1942

"Addictive Bullet Dodging..."

1942 is the first of two games in the series that made a near legendary impact on the arcade circuit, makes a decent stand on the old Nintendo Entertainment System. With visuals and game play that was ported over from the arcade counterpart, as well as that damned theme music that is played constantly throughout each stage, and leaves an imprint in your mind that you can't quite get rid of! You're still a fighter pilot who is looking to take out the near endless waves of enemy fighters with a plain machine gun, and then charged with taking out huge destroyers at the end of each stage. While it's not really all that difficult, the amount of enemies that you'll face later on in the harder stages will truly challenge your ability to pilot and fight effectively!

Flight Into Hell…

It's pretty simple and to the point, you pilot your fighter plane through enemy territory and shoot down the opposition while trying not to get yourself blown up in the process. You'll face off against enemy planes of all shapes and sizes as well as fighting huge battleships and trying to avoid getting nailed in the process! There are bonuses and weapon upgrades to be found, but they do little except boost your point score, which is what the game revolves around. Now, you’ll find that the game takes a serious swing for the challenging side once you get into the later stages and where you need to really pay attention to what is going on during the game!

With the later stages, the enemies come in at different points, and the real challenge to the game is to memorize the patterns that they take throughout the game. It’s almost a given, that you’ll spend part of your time getting blown up and staring at a continue screen, simply because the game takes that unreal turn for the difficult and really doesn’t stop with it until you’ve either run out of patience or simply finished the game. Most beginners to the genre would do well to start here in the arcade series, simply because they can get used to the fact that the game moves slower than the rest, and therefore, there is the ability to learn how to maneuver your fighter in such a way that future games are in fact easier to play!

You move left to right, and use the fire button to shoot down as many of them before they hit you. This can get a little on the hairy side in later levels, when you're strafing a battleship that just refuses to die, and if you get cornered, there is no way out except to take the hit and keep moving when your plane reappears! Gamers who have any sort of experience in this type of game play will find that the game really isn’t all that hard to figure out and play with. Beginners may have some trouble in the later stages when it comes down to actually making it through the incoming enemy shots, but it’s nothing that a little practice and some patience can’t accomplish with some time thrown in for good measure.

The Numbing Song Of Air Battle…

A slightly catchy tune accompanies you through ninety percent of the game and only changes when you're getting ready to do battle with the boss ship. The sound effects are standard fare of explosions and droning planes as well as the klaxon sound of alarms going off when you begin your strafing run of the boss battleship. Combine this with the sounds from other games that you find on the NES, and you may find that if the audio tracks aren’t turned up enough, there is plenty of the music and the effects that you’ll miss throughout the game!

Bullets To Bombers…

As I said, every game series starts somewhere, and 1942 is it. Giving you the most basic of visuals, you really have nothing to be surprised with or about while playing, save for maybe the different plane designs. You'll have large bombers firing at you, small attack planes strafing the screen, and in the boss battles, you'll get huge battleships! While this may seem like a lot, it really isn't when you boil down that the amount of incoming shots can and will cover up everything that there is to see! This won’t really come, as a surprise to anyone who knows what series improvements is all about, and if you compare this game to other ones, you’ll find that there is nothing here that cannot be improved upon and eventually is.

Into Infamy…

1942 is a classic shooter for a classic system. Anyone who fondly remembers the NES system, will probably find some good times in this title, and come back to it again and again. But, with the rest of the world moving further and further away from its roots, gamers will forget about this one, and leave it to collect dust, much like the rest of their NES systems. If you can enjoy the game for what it has to offer in terms of addictive qualities, and some very intense battle sequences, then you can ignore the fact that the game doesn’t have much of a point other than to blast whatever looks evil and looks like it’s going to kill you. Once you’ve got that down and you’ve got just what it takes to go through 1942, then head for the next one, which features just a little bit more…

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/09/01, Updated 02/05/03