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Afterburner Complete: the downside of digital controls

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It’s not just horizontal side-scrolling shooters that I’m hopeless at. Afterburner Complete is an excellent conversion of the arcade game, and one of the games that I’ve played many times on my actual 32X. It’s colourful, it’s fast and smooth, it has great music. I am rubbish at it.

Part of this is down to the digital controls, I’m sure. There’s no nuance on how you move, you have to throw the plane all over the screen to avoid missiles but this means that it’s really difficult to target any of the enemy planes. On Afterburner Climax the controls are much more precise, with the aiming reticule being more delicately balanced, and I feel so much more in control.

I set the number of lives to the maximum, and I managed to get as far as level 8, but I found the shift in focus to avoiding obstacles – the canyon walls and the radio masts – to be beyond me. No matter how quickly I reacted, even with the plane’s speed set to the minimum, I ended up crashing multiple times. I have no idea why I couldn’t just fly a little bit higher.

Kolibri: eaten by a frog

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Kolibri is certainly colourful, fast, and with plenty of sprites flying around the screen. Flying being a key word – as a hummingbird, everything takes place in the air, with very occasional ground-based enemies. Frustratingly the development team have obviously seen nature videos where the hummingbirds move around slightly in the air, because they’ve implemented that here – my bird was shifting around a little when I really wanted it to just stay still and let a projective pass.

It is a bit of a frustrating game in places. In order for the game to look as natural as possible, they have dispensed with an on-screen display. You can’t see how much health you have left unless you get hit or collect an energy ball, at which point one, two, three or four little hummingbirds appear around you to show you how many hits you can absorb. You also can’t easily see what weapon you are holding, though of course that can be fixed by firing it. I think that your bird colour changes depending on the weapon as well, but I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve played through the first five or six levels now, and there’s a bit of variety there. In Aero the Acro-Bat, you were given some instructions when you started each level on what the goal was – jump on certain platforms, or defeat a certain number of specific enemies – but here you just need to work out what’s going on before you die. Not always possible, but at least there appear to be infinite lives; you just start again at the beginning of the level you died on.

[A side note: screenshots taken on this emulator often come out a bit odd, I think because of the way the Mega Drive and 32X outputs are being combined. The third screenshot here, for example, only has the background on the upper half the screen, whereas actually there was a hill there.]

The other issue is that the powerups are a bit too similar to each other and easy to pick up. Normally ease of collection would be a good thing, but here there are about six or seven weapons and you can collect the powerup for the one you want. I am particularly fond of the homing energy balls, or the lasers, but often find that I’m accidentally collecting other weapons instead. Homing weapons are useful because enemies can come from both sides, and the controls are a bit picky in terms of turning around.

It’s a breath of fresh air for horizontal shooters – look, no spaceships! – but it’s a little frustrating to control, which ruins it somewhat.

Virtua Racing and Virtua Racing Deluxe: evolution of the Mega Drive

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Virtua Racing in the arcade was a revelation. Until this point driving games were generally represented by a curving path drawn on a 2D plane, with you having to react left and right to keep in the middle of the road (the game was moving your sprite automatically in the opposite direction). As amazing a game Chase HQ on the CPC was, the driving model was basic at best. Even Road Rash had only a semblance of steering. There were some exceptions – Hard Drivin’, Stunt Car Racer, all the Mode 7 flat racers on the SNES – but it wasn’t until Virtua Racing appeared that you could really feel like you were driving a racing car.

It came with a price tag. While most games in the arcades were 50p a go (or even 10p for the older cabinets), the big noticeable Virtua Racing cabinet was £1. I hadn’t paid £1 for a go of an arcade game since the Virtuality cabinet on which I played VTOL. At least Virtua Racing didn’t make me feel ill, with a headset that didn’t fit properly and a framerate that was probably measured in seconds per frame, although going back to the arcade game now the refresh rate isn’t anything to write home about either.

So I didn’t play VR much in the arcade, but the few times I did it was a great experience. And then they announced it was going to be released for the Mega Drive. Oh my.

It cost £70, almost twice the price of a standard game, and it included an extra processor to allow for the polygonal graphics. The framerate wasn’t amazing (15 fps compared to that arcade’s 30), the graphics were very much cut back, but the feeling of racing was still there. I bought Virtua Racing and played it a lot.

I don’t think any other games ever used the same extra processor on the Mega Drive, but not long after Virtua Racing was released Sega announced new hardware for the home – not only a new console (which would be launched as the Saturn), but an add-on for the Mega Drive to increase its capabilities. The 32X did not sell well, which is why I was able to buy mine for £25 a couple of years later. It’s a fun machine to own because the games are actually pretty decent, even today.

Sega released Virtua Racing Deluxe for the 32X, and it’s a big step up from the Mega Drive version. It runs at 20 fps – which is still very low for today’s standards, but feels fine – and there’s a lot more detail on the screen. I played this version even more than the MD game, even though I did get it much later on.

Since Virtua Racing Deluxe was a launch game for the 32X, both these games came out in 1994 – March for the Mega Drive, and December for the 32X. Comparing the two games shows quite a lot of progress for nine months – and the huge upgrade the 32X was able to enable.

The resolution and clarity of the graphics is immediately apparent here – the 32X has more colours, relying less on dithering for shading, and everything is made up of more polygons. Even the HUD overlay is better constructed, with the map rotating with the car, and the information taking up a little less space.

I must apologise for the lack of consistency between these images – I wasn’t planning on comparing them when I took the screenshots. Nevertheless, you can see here the detail on the car is massively improved for the 32X game, even if you can’t see the struts holding on the wheels (due to them being the same colour grey as the road).

You can also see that I completed the course faster on the 32X.

The 32X has added particles, a clarity around the edge of the road, and for some reason the car’s at a slightly different angle.

Revisiting these games (admittedly via emulation) is instructive to see how far we’ve come, and yet also how much has remained the same. Virtua Racing came out on the Switch a few years ago, and it is (as you’d expect) even better than the arcade game – 60 fps, improved handling, expanded game modes – but the game plays the same as ever, and the Mega Drive versions are just as fun.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD: completed!

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At least my thoughts have been consistent.  The top tweet is eleven years after the bottom.

Having bought Twilight Princess alongside my Wii on launch day in December 2006, but then being captivated by other games (and with a general desire to not play the game until Kieron and John were going to do so as well), I didn't get around to actually playing it until 2011, after I finally gave up on my friends' lackadaisical attitude to Zelda gaming.  As I was more active here at the time, you can read several posts about my progress then, where I completed the forest temple, was whisked away to the twilight, had trouble with controlling Wolf Link, met Midna, and scouted for the three parts of the Fused Shadow.  I seemingly got as far as the temple at the bottom of Lake Hylia, including defeating the boss, before giving up.

Giving up? I don't think it was a conscious decision. Instead, Mario Kart 7 was released, I was also playing a Layton game, and other stuff just seemed to grab me instead. I always intended to go back, but I never did.

Skip forward a decade, and I realise that I bought a copy of Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U when it was cheap somewhere, I have no big story game on the go, and I quite fancy crossing this off my list - particularly because I was bought Skyward Sword HD for the Switch for my birthday and I'd like to play that sometime.  So, rather than resurrecting my old save and complaining about being lost, I unwrap the new game and start it.

After a few hours I remember why I lost interest in the early days of my first playthrough. It's just a little dull to start with, meeting people around the village, fishing, running down narrow corridors between areas. There is some interest when children are captured ...

... but the muted (brown, C64-like) colour palette does its best to dissuade this interest. And then you get to the twilight, which (as my tweets above show) I found pretty difficult to progress through.

And yet I did.

I remembered very little about my original playthrough other than chasing monkeys through a forest and the aesthetic.  I suspect that this is largely due to the relatively generic nature of the world; the art direction isn't as recognisable as Breath of the Wild, for example.  It wasn't until I was many hours in that I started to remember my routes through places; but those many hours became more and more exciting as I progressed.  It was clear to me that the story of Midna and the story of Zelda were somehow intertwined, but it wasn't until I met up with the scary-floating-faces crew that things became clear.

Midna is probably the best thing about the game, and having her constant companionship and annoyances throughout the story meant that the end was quite affecting.  Having traversed through Hyrule, back and forth to collect hearts and rupees and equipment and whatnot, there was a definite shift in the endgame once you travel to the skies and then to meet Ganon.  On the way there's a few non-surprises ...



And then once you get to Ganon, it's a pretty standard big boss Zelda game fight, with a few tricks with Midna and Zelda and unexpected but expected changes.  You know you're coming to the final fight when you come across a room full of chests.



Midna doesn't like Ganondorf, by the way.

And then the end of the game.  I think I've mentioned before about the final blow in the Wind Waker, and how no other Zelda game has quite met it - but this came close.  After taunting and attacking and generally making those I cared about suffer, it was nice to make Ganondorf wear a new brooch.

It isn't the best Zelda game.  It's not even the best Zelda game on the Gamecube.  But it is a Zelda game, in the classical form, and the dungeons are well designed, and the characters are (mostly) distinctive and fun, and the puzzles and equipment is intuitive and challenging, and the story is a bit rubbish but you want to see the end of it, and the enemies are enjoyable to fight, and ... it's good.  Overall it went on a little too long, even if the story did take some interesting twists and turns, and the oppressive nature is a huge barrier to enjoyment.  But it's good.