"Broken Wings"

Life is full of surprises. Good or bad, they come when you least expect it, and can potentially change your life forever. Such was the case when Sega released After Burner in the arcade. Coming complete with a hydraulic sit-down cabinet, the game was the first of its kind to successfully take the boredom out of flight sims. There were no worries about instrument panels, altimeter gauges, or landing sequences. A short while after its arcade debut, the game went on to be ported to a number of home consoles, including the Sega Master System. Sega's fledgling franchise was such a big hit, that it even saw a release on the NES. Wait…what?!
Surprise! That's most likely what Tengen was thinking once their unlicensed version of After Burner hit store shelves for Nintendo's own console. For those of you not aware, Tengen (a now defunct subdivision of Atari) never had a good relationship with Nintendo. They didn't like Nintendo's strict limits on third party game development, and in turn, Nintendo didn't cozy up to Tengen's proposal for a less restrictive development license. After releasing only 3 officially licensed games (RBI Baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac-Man) in 1988, Tengen went rogue a year later and started dishing out games that Nintendo never approved of. As a result of Tengen's efforts to stick it to Nintendo, NES gamers got to play some key arcade blockbusters that they would otherwise never have a chance to play at home. Of all the unlicensed games that Tengen ever produced on the NES, the ones that were originally Sega titles was by far the ultimate way of giving Nintendo the one finger salute. If you believed in hell, it officially froze over. Unfortunately, so did the gameplay elements that made After Burner so great in the first place.

The game starts off much like the arcade version. There's no major story. Your F-14 Tomcat jet takes off from the battleship and before you know it, you're off to save the world, waging war against the forces of evil. You have the same limited range of motion as in the arcade version. You can bank left or right, pitch up or down, and pull off barrel rolls without the worry of flying too high or too low to ground. Not long after the beginning of the first stage, enemy aircraft will come into view and you can get a little practice at shooting with your Vulcan 20mm cannons as well as attacking with missiles. After defeating the first few waves of enemies, the game advances you the next stage, so on and so forth. As can be expected, you're not the only one firing a weapon. The big attraction to After Burner has always been dodging enemy fire at breakneck speed while flying through heavily detailed environments. This is chiefly were the game goes wrong on the home console port. For starters, the game isn't quite up to snuff with the sense of speed. It's missing that constant thrill factor necessary to capture the authentic arcade experience. To the game's credit, you do have the ability to fire up the afterburners (press start) for a momentary burst of speed, but that will usually send you soaring nose-first into an enemy's missile. And even when flying at a normal pace, out-maneuvering those missiles can still tend to be more of burden than necessary.

Part of the problem is the fact that the oncoming enemies tend to appear on or near the horizon, which is constantly colored bright white. This means that you'll be struggling to a visual lock on them well before they get too close for comfort. What really complicates matters is the fact that your opposition often attacks in groups of 3 or more. If you can't get rid of at least half of their forces before they all fire a shot off, you're in deep dog doo my friend. My favorites are the formations where two jets will show up in plain sight, but one remains hidden in the horizons brightness. That makes for some of the most frustrating moments in the game. Of course, on the plus side, you can't deny that there's a definite challenge for anyone willing to take on the mission.

The barrel roll can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. In most cases, it proved to be the latter for me. Granted, some of this is simply by design. There's the whole gimmick of not being able to fully rotate your F-14 by just holding one direction, so you have to simulate doing so by tilting your plane left or right, then quickly tapping the controller in opposite direction. That's bound to create some unique challenges in the heat of battle and that's cool. What isn't cool is when I need to do a barrel roll to shake off an encroaching missile, and the technique to do it doesn't want to cooperate with me. As the missile draw ever closer, I calmly and confidently try the maneuver input again, figuring that maybe I'm just being too hasty. No luck. By this time, the missile is just a pixel away from overtaking my jet. So I frantically try the directional command again, this time in hopes that my furious controller dexterity will reap the one simple barrel roll I need. Not a chance. Soon I'm seeing smoke emanate from my plane's left wing, indicating that I'm about to go careening into the ground below.
Conversely, I go through a similar experience when I need to refrain from rolling my plane. When the action gets very heavy with planes swooping in from behind and enemies ahead of your firing missiles, you naturally with find your self constantly banking to the left or right. This pretty much guarantees that you'll end up rolling your F-14 at the most inopportune times, which leave you vulnerable to attack until your plane gets into the upright positions again. I just love that helpless feeling I get when I'm watching a missile sail toward me while in mid-roll.

The awesome scenery we saw in the arcade original is completely missing here. Gone are the detailed trees and shrubbery that once decorated the ground. Instead, every area looks as if a massive war already took place and you're just flying over the aftermath. The only thing that successfully distinguishes one stage from the next is the change in background upon reaching the beginning of a new area and the occasional refueling sequences. Quite honestly, I'd periodically glance at the ground while engaged in battle and become baffled as to what I was looking at. The first few times I played through what turned out to be the snow environment (stage 5 or 6), I initially thought I was suddenly flying above the clouds. Better yet, the first stage to feature a landscape looks more like you're flying over a sea of regurgitated spinach. Unfortunately, the backgrounds also tend to be more of an eye strain than anything else thanks to the bright hues of orange and blue and green.
Another problem is your own jet fighter. Not only is it a bit too diminutive for its own good, but the shade of grey chosen for your plane tends to blend in with the bright backgrounds more than it should. Not the best choices of color types when you need to see what's ahead of you and react accordingly. This, in turn, only compounds the problems I mentioned earlier with not being able to spot the enemy well before he's in your face. Too many of the wrong elements combine to make an already lackluster port even less appealing for the player expecting a halfway decent visual representation of the arcade game.

The music is really the only aspect of the game that doesn't completely ruin the experience for me. Most of the tracks are fairly faithful to the original, albeit slightly sedated. My favorite tune is still the beginning level's theme. It always reminds me of the Top Gun movie, which ironically came out the same year as when After Burner hit the arcades. You have your basic beeps and blips from your radar when ever an enemy is headed your way or you have a missile on your six o'clock. Other than, it's just your standard fair of explosions and gunfire. Nothing you haven't heard before on the NES hardware.

After Burner is a game I adored when it was in the arcade, and I still love it now. I really wanted to like the NES version, because I love the novelty of playing a Sega a game on a Nintendo console when such was not supposed to be the case back then. But there's too much wrong in the execution of gameplay and visual presentation. If the barrel roll didn't make or break your success in the game, then I probably wouldn't mind as much that the inconsistent controls hamper the maneuverability of your jet. The bland, yet eye-straining visuals only add to the frustration. Sometimes, just trying to get a lock on a group of pea-sized enemies on the horizon will end up costing you a life. Perhaps worst of all is the lack of continues. With 18 stages to play through and only 3 lives to start off with, a few continues would have been a decent persuasion to finish the game, considering all the issues bogging it down. If you don't already own this game in your library of titles, you're not missing anything. Some games are best left un-ported to 8-bit home consoles and After Burner was one of them.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/15/09, Updated 07/15/09

Game Release: After Burner (US, 1989)