Steam Cleaning Part 1: Space Ace

I've got a ton of games on Steam that I've never played but want to. I've also got some games that I never finished (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!) and I want to wrap up. I've also got a game of Terraria going. There aren't any rules really, and I don't have a particular timeline, but I'll try to play a game and write a little bit about my experience whenever I can.

Today, I played Space Ace. I'm not going to explain much about the game in terms of the background of Don Bluth and Dragon's Lair. Laserdisc games are an offshoot (or maybe the progenitor of?) FMV games. Essentially, they let you use some simple inputs (in this case, 4 directions and an "action" button) that you try to match from VERY subtle cues in the game. If you provide the correct input at the correct time, you get the "win" animation, and the game continues on to the next section. If you don't, you get a death animation. That's it: make all the right inputs, and you get to see the end of the game. Mess up, and you cycle around again, and get another try at the input.

I'm old enough to remember paying games like this in the arcade. I have a very distinct memory of standing around a Dragon's Lair cabinet in my local Aladdin's Castle, the smell of cheesy, greasy, delicious pizza in the air. It was circa 1994, and I watched for a long time while airmen from the nearby Air Force base dropped a huge pile of tokens into the game. They were brute forcing it, trying every input at every opportunity until they proceeded. At 25 cents an attempt, and 5 possible inputs even if they got the timing right, the arcade got its money's worth.

I still miss that pizza. And when Dragon's Lair came out on PS3, I was eager to try it out. It had a great sense of humor, and the animations were imaginative, particularly the death animations. on PS3, I also didn't have to worry about the quarters issue. Or the subtle cues, or figuring out the correct inputs or timing, since the updated game had input cues built into it. Sure this was super-maxi-extreme-cheating, but it really was the only way to make playing it fun. Hell, if I'd wanted to I could have just watched the whole thing play out like a movie from an option in the Extras menu. But the truth is, in Dragon's Lair, the death and failure animations were funny enough to make actually playing the game entertaining, at least for the time it took to get the prompts right.

It's really an illustration of the difficulty in playing arcade-based games now: in an arcade, it would take a ton of time and a giant pile of money to get through the game. When you're playing it for free, the frustration isn't worth it, but seeing the whole game, and even playing the limited game play is fun enough, so long as the difficulty is toned down.

When it comes to Space Ace, much of the charm is missing, and the pace of the animation is so frenetic that I often wondered whether the PC app had some kind of problem. In Dragon's Lair the game was fun to watch, the deaths were hilarious, and the actual animations (even though the scenes were often made of a lot of short cuts) were slow enough that you could see what was going on. In Space Ace, the actual animations fly by. The space setting actually hurts the game also, since it doesn't have the sort of comedic and creative freedom that the fantasy setting of Dragon's Lair does. Dragon's Lair was just plain weird, and seeing more of the weirdness really made the game worth seeing. Space Ace, on the other hand, just doesn't have that much interest. The space stations and ships are pretty generic, the villains and monsters are relatively boring (just people with funny-colored skin), and the action itself doesn't have the surreal elements that the magic from Dragon's Lair made possible.

It took me about 20 minutes to finish the game with all of the help turned on. Without the help, there is absolutely no way I would have had the patience to try to finish the game, because the content just wasn't interesting enough. Even with them turned on, the task of completing the game was a chore, and the sections I got stuck on seemed to be the most boring to watch (like when I repeatedly missed the timing on driving a space motorcycle back and forth). This is all made worse by a number of sections in which the game reuses the same animations, just rotated or mirrored, to pad out the length of the game. Given that the animation is the only draw for the game, having elements (again, usually boring ones) repeat just serves to discourage people from dropping in another quarter (or in my case, another moment of their time).

As a piece of video game history, I would give this a pass. Dragon's Lair is really the thing you want, and it's a better game, more entertaining, and more historically important since it came out first. I wouldn't even recommend Space Ace to Full Motion Video enthusiasts, since the whole thing is just boring and frustrating. If you're really curious, watch the video play out somewhere online, but even that probably isn't worth it.