Action Fighter

"Vegita cleans the downstairs closet and finds...a review!"

Today shall be a good day for reviewing. Why? Simple - nostalgia is a powerful tool, one that can make men turn to the strangest of activities just because ''It was cool when we did it, years ago.'' Yes, Nostalgia - the thing of the past - has driven me to sit down with several Master System games and replay them, wondering what in the WORLD drove me to pick them up in the first place.

It's always fun to look at games you've played in the past and relive those previous experiences from a new perspective. Games that were easy, games that were hard, games that you loved dearly - all things change when you look back. Therefore, I shouldn't have been surprised when I played ''Action Fighter,'' a strange mix of gaming styles and genres developed for the Master System in 1986. Over the years, I created misconceptions about the game, starting with how the game was played. I suppose this could be chalked up to poor gamer skills, but the fact remains that I honestly believed this game to be a cheesy Spy Hunter knock-off. This might be true if you only looked at one aspect of the game...

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, and should discuss the game itself before I move onto my inability to remember the past accurate. Let's start off with the premise of the game. As with most of my Master System games, I do not have an Instruction Manual (or even a box) to accompany the game, so I really have no idea what the plot for this game is. Therefore, you are left to try and figure it out on your own through the game itself and the background provided. At the title screen of the game, a large red car drives up and flashes its lights beneath the game's logo. This entails that the game is a driving game. Upon starting the game, you see a picture of 3 boats, with the words ''Mission 1 - Sink'' listed above and the President's Seal beneath. Therefore, you can safely assume that you are on a mission from the President to blow up these ships. So how does a driving game get out into the middle of the sea and destroy ships? That's the humorous part - after this screen, you are taken to the game itself, which puts you behind the controls of...a motorcycle? Ok, what the DEVIL is going on here?

Actually, it's all very simple. You control this Motorcycle, dashing along the highway while shooting other vehicles that get in your way. Unfortunately, if you leave the road or happen to ram another vehicle from directly behind, you die. I'll return to the ''dying'' concept in a bit, for now let's talk about the driving itself. As you plow along the various roads and harbor-sections, you can shoot (or bump) other vehicles off of the road. Occasionally after shooting these vehicles down, a Letter (A through F) will scroll down along the road. Nab this letter and it will appear on the Right Side of the screen. Successfully grab the letters A-D and your Motorcycle will magically turn into a Car - the aforementioned car from the Title Screen. See, NOW we're getting somewhere. This car is significantly more durable than the motorcycle, being able to control itself better upon being bumped as well as having twice the firepower of the Motorcycle incarnation.

As you continue down your path of destruction, you will continue to gain letters - the letters E and F, specifically. Upon gaining these letters and arriving at the next harbor point, your car will slow to a halt as 2 Jet-Propulsion engines affix themselves to your car, turning you into a Rocket-Car. From here, your car takes off into the sky, ready to hunt down and destroy your target(s). The game then switches to a Shooter, having your heavily-modified motorcycle combating flying targets (and ground ones, through the aid of dropped bombs and a targeting reticule) while moving towards its destination. Upon arriving at your goal, you then have to maneuver about, taking out your target - in the First Mission, this is 3 submergible boats that fire at you while sinking and surfacing to avoid bombs of your own. Stage 2 picks up with you still in the air, and has you battle along (against even harder waves of opponents) until you can land on the ground and work your way towards the next group of baddies (6 tanks). The stages alternate back and forth like this, each stage getting progressively harder.

Back to that section I spoke of about ''dying''. Your vehicle has an infinite number of lives, provided you still have time left on the timer. The timer itself has 999 counts (5 counts equaling roughly 1 second, meaning you have around 200 seconds or over 3 minutes), and as long as the timer is still counting, you still can still come back. The problem is, whenever you die you are sent back in the stage a little bit, meaning you lose precious seconds in the process. Also, if you managed to grab a power-up to upgrade your weaponry (in the Driving Stages you can hop into a van, while in the flying stages you grab ''P'' icons), you lose this when you die. Sucks to be you, eh? Once the timer counts down to 1, you have only 1 remaining life left - if you die, you'll still start over, but the timer will hold at Zero. Thus, if you die again, it's game over for you.

So that's how the game progresses - you start off as a Motorcycle, barreling down the road trying to blow up others up until you can turn into a car. Gain a couple more power-ups to transform into a Flying Car, and from there blast your way until you reach the boss(es). On the following stage, shoot your way through your enemies until you reach the landing point, then continue down the road until you reach the next boss. A simple enough progression through the game, yes?

Gameplay:

I've discussed how you play through the game, but how does the game itself FEEL? First off, I probably make the run-through of the game sound easy. By no means is this game easy, as it is incredibly easy to die (and, thus, very frustrating to replay the same sections over and over). This isn't truly a fault of the controls, though. For the Driving Scenes, your motorcycle/car is easily controlled - Button 2 fires your gun, Left/Right move your vehicle according, and Up/Down control your acceleration. In the Flying Scenes, you cannot control your flight speed with Up and Down, instead using all 4 directions to move your vehicle about. Button 1 controls your bombs in these areas, while Button 2 continues the trend of shooting straight ahead.

Your motorcycle is incredibly weak, easily being swatted about by anything and everything on the road. Thus, you will be forced to play Dodge & Shoot rather than Ram & Shoot (the Spy Hunter style). The stages wind about, and since the slightest touch from your opponents can send you skidding off the road (and, thus, to your death), it becomes frustrating. Although the game flashes arrows at the top of the screen that tells you when the road will be taking turns or splitting into 2 sections, they often come to quickly for you to notice and prepare accordingly. Thus, the driving sections - despite their somewhat innovative style - are frustrating to play through. Granted, it is interesting to be able to downsize your car back to the Motorcycle at any moment (by pressing Buttons 1 and 2 at the same time), but I really don't see a purpose to making yourself weaker and more subjective to being batted around.

The Flight scenes are far more perilous. Your enemies come in semi-predictable patterns, although the variations from pattern to pattern can still wreak havoc on your shooting skills. For example - you have a group of 5 ships that will move in a single line from one side of the screen to the other, occasionally firing. This is easy enough to deal with; however, the timing on when they fire often varies, thus throwing you off as to when they might be shooting you. You could go for an easy shot, only to discover that you were laid to waste by an unexpected salvo. This difficulty is compounded even more with multiple enemies onscreen, acting similarly - Helicopters, although predictable in their shooting flight patterns, will still easily destroy you due to their timed shots and wide-spread formations. You literally have to memorize the best routes to circumvent each group of enemies, and pray dearly that there aren't any ground-based installations to attack you at the same time.

Guess what ELSE is bad about the flight areas? There are periodical cloud formations that you have to pass through, which can easily obscure not just enemies, but their projectiles as well. Therefore, you could very easily be travelling through a cloud and not only miss your enemies, but flat-out die because you couldn't see what was approaching. There's something very, very wrong about that in my opinion. The game is difficult enough thanks to the random groups of enemies and mis-timed projectiles, but when you start including scenery that can kill you as well...I just don't like it.

Graphics:

Well, if this game has one thing going for it, that would be the graphics. From from the start of the game, you'll see a fairly impressive display of graphical power for an 8-bit console. The Title Screen, with the Red ''Supercar'' driving up, looks quite nice. The game itself moves quickly and shows a decent amount of detail per car, despite the low amount of frames per animation -your motorcycle has a total of 3, with 2 of them simply being the same sprite flipped over to give the appearance of leaning the opposite direction. The other vehicles share the same amount of detail, although they lack the animation you have. The Flying Scenes carry the same amount of artistic effort, putting 1-2 frames of animation per each opponent. Thankfully, the bosses have more animation to them, giving some semblance of effort in the graphical department. All in all, the game looks quite good for a production from 1986, especially for a game released for the Master System.

Sound:

Wellsir, I don't really know what to say about the sound. The music itself is fast-paced, utilizing a fast beat to accompany the lead musical track. However, the incessant ''low-high'' bass track tends to really get irritating after a while, making you wish for more variety in the song (which is a shame, since this particular piece of music is the main song heard throughout the game). The sound effects themselves are tolerable enough, with a ''clang'' sound for when your bullets collide and decent ''explosion'' sounds for destroyed installations or opponents. Although I think the efforts at sound could have been better done if the emphasis had been placed more on the sound than the lackluster music, I feel the general audio job was performed well. Again, I am basing this opinion off of the time period the game was released, but you can make your own decisions on this. The music was ok but repetitive and the sound was tolerable, so I'd rate the whole audio package as average.

Overall:

So what have we learned today? We had a game that, for the first part, somewhat mimicked Spy Hunter (travelling down the road, shooting down opponents). However, it lacked the variety of weapons or the music, so it really can't truly be called a knock-off. The flying sections, while difficult, were inventive enough, especially when paired with driving scenes. However, the game becomes too difficult too quickly, bogged down by difficult enemy waves and a frustrating knack for making you replay sections over and over. The sound is decent, the graphics are above average, but the game itself can only hope to achieve an average rating.

---Final Score: 5/10---

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/29/02, Updated 05/29/02