Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings
Developer: Video System
Release Date: 1993
System: SNES
Aero
Fighters for the SNES is a port of the arcade game Sonic Wings, and I
will say this right off the bat, it shows. This is because Aero Fighters
is a hard and merciless game, even cranking this down to easy, maxing
out your lives and credits, I can't guarantee an, success in beating
this game for a good while. Enemies and bosses come at you aggressively
and cheaply, sometimes coming in from the bottom of the screen. The
stages are short but will do their darndest to widdle down your lives.
Plenty of cheap deaths await you.
So, with that out
of the way, let's talk a little bit about why this game, despite the
difficulty this is just a cool and well-made SHMUP. Firstly, characters, this
game comes with a shed load of them, 8 base characters and 2 special
characters, and each of them has their own base weapon fire pattern
and special bomb. They also have hidden stats for their damage and
speed. When you start the game you will pick a nation to play as, with 4
nations to play as; US, Japan, Denmark and the UK. A slight quirk of the
game is that your character will be dependent on what controller port
you are using, with 4 of the characters assigned to player 1, whilst the
other 4 being assigned to player 2. It's a little weird and, depending
on your setup, a bit inconvenient. This is probably in part to their
being a simultaneous multiplayer mode, something I can imagine makes the
experience significantly easier. As for characters, it really is a beautifully strange mixed bag. From a fighter pilot trying to save his wife, to a
Ninja sent on a mission from his lord, or an idol who has accidentally'd into
the whole situation.... Or some of my personal favourites, the Danish
contingent, consisting of a brawny, Viking proving he is the strongest
in the world, or the Robot just dominating on other machines. The game
itself is just... Wacky like that, and I am all for it. My understanding
is there is a playable Dolphin pilot in one of the later Arcade sequels.
The
game is divided into two acts, if you will. The first part will see you
playing 3 levels in he nations you didn't pick to play as. So, playing
as the US, you won't play the US stage but you will do the UK, Japan and
Denmark stage, in a bit of a random order. Ater that there are 3 more
stages, set in a few other countries before you tackle the final mission
that tasks you with stopping a shuttle from reaching space.
Incidentally, in the Japanese version of the game, if you take too long
fighting the final boss, it will escape and there is a secret bad
ending.
Continuing the streak of weird and quirky, there seems to be a
random chance that you will fight a special, silly final boss instead of
the usual one. At the end of the game, as you are trying to destroy the
fleeing rocket, it will split into a smaller
missile, which you continue to fight, however, there seems to be a
somewhat random chance that instead of the missile, a pod will emerge
from the rocket and you will fight a giant monkey, who flies around the
screen shooting projectiles at you. It is almost reminiscent of the
Osaru from Dragon Ball Z. I don't know if there are specific requirements
that need to be done to fight this variant. Much like the quirky roster
of characters, having a silly secret boss at the end of the game is
apparently a hallmark of the series.
Despite the
difficulty, I really enjoy Aero Fighters, initially it does feel a
little like you are commando crawling through a sea of broken glass,
bleeding lives and credits at an alarming rate, but I felt that my
perseverance was rewarded with this one as with each subsequent
playthrough I did, I inched closer to being able to do a 1-Continue
Clear. There was no incentive to do this, even RetroAchievements was
polite enough to say that just beating the game as a character is worth
celebrating. It's certainly doable, but I do like the safety net of
hitting the final stage and using a continue there to go into the stage
with my maximum lives. Incidentally, the game has a way of tracking how
many continues have been used, and 1 have heard of this being done in
other games. When you use a continue, and your score resets, you will
start with a score where the 1 digit has incremented. Meaning if you
used 3 credits to beat the game, your final score would end with a 3 as
nothing else in the game can increment that digit in your score. Its a
very unsophisticated method of checking how many continues a player
used, but I can see this being used as a means to check for 1CC. Anyway,
I don't think I have much more to say on this game, _ and that will be
the case for some of the other SHMUPtember games, not everything
inspires a torrent of thoughts in me.
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