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.