ACE: Air Combat Emulator

The Good
'Air Combat Emulator' is a very early combat 'flight sim', with sprite-based graphics and simple blippy sounds. It was more at home on the 8-bit machines, where the competition was less fierce - by 1986, this game looked very poor in comparison with Microprose's 'F15 Strike Eagle'. Released in the UK by 'Cascade software' (who only ever did four games, but stuck around for years), and followed by two sequels - 'Ace 2' was a split-screen multiplayer game, and 'Ace 2088' was a sci-fi, 'Star Raiders' game, but not as good as 'Star Raiders'.

The Bad
The graphics are extremely crude - the sky is blue, and the ground is green. You can eject whilst flying upside-down at an altitude of one foot, and live, and if you raise the undercarriage whilst on the runwau you explode. It's not much more advanced than a typical arcade game (River Raid springs to mind), and the claims that it offered unparalled realism were hollow.

The Bottom Line
Very poor early combat / flight action game.

The Good
The title screen, taking off and … exiting the game. Help me out here?

The Bad
There are basically 4 scenarios. Fighting ground forces. Fighting enemy aircraft. Fighting naval forces. Re-fueling. I didn’t like any of them.
I really did try with this game. It was the first game I ever bought. I spent much time trying to fight aircraft, tanks and battleships to no avail.
ACE wasn’t 3D as it was made in 1986. The enemy aircraft used to annoy me most of all. They would fly across the screen on random paths and the only time you hit one was when it flew through your gun-sights.
Tanks used to just appear on the screen looking much the same as the trees.
The navy used to toast you right off as they were supposed to be attacked last.
Re-fueling was a nightmare. Precision keypresses and patience. I don’t think I docked once.

The Bottom Line
A dismal flight-sim. Maybe it was better on the C64 version. Maybe I couldn’t play the game. Maybe I didn’t care…