Afterburner

Vitals:

Year – 1987

Developer – Sega

Genre – Flight Sim/Shoot’em

Lives – 3

Continues – 0

Another one I remembered from my youth, and after being frustrated by the last couple games I decided I just wanted to kill some stuff.  So this was a great choice.  I remembered playing with a joystick though which sure made the controls a lot easier.  Unfortunately no more joystick, so doing those awesome barrel rolls required major co-ordination.

I hopped right into the cockpit on this one and started blasting away.  Planes came in from the sides, I shot them down – hey this is easy!  Then there was this bleep and a square in the distance on my radar.  Then there was a missile, then there was me crashing and burning.  Crap.

It didn’t take me long to find the Game Over screen, probably about 30 seconds.  Then I went and read the manual.  Ooohh, missiles, right.  Those squares mean shoot a heat seeking missile.  So I started to unload on these guys.  Man I wish I had a real plane that could carry 150 missiles, I’d be pretty much unstoppable.  Well, maybe not unstoppable, this game stops me pretty quickly.

It took some time to master the swooping and cutting in and out when missiles were coming at me, but it wasn’t long before I was cruising along, blasting guys out of the sky and laughing at their pathetic attempts to shoot me down.

Then something unexpected happened.  A missile showed up behind me!  I tried to outfly it, but no luck.  Kabooom.  Over and over and over and over again.  At first I thought it was some kind of special power-up since it was floating beneath my plane, but after a while randomly exploding I figured it out.  Next step … how to get rid of it?  Took me a while to realize that when I did a barrel roll the missile lost its tracking.  Awesome.

Next problem, when doing a barrel roll and there are missiles in front of you your plane stays too stationary and the enemies laugh at you while you explode into a million pieces.  So … missiles to the left of me, missiles to the right of me, missiles before me!  I think I was set up to fail.

I did come across these interesting ‘bonus’ type levels where you just absolutely demolish everything on the ground with very small chance of being destroyed.  I think I ran in to one tower and that was it the whole time I went through them.  They were pretty cool though, of course if I was an idiot and took a jet plane in a small canyon like that I wouldn’t expect to live through it.

The Good Stuff:

Being part flight sim the controls on this game were really cool.  Flying forward instead of side to side is a major difference from most plane shoot’em up games from back in the day.  Being able to almost move in three dimensions really gives you options for avoiding missiles. 

Not having to worry about anything but killing the other planes was really what I was looking for at this point.  There are no power-ups, nothing fancy, just plain killing planes and trying to survive.

The Ugly Stuff:

No continues sucks!  I’m not even sure how far through the game I actually got.  It’s hard to see much progression; the scenery is just different shades of the same scene.  Some of the shades made it really difficult to see the missiles, which basically made the stages impossible.

Not being able to move while rolling was a challenge in itself.  Of course that mostly comes from the problem of not always being able to control when I did a barrel roll.  It seemed like when I wanted to do one, it didn’t happen, and when I was trying to dodge missiles I’d go in to one and explode.

Overall:

I remember this game being tons of fun in the arcade with the special joystick, or in the cockpit style game where you actually felt like you were driving.  On the NES - not so much.  I got what I wanted out of it, which was blowing stuff up, but that gets old pretty quickly.  I was considering diving in to Afterburner 2 during this review just to see the changes but I was so burned out from shooting down planes that I just couldn’t work up the energy.

For a quick 30 minutes every now and then when you just want something to keep busy and would have fun flying a plane, this is definitely a good choice.