It took me YEARS to understand how the controls work. Its worse than what they used to do with FMVs on the Sega CD. Imagine your TV, but the window is about the size of your smart phone. The only other things you get in terms of "cut-scenes" are these tiny windows of very-pixelated animation that look like they were taken from the arcade game. If you leave the controller alone long enough, you get this really awkward back and forth pan of the side profiles of Ace and Borf, with Kimberly in the background having the only animations, and its just her eyes blinking as she smiles creepily. The best you get is in the opening splash page. FMVs were none-existent in early cartridge titles. Firstly, say goodbye to those gorgeous animations. Having said all that, the game has alot of issues. From Borf shooting his laser at Dexter, to the flying laser-bots and rock crushers, the levels are mimicked to the best of their ability given the massive limitations of the hardware. Playing the opening level and going back to watch the first scene from the arcade version, you can see that alot of the set pieces from the movie as well as the enemies are taken right from the game. The developers O.D.E (a company who's only other credit is ports of the game Deathbringer from 1991) tried their best to emulate the games levels to the best of their ability. If there is one solace I can give it, is that it does try more than its Dragon's Lair counter part to match the source material. Ace/Dexter must travel the galaxy, save Kimberly, and stop Borf from using his Infanto-Ray on the whole Earth. Borf uses his new "Infanto-Ray" to turn Ace into a scrawny, adolescent version of himself, dubbed Dexter, while also stealing Ace's girlfriend, Kimberly. Space Ace, for those of you who are to young to remember when these games were popular in the arcades (if you remember what an arcade even IS) tells the tale of Ace, a muscle-bound stereotypical hero and the evil villain, Borf. So would the SNES have enough of the horsepower to withstand the awesome might of Space Ace? The short answer: No. But this was 1994, well into the lifespan of the Super Nintendo, a console that was twice the power of its predecessor. So how do you transfer the game to a new platform without ruining the integrity of gameplay? Well, if the 1990 NES port of Dragon's Lair is any indication, you weren't. Both games were built upon Laserdisc technology (for those of you that don't know, LDs were the size of dinner plates). But in that lay the problem: how do you port a game as massive as Dragons Lair or Space Ace onto the NES/SNES. Both games were a hit at arcades, so naturally it was inevitable that ports would appear on the major consoles of the time. Yeah, there wasnt much in gameplay variety (you basically played the game exactly as the game tells you to everytime) but the game was helped by amazing animations by legendary cartoonist Don Bluth (All Dogs Go To Heaven, Land Before Time, An American Tale). You watch a full motion video, wait for something in the scene to glow, and use the controller based on the action of screen. Before games like Shenmue, Resident Evil 4, and God of War made quick time events the norm for video games, Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were pioneers in that they were the only games on the market that were ALL quick time events. Space Ace is, as stated, a spiritual successor to the iconic arcade classic, Dragon's Lair. But Before I get in to the game in question, I feel a backstory is in order.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |