Afterburner

Developer: Sega
Year: 1988

Greetings, Laura, and welcome to the wide, wide, wide world of lackluster arcade ports!

When people talk about games from the 2nd era of console gaming 'not standing up', this is what they're talking about. Honestly, the game's not that bad, but if you can think of a single reason to play it for more than 10 minutes, I'd love to hear it. It's just not meant to be played for even as long as we've been playing these games, and that's a gaming phenomenon that doesn't exist any more -- mostly for the best.

All of this said, here's the breakdown on Afterburner:

• There's only 1 kind of enemy, unless you count the missile that tries to catch you from behind in the third stage.
• The stages are identical, except for the color of the non-descript ground passing below you -- check out the two screen
• You can roll your plane 360 degrees, though this mostly hurts your efforts to shoot anything.
• The song stinks -- and this is something that can really rescue a mediocre game.
• The graphics are lousy -- it's often difficult to tell oncoming missiles from other important things.
• Re-fueling is cool, though you don't actually do anything. There's a big mothership with a claw.

I wish i didn't feel this way about Afterburner, because I liked it as a kid, but I do: it just doesn't hold up.

And a large part of this is because it's a bad port, but another large part is because it's a port of an arcade game -- a very successful one, actually, by Yu Suzuki from Sega's AM2 development group. I think that arcade games in general -- with the possible exception of fighters -- probably won't stand up in your house anymore. It's sort of sad, but if you don't believe me, go play Afterburner. You won't hate it. You just won't want to play it for very long.

Rating: 5/10 Meh.
Advice: You can't crash into the ground, but feel free to try.
Best Moment: The claw, obviously. And realizing that you actually start with 150 missiles, so fire away.