Post by hornet on Dec 28, 2007 12:31:23 GMT
Did anyone here ever play Outrun 2/2006? Comfortably my favourite on-road racing game in years, the genius of it was that it abandoned any pretence of realism and instead concentrated on recreating what my inner 12-year-old believed it was like to race in a Ferrari - wide roads, incredible speeds, enormous powerslides and a flashy blonde in the passenger seat.
I bring this up because Ace Combat 6 makes me feel about jet fighters the way Outrun 2 made me feel about cars. It slews away all the fat and nonsense and realism-for-the-sake-of-realism and just leaves the pure, distilled awesome.
There are problems with it. With missions lasting half an hour plus, the inability to save before the end of them is desperately inconvenient. Also, when your allies get themselves into trouble and start bleating for help over the radio, it's not always very clear exactly who needs you and where they are. On top of that, it's hard to overstate how mind-bogglingly ill-conceived and terrible the between-mission cutscenes are. While the execution is simultaneously cringeworthy and tedious, with terrible scripts, aggravating characters and stilted acting, the real problem is the concept. Half-arsed soap-opera nonsense about the wife of a fighter pilot and her husband who's been captured by the enemy with a heavy "War Is Hell" motif is almost exactly what you don't need after three-quarters of an hour of gameplay that's thoroughly convinced you that war is AWESOME.
For me, all of this amounts to no more than a minor annoyance becuse the game just puts a big stupid grin on my face. It totally nails the adrenaline-pumping, Top-Gun, Biggles-Flies-Undone, set-engines-to-Ludicrous-Speed thrill of dogfighting like nothing I've ever played before. It helps that it's beautiful, with tons of atmospheric little touches - you can look up and see the blue sky criss-crossed with lingering missile contrails, or look back and see pillars of smoke climbing in the wake of your bombing run (the after-mission replays are wonderful, by the by, and make you look quite unfeasably cool. They're like starring in your own little Michael Bay movie. But in a good way).
It's a game that's absolutely designed for the EggBox's custom-playlist feature, too. Being able to light your afterburners and whizz a hundred feet over the treeline at a thousand miles an hour, dispensing generous helpings of Boom to dastardly invading foreigners while being accompanied by The Ride Of The Valkyries, the Blue Danube Waltz, the theme to 633 Squadron or (alright, I admit it) the Top Gun sountrack is more fun than human beings should be legally allowed.
I realise I'm making myself sound a massive case of arrested development here. So. Um. Isn't Pan's Labyrinth great?
I bring this up because Ace Combat 6 makes me feel about jet fighters the way Outrun 2 made me feel about cars. It slews away all the fat and nonsense and realism-for-the-sake-of-realism and just leaves the pure, distilled awesome.
There are problems with it. With missions lasting half an hour plus, the inability to save before the end of them is desperately inconvenient. Also, when your allies get themselves into trouble and start bleating for help over the radio, it's not always very clear exactly who needs you and where they are. On top of that, it's hard to overstate how mind-bogglingly ill-conceived and terrible the between-mission cutscenes are. While the execution is simultaneously cringeworthy and tedious, with terrible scripts, aggravating characters and stilted acting, the real problem is the concept. Half-arsed soap-opera nonsense about the wife of a fighter pilot and her husband who's been captured by the enemy with a heavy "War Is Hell" motif is almost exactly what you don't need after three-quarters of an hour of gameplay that's thoroughly convinced you that war is AWESOME.
For me, all of this amounts to no more than a minor annoyance becuse the game just puts a big stupid grin on my face. It totally nails the adrenaline-pumping, Top-Gun, Biggles-Flies-Undone, set-engines-to-Ludicrous-Speed thrill of dogfighting like nothing I've ever played before. It helps that it's beautiful, with tons of atmospheric little touches - you can look up and see the blue sky criss-crossed with lingering missile contrails, or look back and see pillars of smoke climbing in the wake of your bombing run (the after-mission replays are wonderful, by the by, and make you look quite unfeasably cool. They're like starring in your own little Michael Bay movie. But in a good way).
It's a game that's absolutely designed for the EggBox's custom-playlist feature, too. Being able to light your afterburners and whizz a hundred feet over the treeline at a thousand miles an hour, dispensing generous helpings of Boom to dastardly invading foreigners while being accompanied by The Ride Of The Valkyries, the Blue Danube Waltz, the theme to 633 Squadron or (alright, I admit it) the Top Gun sountrack is more fun than human beings should be legally allowed.
I realise I'm making myself sound a massive case of arrested development here. So. Um. Isn't Pan's Labyrinth great?