SPACE ACE REVIEW - September 1996
| There are two things us reviewers like about
games like this. One is that we don't have to pay for them (true of all games, obviously,
but especially pertinent when it comes to cute-but-rubbish interactive cartoon types), and
the other is that we usually get sent a cheat with the review copy which enables us to
simply watch the whole game play itself through to the end without all that tedious
mucking about with stabbing randomly at the joystick every 10 seconds. This is clearly a
good thing - as cartoons, Space Ace and Dragon's Lair are pretty fine, and it's only
having to watch the same bits over and over again when you can't guess the right actions
that gets annoying. This particular version of Space Ace, though, flouted all known convention, and arrived sans cheat, inconveniently forcing me to play the game (tch), with all the unpleasantness that usually entails. It's all the more surprising, then, that I still secretly quite like it. No, wait, listen. This is the full-blown coin-op incarnation of Space Ace, with all the bits of the original intact. The control response is very forgiving, to the extent that I managed to get through more than one perplexing situation simply by repeatedly hitting all the direction keys in quick succession, and the game makes a mockery of its own five-lives structure by giving you infinite continues. Thus, while lasting challenge is utterly non-existent, it's fairly straightforward to see all of the pretty animation and plot every time you play it, which seems to me to be rather the point of games like this. Look, I know. As a game it's rubbish, and you'd have to be a bit mad to spend £30 on it. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't quite a nice thing to have, all the same. Oh, please yourself. VERDICT: I can't honestly recommend that you go and buy it. But I still like it, sort of. Nick it from a shop or something. (Erk. He's joking, of course. - Ed) 60% |
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