It's new to me: Air Combat
Way to make things confusing for everyone by naming the first Ace Combat game "Air Combat," Namco.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
In 1993, Namco developed and released an arcade game titled Air Combat for their Namco System 21 hardware, which was nearing the end of its life. It still had plenty of power to impress five years after it debuted in arcades with racing game, Winning Run, thanks to modifications that kept it relevant for that long — at its start, it was the first-ever arcade board designed for producing 3D polygons, and Air Combat ended up being both the fruits of that technology and the knowledge accumulated through five years of developing for it.
Air Combat not only thrived in both Japanese and American arcades when it released thanks to its success at creating 3D, polygonal dogfighting and air missions with an arcade feel, but it ended up receiving both an arcade-specific sequel and served as the launch point for Air Combat’s move to consoles. In June of 1995, the first Ace Combat game released in Japan; when it came out in North America a few months later, it was called Air Combat, just like the arcade game that had inspired it. Thankfully, the superior Japanese title won out in time for the sequel.
The Playstation version of Air Combat is both a good time and rough. It’s rough to look at, as it’s very skimpy on the details for landscapes, the sky, enemies right up until the moment they’re directly on top of you, and everything on the ground that you need to pick out and fire at you know exists mostly because your targeting system sees it. Some of this is replicating what it’s actually like being a pilot in a machine that flies 1,200 miles per hour through the sky, but mostly it’s just that Namco clearly had issues creating larger and more detailed objects for the game: this also shows up in how it all animates. In third-person view, your jet’s movements are not subtle in any way, as every movement is big and jerky, even when they’re supposed to be small and nuanced. And your systems, in the cockpit view, do not like if you try any larger, acrobatic movements, either: it becomes difficult to know just where you are in relation to anything. Which kind of makes choosing which view is preferable tough.
It’s difficult to control the aircraft in a time before analog sticks were normalized, as it sometimes feels like — especially when you’re using one of the low-mobility craft or the novice control setting that maybe oversimplifies movement options — that you’re attempting to pilot a jet underwater instead of through the open skies, which can lead to you desperately pressing buttons as hard as you can in the hopes it rights the proverbial ship. The only time motion feels as fast as it should is when your engine stalls out and you start plummeting toward the earth, which… well, you’d prefer things were going slow then, so you have time to adjust and save yourself.
And yet! Despite all of these obvious flaws, Air Combat is a good time. The soundtrack helps quite a bit in this regard. Flying through the skies to your next mission point, sliding in behind an enemy fighter to target it with guns or missiles, getting low to the ground to fire off a missile at a ground target before pulling up, diving out of the way of an enemy missile… all of this is better when you’re hearing not just the radio chatter, but a rock soundtrack that lands somewhere in between dramatic JRPG battle and training montage. It pumps you up! You’re ready to fly through the skies at high speeds and do some Top Gun shit! Making the game sound like this was an incredible decision, and also the perfect one.
You’re a mercenary pilot that’s working against a terrorist group at the request of the countries that have banded together to take down said group: your job, and the job of the other mercenary pilots in this force, is to keep the terrorists from taking over the government of the fictional island nation of Usea. You come into the game with two aircraft to your name — an F-4 and an F-14 — and earn money from each completed mission that lets you purchase additional craft. You’ll need them, too, as the game treats a mission failure not as a chance to use an extra life or what have you, but for you to have ejected from your craft before it exploded, meaning you can go pilot a different one next time: the one you lost because you were shot down, crashed, whatever, is lost forever, and buying a new one of the same model is going to be pricier.
And since aircraft are expensive, especially early on when prices are at their highest and mission bounties at their lowest, this is a situation you want to avoid. Don’t try to be a hero too often and strafe low to the ground against ground targets that will fire back. Don’t ignore the enemy fighters in the air who will very gladly line up behind you and start firing locked-on missiles and guns at you when given the chance. You need all the armor you can get to make it through many of these missions, and losing it all will cost you a craft you might like very much.
The 16 aircraft are graded on a number of items, like power, defense, and mobility. Some, like the F-117, have stealth capabilities that make them more difficult to find on the radar, but the price for that skill is that they suck at everything else. Congratulations on sneaking up on your foes, you are trying to fly a tank through the air and also it can’t take nor deliver powerful hits. It’s also not made clear (like it is in Ace Combat 2) which craft are better for ground or air targets, so unless you know, for instance, that an A-10 is a kind of bomber and air support vehicle that aids fighters and defends against ground targets, you’re not going to learn it from Air Combat. Not that you have bombs here, anyway: every craft has the same number of missiles and rounds available to them in each stage, but how effective said weapons are is different depending on the craft.
After a handful of the game’s 17 missions, you can begin to hire a wingman to help you out (and can bring on more later in the game). You can direct them to guard your tail, act on their own, or focus on whatever the mission’s central point is, like guarding an area or attacking a building, etc. These wingmen have access to the same kinds of aircraft that you do, so you can try to double up on the fighter you think best fits the mission, or you can have your wingman in a completely different craft to try to bring some balance to your attack or defense. Sadly, the wingmen don’t actually seem to do all that much, besides yell a lot on the radio. Sometimes they can draw some enemies away, which is useful, but the best (most expensive) and worst (cheapest) wingmen don’t necessarily provide obvious differences in performance. Like many pieces of Air Combat, it’s kind of a half-baked system.
In addition to the single-player mode, there’s also a deathmatch two-player mode, where the goal is to shoot the other pilot out of the sky as fast as you can. It’s a welcome addition, as is the fact there’s a Hard Mode and an unlockable mission select, so you aren’t permanently forced to play through the game linearly if you’ve already mastered it but want to keep Air Combat-ing.
I already went into the graphics a bit, but looking at Air Combat against Ace Combat 2 is wild. Namco’s developers didn’t think the Playstation was powerful enough to produce the kind of 3D graphics and detail they wanted in a port, so they ended up scrapping that idea and making a brand new game based off of the original arcade success. Whereas Air Combat (arcade) was lauded for its graphical power and presentation, Air Combat (Playstation) was… not. It’s very basic: skies are pretty empty, the ground is sometimes even emptier, and everything is kind of a blur until you’re close. You aren’t necessarily going to be aware what your target even is sometimes, other than that it’s on the ground and your cockpit says it’s gotta go. It’s a step up from what, say, Sega Genesis title F-22 Interceptor pulled off, but not by as much as you’d like (and the mission gameplay isn’t nearly as diverse as in that game, either).
The Playstation released in Japan in December of 1994. Ace Combat released there seven months later. Namco had access to the Playstation beforehand, sure, but this still isn’t a ton of time to acquaint oneself with everything a console is capable of. At the time Air/Ace Combat was being developed for the PSX, the team didn’t think it was capable of reproducing the arcade’s technological successes, even though that arcade system was retired by the time Air Combat was being made for the living room. Masanori Kato, designer of Air Combat, said as much to Gamesradar during coverage for Ace Combat 6:
In the beginning, we were told by the company to create a port of the arcade version of Ace Combat. However, even though the original PlayStation console was the culmination of the best technology available at the time, it still wasn’t powerful enough to match the performance of arcade machines. Not to mention, the team members consisted of 1 naval ship fanatic and 3 others who had no knowledge of airplanes. In the end, we just decided to forget about creating a port and instead made a game from scratch. Now that I look back on the project, it allowed us to return to the basics of being professional creators; making games that are fun from the point of view of the user. It was a project that stimulated me in a very positive way.
I want to focus on two things here. One, Kato is right, that despite all of its flaws, Air Combat still is plenty of fun — pointing out that flaws exist isn’t automatically the same as saying something wasn’t enjoyable — and second, the fact it’s so bare bones in some ways clearly helped Namco figure some things out for the future. They now had a system to build upon: they knew what worked and what didn’t from the basics for a home version of the game, and between that foundation and more familiarity with the Playstation and what it was capable of, Ace Combat 2 was able to be made in a way that blew everything Air Combat did out of the sky. The graphics got a major overhaul, and from the jump you can see there’s significantly more detail in everything: landscapes, skies, water, the aircraft, their animations, everything. It’s not just more detailed, but larger, too: you can better see enemy movement because you can better see the craft themselves, and targets on the ground are more than just red dots on your radar that need to go away. So, while Air Combat is lacking in some ways, like a house that just needs some work to shine, it still had good bones.
I imagine that if you’ve kept up with Ace Combat games throughout the years and seen the various advances in controls and graphics that it might be difficult to go back to the original. As someone who knew Ace Combat was going to be very much my thing and somehow just hadn’t gotten around to playing any of them, though, Air Combat was a mess in a few ways, but none of them gamebreaking. If anything, it gave me some grounding for what the series is, and allowed me to appreciate my early dip into its sequel.
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