Airwolf

Developer: Acclaim
Year: 1988

I guess the question is, "How could a game about Airwolf not be totally awesome?" Well, follow me, and learn.

One of the themes that's starting to qualify as 'recurring' in this whole effort is that NES games fail when they try to be too much. The AD&D game that we played, it was this huge complicated engine that didn't do anything. In the end, it's simply not that powerful a piece of hardware, and if you try to cram too much into a game, and don't do it well, you get this horrible bloat thing that happens.

Airwolf is another example of this phenomenon. You've got altitude, damage indicators, velocity, a fuel gauge, and a really complicated schematic map. This leaves maybe half of the available screen for the view of what's actually going on outside of your helicopter -- which would seem like a real design flaw except for how crappy the rendering is out there. As to controls, A is gun and B is missile, but this means that the throttle is controlled by (get this) start and select. The whole thing is unwieldy and ugly, and in the end, you don't get much for all the complexity.

There's planes going away from you, which behave exactly like planes coming toward you, and there are missiles, which look like used kleenex. The way you fight is by mashing A and B, simultaneously, all the time. Then you fly to a little person symbol on your crappy map, and all of a sudden you're playing Lunar Lander and you crash.

Until you figure out how to land, and then you zoom through the first 8 levels without dying at all. It was sort of funny -- we played 20 times, got nowhere, and then on the 21st, i was invincible. If that's not an indication of poor game design, I don't know what is.

So, Airwolf was ugly and bloated and complex, like Jenneane Garofalo, but unlike Jennine Garafalo, it's not interesting even in a 'wow, what's going on here?' kind of way. Like Janine Garafalo, Airwolf isn't fun, or funny, and it's also got a really unrewarding complexity. And in the end, like Janeannne Garafolo, I hope never to see Airwolf for the NES on my television again.

Rating: 3/10 I preferred Afterburner.
Advice: You think you can, but you really can't mash those buttons hard enough.
Best Moment: Realizing that, instead of being terrible at it, I was the best Airwolf in the world.