Space Ace Blu-ray Review
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If you were growing up in the 80's chances are
you were one of those kids (like me) enamored by the new cartoon style video
games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. At my childhood arcade Aladin's Castle in
Great Falls Montana, we got both of these games the same week and they were
so popular that crowds would gather around and the arcade employees had to
put additional TVs on top of the machines so everyone could see. I kid you
not, I must have watched for hours as people tried to and ultimately failed
to play those games, I never once saw anybody see the game to completion as
it was just to darn hard. So when I heard the re-release of Space Ace was
coming out on Blu-ray, I was stoked, especially since the last few rehashes
of Dragon's Lair have all fallen flat on their face. But with this new Blu-ray
thing, well, how could I possibly be disappointed?
How do you play a Blu-ray movie? Well, like
Dragon's Lair, the game is basically a cartoon that has some interaction
going for it. You watch the cartoon with your fingers poised to do
something, anything. If an area of the screen glows, you must quickly push
the d-pad in that direction. If your timing is right, then Ace will avoid
the danger and continue onward, if you get it wrong, then he dies. The same
is said about his weapon, if the gun glows, then you had better hit the
action button and Ace/Dexter will use the weapon. Now in all honesty the
game is more about memorization then about quick reflexes. As you go through
the game, you can complete each section knowing that if you make it to the
next, when you die, the game will start over at the new scenario. Some of
these scenarios are quite short and easy to get past, others, like the end
sequence literally have you playing it over and over learning one more move
before you die. In all honesty, I probably played through the end scenario
60 plus times before finally beating the game (more on this below).
"Yup, I can crush walnuts with my jaw."
Even though it is touted like its for the PS3,
Space Ace can be played on any Bly-ray player, it just so happens that most
of the people who have a Blu-ray is because they have a PS3. But this
is something that should be said since you can play the game with your
remote or the PS3 controller depending on what kind of player you have. That
being said, my memories of Space Ace were somewhat tarnished when I began
playing the game, For starters, the animation and look of the game is really
dated. I had hoped that the game would have been given a solid cleaning and
remastering to brighten things up and make the colors pop, but that is
clearly not so since you can darn near see the graininess of the graphics in
some scenarios. In fact, the game needed to be restored if for anything, to
make the consistency of the graphics flow better. For example, as Ace/Dexter
it is your job to save your girlfriend Kimberly and stop Bork from using
his "Infanto" ray on the people of Earth. Kimberly's clothes change colors
(badly) throughout the game. Is this important? No, but for some reason I
thought this bugged me quite a bit. And its not just Kimberly, its the
different aliens and baddies you run into throughout the game. What's worse,
after all my meandering about not getting a face-lift, there is a bonus
section that shows that they did give it a facelift. I'm sorry, but while
they did make some improvements in the transfer, they still have a long way
to go as far as I am concerned.
But let me digress, the whole point of the game
is like I said above, to stop Borf from turning the people of Earth into
infants. The back-story that would play on the arcade machine when no one
was playing was that Borf shot Ace partially and turned him into Dexter, the
13 year old version of himself in all his awkward and dorky glory. Ace
himself was some sort of galactic hero with mountains of muscles and a cocky
swagger needed to defeat all villains. I could not find this intro anywhere
in the game, and in fact, in the special features section, you can watch the
entire game, start to finish like a cartoon. The intro is never there
either.
"He's big, he's bad, he's blue, he's... Borf."
If there is any real improvement, its the sound.
The game sounds well when spewing forth sound effects and for the most part
the dialogue. The problem is, occasionally things are said that make no
sense and in one scenario towards the end of the game Bork is yelling at
Ace, but you can't hear what he is saying, as if the sound crew forgot to
turn up this one portion of the audio channel. The heroic music is playing,
the sound effects are going off, but you can't hear what Borf is saying.
This was just plain silly to me, the quality control in this reissue was
really lacking. Additionally, I swear they left some stuff out, because like
I said, the conversations that occur just have no real flow to them. I
wondered if I had missed something, one minute Kimberly is mad at Ace, the
next she's assisting him, but upon watching the game in its completion via
the movie, nope, Ace and Kimberly really are idiots, it is a wonder Borf
failed in his conquest of Earth.
The weirdness continues as well, let me set the
scenario up. As you play through the game (primarily as Dexter) you will
occasionally be given the opportunity to turn into Ace for a bit of time.
The idea was that the game would have some replayability going for it. If
you are running and you choose to activate Ace, then the scenario changes to
reflect Ace's more aggressive personality and will feature more butt kicking
and laser shooting. If you stay as Dexter, you more or less do more running
away and dodging. Eventually the game returns to the normal path, its just
you were given the two choices to get there. Here is where things get weird.
Whether you die as Ace or as Dexter, oftentimes the death cutscene would
have nothing to do with the death you thought you were about to see. For
instance, in the swamp area, you are on a platform that is crumbling and a
giant lizard is trying to eat you, should you not go the correct direction,
the death cutscene has you holding on to what appears to be a giant pugel
stick being driven into a deep hole. A deep hole? Sometimes the game got it
right, but almost as much it got it wrong. Plus, often the background
graphics wouldn't match the scene in which you died in or were from a
previous part of the game. As a child I had no idea that Don Bluth had cut
so many corners making this title.
"Ace, move your hand you pervert!"
Now, I must tell you, that it took an incredible
amount of dedication to beat this game and to be honest with you, the only
reason I did so was because my two boys were wanting to see the end. I had
played enough to write the review, beating it only makes me look like a hero
to my children. That being said, there are so many glitches and sloppy edits
that this game is really sad. During the game, there were times where I
would make the correct move and then the scene would change and, I kid you
not, a 1/1000 frame of the next scenario would flash and then I would be
dead. Thinking it may be a glitch I repeated the same steps only to find
that by changing into Ace 30 seconds earlier, that I could move around the
glitch, so much for alternate paths. This was isolated to a single time but
still, this is not how to make a game. In addition to this was the several
times the game blatantly told me to do the wrong thing by highlighting an
area or weapon when through trial and error it was discovered that I needed
to do something entirely different. This just kills me because the game is
already challenging enough as it is, to do such a blatant miscue is simply
irritating.
And finally, the game can possibly drive you
and/or loved ones insane. Each time you die, my man Bork comes on the screen
to insult you with some irritating comment. What's worse, you hear it so
often because each time you play a scenario you can usually only advance a
single move and then die. So in a scenario like the motorcycle scene, which
has around 15 moves, you will play it around 20-25 times because each time
only moves you one move closer. This game really frustrated me.
| Review Scoring Details for Space Ace Blu-ray |
Gameplay: 4.0
You don't play the game, you memorize the
movements, and there is no room for error here.
Graphics: 4.0
They said they gave it some spit and polish, and
the bonus reel proves it, but the game still looks grainy and choppy.
Background deaths don't match the scenarios, characters change colors for no
reason, the game is disappointing.
Sound:3.0
The voice work in this title is horrendous and
even fades out in one scene. While they gave it a nifty surround sound
track, it still is disappointing to hear bad dialogue being said by bad
voice actors.
Difficulty: Hard
It takes about 15 minutes or less to watch the
game without death. I died at least 100 times beating this game, thank
goodness you can have infinite lives.
Concept: 4.5
In 1983 this and Dragon's Lair was "THE" games
to have, amazing what 25 years does to the desire portion of the brain.
Overall: 3.8
Man, even for the $25 price tag, I would say
pass, the frustration, the poor controls, the hideous audio, the completely
ruined memory of a misspent youth in arcades, I could cry.
