it.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is pretty much the black sheep of the Ace Combat franchise, so I figured it probably wouldn’t be a terrible idea to try it first. That way I can see what the series is like now, and then compare it to what it was in the PS2 era. Ace Combat fans do not have the luxury of doing it this way around, so they inevitably see it as a series in decline — particularly now it’s made the jump to free-to-play on PlayStation 3.

Now, as noted, I have no frame of reference for the rest of the series as yet, but if the other games are even half as enjoyable as Assault Horizon appears to be — and I’m led to believe that they’re considerably better — then I’m very much in for a treat. But more on that when my copies arrive.

For now, let’s talk a little about Assault Horizon. It was referred to by some on its original launch as being Call of Duty in the sky, and this isn’t an altogether inaccurate comparison. There are lots of characters who have little in the way of… you know, character development, but who provide the framework for the different types of mission (one dude is a fighter pilot, another dude is a helicopter pilot, the token ladypilot flies bombers and transports); the missions and story are very much pre-scripted to fit the overall narrative; the narrative itself makes little in the way of sense but is enjoyable from the perspective of it simply being spectacular to watch.

And, for all the shit Call of Duty gets, this isn’t a bad thing for this sort of game. Air combat should be spectacular and exciting — at least, if you’re taking the “action movie” approach to it, as this game is — and when you approach it with that attitude, it doesn’t matter so much that the game just flat-out defies the laws of physics on numerous occasions with regard to how the various vehicles handle. (The way the helicopter dodges missiles with a ridiculous barrel roll is a particular highlight.)

So far the combat itself has been enjoyable and satisfying, too. Early in the game, you can pretty much get someone in your sights and fire off a missile at them, but as you progress you start having to pull off more and more fancy manoeuvres to get into a position to get a kill. And it’s here that the game’s most controversial addition to Ace Combat veterans shows its head: Dogfight Mode.

Dogfight Mode is… well, I’m not really sure how it works, but I do know it’s ridiculous. Rather than having to worry too much about pointing your plane in the right direction, Dogfight Mode consists of a sort of autopilot as you tail an enemy, though you still have to roll and pitch in order to keep them centred in a large circle on the screen in order to lock on with missiles. It’s usually the most reliable means of ensuring you down an enemy — particularly the stronger “leader” enemies — but it’s also used for some very silly white-knuckle setpieces throughout, as your quarry leads you on a merry chase between skyscrapers (with things like cranes collapsing around you, naturally) or perilously close to the ground. (And yes; turn the assist options off and the flight controls to the “proper” ones and you can indeed slam into the ground and immediately bring your mission to a premature end, like any good air combat game worth its salt.)

I fired Assault Horizon up out of curiosity earlier and have found myself playing it pretty much all evening. While I’m conscious of numerous things it could do a bit better, I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far, and I’m feeling like it was a good choice to give this one a try first, because from what I understand, things only get better from here. My mild curiosity has been upgraded to “can’t wait” status.

Fox two, fox two.

1725: Jet Fighter Squad

On something of a whim (and after seeing a screenshot posted by Mr Alex Connolly), I downloaded a lovely-looking cel-shaded air combat game called Vector Thrust the other day. This is supposedly a spiritual successor to a series of games I’ve never had any contact with previously: Namco’s Ace Combat franchise. After playing Vector Thrust a bit and enjoying it, I’ve managed to track down cheap copies of the PS2 Ace Combat games to tide me over until the fun-but-crashy Vector Thrust comes out of Early Access in a hopefully somewhat more stable state.

I can’t speak much about Ace Combat as yet — though I’m looking forward to trying them, rather late to the party as ever — but giving Vector Thrust a go and subsequently ordering copies of what are supposedly the best Ace Combat games, it occurred to me that flying a supersonic, tooled-up jet fighter is something we don’t get to do all that often in games these days, whereas it used to be a mainstay of computer (as opposed to console) gaming in general.

I used to play a lot of jet fighter sims when I was younger. This was primarily because my Dad, as something of a propellerhead, tended to be sent review copies back when he wrote articles for Atari magazine Page 6/New Atari User. My Dad preferred the more realistic end of the spectrum when it came to flight sims, however — he’d often spend some time with MicroProse’s latest, then head right on back to Flight Simulator II in order to fly from one place to another in real-time with no-one shooting at him.

I wasn’t averse to a bit of Flight Simulator myself — it was very satisfying to be able to fly what was, at the time, a super-realistic simulation. But I much preferred the action and drama of a good jet fighter sim. I talked a bit about F-19 Stealth Fighter a few posts back, but there were plenty of others — the rather arcadey action of F-15 Strike Eagle (and its sequel, which actually did become an arcade machine); the limited but challenging selection of missions in Falcon and the wonderful dynamic campaign of its later incarnations; the tricky carrier takeoffs and landings of Flight of the Intruder; the cinematic combat of TFX and EF2000; the outright “soap opera” nature of Origin’s Wing Commander-in-the-sky spinoff Strike Commander. I developed a frighteningly comprehensive knowledge of modern air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance — particularly for someone of my age — and, having spent many hours reading the lengthy manuals (remember those?) for these games on the toilet, I knew a fair bit about the planes and how they worked, too, since this was the age of many manuals having a coffee-table book level of detail about them.

Ace Combat isn’t, from what I understand, a sim. But neither is it the “3D shmup” of titles like After Burner and its sequel G-LOC. Instead, like Vector Thrust, it’s somewhere in-between, offering a semi-realistic flight model coupled with ridiculous, “gamey” aspects such as your plane being able to hold terrifyingly huge amounts of missiles and dogfighting that is more inspired by World War II combat than what actually happens in the sky these days.

It’s a kind of game we don’t get all that often these days any more, and that’s a real shame — though at the same time it’s also encouraging to see titles like Vector Thrust (which, I understand, was put together by a teeny-tiny team) cropping up, even if this sort of thing would never get greenlit by a triple-A publisher these days, in all likelihood.

Regardless, I’m really looking forward to trying out Ace Combat for the first time; having read a little about them and listened to the (spectacular) soundtracks, they sound right up my alley — and will be a nice change from some of the other stuff I’ve been playing on the side to boot.