Top Gun

You may be too young to remember, but Top Gun in the 80s was HUGE. We are talking Dirty Dancing huge, which is interesting, because both are fondly remembered but have failed to gain an audience with newer generations. Top Gun in particular seems to be known to the 90′s generation as “That gay movie.” I’m not going to waste time defending the film, but I always think it’s important to set up the context of a certain title before I review it. So when Top Gun for the NES was released, the movie and anything involving fighter jets were the top of the mountain.

Seriously, I think you can go back to 1986 and see that every 20 year old male in America applied for Naval Aviation. Those that didn’t sure as hell wanted to at least pretend to rocket around and splash bogeys with effortless panache (points to be given if they made their friend in the backseat puke). Video games offer an obvious chance to support this fantasy, and if you didn’t have a PC capable of providing you with a realistic flight sim, Konami stood by to launch this title at you from the deck catapult.

I remember this game and Sega’s After Burner came out at practically the same in ’87. A friend comes up to me saying “Get your quarters, we’re going to the arcade.” There, I am introduced to After Burner, and it was awesome. Maybe a week or two later that friend comes back (this was how you got your information before the Internet…) telling me that they had released After Burner on the NES. We went to rent it at the video store and, come to find out, they hadn’t. It was this game he was thinking of, and this game couldn’t quite compare.

Top Gun is basically a stripped-down console flight sim. You fight waves of enemies that die in one shot, much like the arcade classic we had confused it with. The difference is that Top Gun has you doing this from a first-person view inside the cockpit of your jet. This leads to a few problems. First, the cockpit becomes a way, not to facilitate the experience of “being there,” but to mask the lack of graphics in the game world. Much like Airwolf, you have a single color for the ground and a single color for the sky. Enemies are 2-D sprites that rush toward or away from you, firing guns that must be avoided and missiles that must be shot down. You have an altimeter that means nothing, a fixed airspeed that cannot be changed, and three little gauges on the right that literally serve no function whatsoever. Your primary concern isn’t even flying, as the plane really does that for you. You don’t even have the capability to pull rolls or loops or any such aerial fun. You instead sort of guide the nose (and the fixed crosshairs) onto bad guys and away from bullets. If you land the crosshairs right on an enemy, you take them out with a burst of gun fire from the A button. If you get them within a larger marked area around the crosshairs, you can hit B to arm and lock a missile, and B again to shoot it. Repeat for four levels, and thank you for buying another Konami game.

This alone sounds, and is, boring. That’s why you have the infamous landing sequence after each mission. Ask any classic gamer, and they’ll probably be able to tell you all about it. If you know a guy who gets really passionate and infuriated about this kind of stuff – definitely ask him. It’s like the story for our gaming generation, because every kid loved the movie, every kid got the game, and every adult that kid turned in to will likely tell you the same thing – “I could never figure out how to land on that carrier, and it pissed me off so much.”

Here’s the situation: You’re flying along on autopilot, casually shooting enemies that appear and making sure not to lose too much life. Suddenly alarms start sounding and you’re told that you’re “heading to landing sequence.” So you’ve been coasting along for last five minutes not flying the plane, then, Whoop! You gotta fly the plane! The A and B buttons now speed you up or slow you down, and the control pad moves you around more wildly than before. You’ll see the carrier in front of you and directions appear on your screen telling you to turn right, speed up, etc. Except, these instructions are given with far more urgency than is required. The game flashes frantically at you “RIGHT! RIGHT!” and you naturally panic, despite the fact that all you need to do is gently line up the carrier a little. You’ll get a few directions like this, and then, invariably, everyone gets stuck on the same point. The game tells you “UP! UP!” and you pull the plane up until you can’t go “up” anymore. The game still screams at you “UP! UP! JESUS CHRIST PULL UP, YOU’RE GONNA DIE!” but there’s no more “up” to go. Cut to wide shot as you fall out of the sky short of the carrier, hit the water, and explode.

I never made the landing as a kid. I followed the instructions, I forced myself to get used to the whole “up is down, down is up” flight scheme, I still never made it. Ironically, I hit it every time going back and playing it for this review. I’d had some time with flight sims in the time between, so when I hit the infamous “Up! Up!” point, I instantly thought “Well I have to speed up to get any higher, or else I’m going to stall.” Next thing I know, I’m safely on the deck.

Now what eight-year-old kid is going to know about stalling, or have an understanding of any weekend warrior material at a higher level than this game? That’s right, NONE. So an entire generation of poor kids landed in the fucking Atlantic because the game lied to them. “Up! Up” should really be “Speed up!” – made even more confusing because the sequence does tell you “Speed up!” at other points. Naturally, you think there’s a difference. So if you follow the directions, you die and you won’t know what you did wrong. It’s funny because nowhere else in the game comes close to anything resembling realism, and then it throws this at you. So take it from Captain J Man; ignore the directions and just get your speed and altitude to close to the targets shown on the radar display, don’t panic, and you’ll hook the third wire every time.

Luckily, if you miss the landing you only lose a life and the game goes on… until the middle of the second level. In the middle of every level from two onward, you’ll run low on fuel and have to hit Select to call for midair refueling – a maneuver which Tom Clancy describes as “the most unnatural act two machines can perform.” You have to hold your plane straight and level as a larger one snakes a fuel hose out the back. It’s basically the same minigame as landing, with the same controls, except you’ll be left to run out of fuel and die if you miss. Rather ridiculous, but the sequence is not overly difficult to execute properly. This time you have an icon on your radar screen indicating the hose in relation to your jet. If the hose is red, you have a problem. You can shift your plane around just by watching this docking screen, speed up/down until it turns green, and then you’re okay. Again, it’s tricky, but not a single problem playing it now.

The game has only four missions, three of which play identically. The first level is a “training mission,” so you only have enemy aircraft to deal with. The last three have you flying over the ground or ocean, in range of surface-to-air targets. These fire ridiculous volleys at you, to the point that you really shouldn’t go near them. Fortunately, all you have to do is point the aircraft at the sky. You’ll stop climbing at 30,000 feet, but the real idea is to keep the ground out of view – the game operates on the rule that if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. This is the same with any missiles or aircraft, and if you can mange to push them off the screen, then they just disappear. Sort of the gaming equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “lalalalala I can’t HEAR you!” except that here it actually works. So in each of the last three missions, you’ll do your midair refuel gig, fly another overlong, underactioned section of air, and then approach the boss. This is a hardened target like a base or a space shuttle (*shrug*) that requires you to pound it with missiles and dodge AA fire before you end up flying over and missing the target. And these things are HARD to kill.

Before each mission, you can configure your missile loadout between having a lot of weak missiles or a few strong missiles. The large numbers of weak missiles are great for fighters, but leave you in trouble at the boss. Conversely, if you take the strong missiles you’ll drop the boss easily, but only if you don’t fire them all at the airplanes. And there goes the only strategy element in the entire game. Wave g’bye kids.

The graphics aren’t bad, but the NES isn’t up to the task of rendering a convincing, or interesting, flight sim. The utter lack of detail doesn’t help the illusion that you’re flying over anything, and the single colors make it look like a ColecoVision title. Luckily you’re never required to navigate – this is a corridor shooter like StarFox – so lack of ground or horizon landmarks doesn’t matter at all. It does, however, make for a tremendously boring trip. Some sections do break out the digital paint brushes, like the intro screen of a Tomcat flaring its engines, but the gameplay likely pushes the NES to its limit for a cockpit shooter, and that limit doesn’t quite make it right into the danger zone.

Though speaking of which, the Top Gun theme is recreated quite well on the intro screen. You’ll never hear it again, or any kind of music in the game, again a likely push for the realism angle. Effects are about as good as they can be, and these are able to make it to “good enough.” Tire squeals, engine warm-ups, gunfire, and missile shots all sounding recognizable.

The game only has four levels, but when the levels themselves are so boring, I hesitate to call the game “too short.” It really is a perfect example of bad game design, containing all the elements gamers hate. The longest parts are boring. There are sections that are out-of-place difficult, which become barriers to finishing the game. There’s nothing involving to keep you engaged and want to keep playing. And it’s short with a lame ending, making it not worth the effort to beat. You’re not going to see anything different past the first stage. Save yourself the frustration.

 

The Good

An attempt to provide console owners the same fun as their PC counterparts.

The Bad

Four levels, tricky minigames, weak flight system, rather boring.