Take These Broken Wings

After Burner Review (NES)

Genre: Flight Sim/Shooter
Number of Players: 1
Developer: Tengen/Sega
Publisher: Tengen
Release Date: December 1989 (US)
Platform: NES
Also Available On: Arcade, Sega Master System, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, MSX, Famicom, X68000, Towns FM Marty, ZX Spectrum

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Tengen (a defunct subdivision of Atari) never had a good relationship with Nintendo. They didn’t like Nintendo’s strict limits on third-party game development on the NES. On the other side, Nintendo didn’t cozy up to Tengen’s proposal for a less restrictive development license. After releasing only three officially licensed games (R.B.I. Baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac-Man) in 1988, Tengen went rogue a year later and started publishing games without Nintendo’s approval.

Of all the unlicensed games Tengen produced on the NES, the Sega arcade titles were by far the ultimate way of thumbing their nose at Nintendo. If you believed in hell, it officially froze over. Unfortunately, so did the gameplay elements that made After Burner so great in the arcade.

There’s no real story here. Your F-14 fighter jet launches from the carrier, and before you know it, you’re off to save the world from whatever. 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 the 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, you advance to the next stage, so on and so forth.

As can be expected, you are not the only armed jet out there. The big attraction to After Burner has always been the dodging of enemy fire at breakneck speeds while flying through heavily detailed environments. This is chiefly where this home port goes wrong.

For starters, the game doesn’t have the convincing sense of speed necessary to capture the arcade experience. To the game’s credit, you do have the ability to fire up the afterburners (by pressing the start button) for a momentary burst of speed, but doing so usually sends you rocketing into the path of an enemy’s missile. And even when flying at a normal velocity, out-maneuvering those missiles is an exercise in frustration.

Part of the problem is enemies tend to appear on or very close to the white horizon that divides the land scenery and the sky, making it quite difficult to see them before it's too late. They often attack in squadrons of three or more, further complicating matters. If you don’t eliminate at least half their forces before they each fire a shot, you’re in deep doggy doo my friend. Most infamous are the formations where two jets show up in plain sight, but one remains hidden on the horizon. It makes for some of the most frustrating moments in the game.

Doing a barrel roll can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. In most cases, it was the latter for me. Granted, some of this is 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 the opposite direction. That’s bound to create some unique challenges in the heat of battle, which, admittedly feels awesome at times.

What isn’t awesome is when I need to do a barrel roll to shake off an encroaching missile, but alas, the technique doesn’t want to cooperate with me. Soon, I’m seeing smoke emanate from my jet's wing, signaling that I’m about to careen into the surface below. Not a great way to go.

I experienced similar issues at times when I needed to refrain from doing a barrel roll. When the action gets heavy with planes swooping in from behind and enemies in front of you firing missiles, you naturally find yourself constantly banking left and right. This practically guarantees that you’ll end up rolling your jet at the most inopportune times, leaving you vulnerable to attack until it returns to the upright position again. It is quite irksome to helplessly watch as a missile sails toward you while stuck in mid-roll.

The impressive scenery in the arcade original is completely missing here. Gone are the detailed trees and shrubbery that decorated the ground. Instead, every area looks as if a massive war already ravaged everything, 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.

I’d periodically glance at the ground, baffled as to what I was looking at. The first few times I played through what turned out to be the snowy 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, blue, and green.

Another problem is the sprite graphic of your fighter jet. Not only could it stand to be a little bigger, but also its grey color sometimes blends in with the bright backgrounds. This, in turn, only compounds the problems I mentioned earlier with not being able to spot the enemies well before they’re 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.

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The music is the only aspect of the game that doesn’t completely ruin the experience. Most of the tracks are pretty faithful to the original, albeit slightly sedated. My favorite tune is still the theme for the first stage. It always reminds me of the Top Gun movie. You have your basic beeps and blips from your radar whenever an enemy is headed your way or you have a missile on your six o’clock. Otherwise, it’s just your standard fare 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 went in hoping to enjoy this version of it, because I like the novelty of playing a Sega game on the NES—something Nintendo considered sacrilegious, to say the least. But there’s too much wrong with the execution of critical gameplay elements. 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 ugly, bland visuals didn’t do it any favors either.

Trying to get a lock on those pea-sized enemies on the horizon can be fairly tricky, especially for newcomers. Worse yet, there are no continues. With 18 stages to play through and only three lives for the entire run, a few continues would have been appreciated, considering all the issues bogging it down.

If you don’t already have this game, you aren’t missing anything spectacular. I give this a cautious recommendation only to the truly undiscriminating player who really, really wants to play After Burner and doesn’t have access to a better version. This is one home port the NES could have done without.