Space Ace

"Quite possibly one of the worst games ever made"

I think we all know Dragon´s Lair for having been the very first of its kind and having introduced one of the weirdest genres in video game history to us: the Interactive Movie. While Dragon´s Lair might have blown away people back then when it hit the arcades with some magnificent cartoon animations provided by none other than former Disney employee Don Bluth, the game suffered from one significant flaw not even its visuals could conceal: even in the 80s people grew aware of the fact that the amount of gameplay was extremely limited and almost non-existent. All you had to do was pushing the right button at the right time every once in a while during the cartoon sequences, and that´s about it. And no matter how engrossing it might have seemed to have such visuals in arcades in the 80s, the practically non-existent gameplay made it clear that this genre was doomed, even though the Interactive Movie was able to see a revival on the Sega CD and Panasonic´s 3DO, with more or less satisfying results.

And one of Dragon´s Lair´s successors happened to be Space Ace, with the animations and the character design having once again been provided by Don Bluth. But in reality, Space Ace was merely a rehash of the gameplay concept found in Dragon´s Lair, with the player being just as uninvolved as before. The only difference was the Space setting, but even the basic idea for the story was a shameless copy of Dragon´s Lair, with the same ol´ "save the princess (in the case of Space Ace, high school girl friend)" formula.

So, while Space Ace already did not exactly work in the arcades, the mere idea of porting the game on a 16-Bit console like the Super Nintendo already was a terrible one from the start. And unsurprisingly, Space Ace turned out to be an awful mish mash that even manages to be actually more unenjoyable than its arcade original, and even more amazingly, this dreadful and horrendous gaming experience is quite possibly the game with the worst control scheme ever, making Space Ace nearly unplayable. What am I saying. This game IS unplayable, for several reasons, to be precise.

I will spare you the details about the cookie-cutter story, since it does not really matter at all and is not able to save this already sunken wreck of a game, so let´s go straight to the "gameplay". What can I say? Space Ace is an interactive movie that has been ported onto the Super Nintendo, I think that says it all, but here is why this game fails so miserably. At first, the game might seem like a Jump & Run, judging from its 2D-like perspective, but that thought will quickly fade away due to the fact that all you can do is pushing the right button at the right time in order to trigger an event that will cause the story to continue and prevent you from dying. For example, once an enemy appears on the screen, you have to push a button in order to draw a gun and kill the approaching enemy. Sounds easy in theory, but first of all, the game handles the reception of your commands in an extremely sluggish and downright awful way, making the entire procedure a matter of luck instead of skill, killing the main aspect of the gameplay instantly. So not only is the basic idea of this "game" paper thin, it´s also amateurishly executed, making it truly impossible for you to really command your main character (named Dexter) throughout the game. Needless to say, the difficulty level of the game is unfair, even though that would be an understatement. Part of the reason for this are the aforementioned broken controls of the game, and another aspect might be the fact that the game does not really give you time to react properly to the things happening onscreen, and even if you are able to, you´re likely to fail because your "hero" is, to be perfectly frank, slow like molasses. Good luck avoiding all the deadly traps and killing all the hideous enemies...

The visuals in this game are at least decent, even though it´s clear that the game cannot look as good as it did on laserdisc and in the arcades, and quite honestly, at least Dexter seems to lack enough colors in order to make him appear more fitting with the environments. The problem is that the cutscenes, like the various deathscenes whenever you fail to push the right button, are horribly pixilated, lacking any grace, style or beauty and simply being dreadful to look at. I honestly don´t know what they were thinking when porting this game to the SNES...at the very least, if they really had to make such a useless port, then perhaps they could have made the game fit the capabilities of the SNES, but no...

I don´t really want to go any further into the music and sound category, as there is not really much to tell. The music is quite annoying and much like the rest of the game, it will get on your nerves very quickly, since they are uninspired and boring to listen to, not helping to make the game more bearable at least in terms of audio. Even worse are the sound effects, sometimes bordering on being utterly ridiculous. I shudder when I even think at these short sounds the characters made in the death scenes...annoying is to harmless as a term to describe this travesty, but considering that the game as a whole already fails miserably, it does not really matter anymore.

So, what´s left to say? Horrible idea, even worse execution. It seems like the developers threw every single flaw a game can possibly have into this cartridge in order to create the epitome of bad games for all to avoid like the plague. To me, this horrendous failure might be the worst game I´ve ever played, and I would not even recommend playing this game if it was a gift from one of your relatives. It probably can´t get worse than this, and this steaming pile of dung is without a doubt the worst Super Nintendo game in my book. Avoid this game at all costs if you should happen to stumble over it on e-bay or in some video game shop as a pre-owned game (pity the poor soul who owned this game before, though).

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/06