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Classic Plastic #02 - Air Fortress (NES)

Posted October 7th 2005 by Adam Caporello.

Welcome back, ladies and goombas. Here lies the second offering in my selfless attempt to suggest some 8, 16, or 64 bit-goodness that you may or may not be aware of.

Although I tried to pull myself away from the alphabetical plan of attack, the mere mention of HAL Laboratory's Air Fortress in Classic Plastic #001 kept the game imbedded in my subconscious. It's not a difficult game to find by any means, but it doesn't seem to get the credit or recognition it deserves, so I'd like to honor this game as somewhat of a sleeper hit. The Advantage regularly plays an amazing rendition of the fortress theme, which fully corroborates my claim. Unfortunately, I can't say that Air Fortress is a completely original concept. There are definitely some borrowed elements from Metroid, which was released a year prior.

Each stage starts you out on a side-scrolling shooter expedition. These portions are simple and relatively easy, there's not even a boss to face at the end, you just casually land your little speederbike-type vehicle and stroll into the entrance to the fortress. The sole purpose of this first part of the stage is to collect energy and bomb power-ups, which will come in very handy once you enter the fortress stage.

This second part within the fortress is really the meat of the game, and plays like a hybrid of Metroid and Kirby's Adventure, not surprising, as HAL came up with Kirby. Although, Kirby's Adventure was released a whole six years after Air Fortress, so I wonder if HAL liked the 'hovering' ability it introduced, but wanted to bring it back with a cutesy look to appeal to a wider audience? Who knows.

The 'energy' you collected in the shooter portion acts as your health system (represented by numbers, à la Metroid), as well as your hovering ability. As you press 'up' to hover, it drains your energy, which requires you to limit your hovering lest you run out of energy in about 20 seconds. Once you land back on the ground, your energy quickly regenerates up to the highest amount you've upgraded it to. So don't worry about losing energy permanently just from hovering, the only way to do that is to take damage from an enemy.

Another Metroid similarity shows through in the layout of these fortresses. Claustrophobic, subterranean, and ripe with elevators... as well as a little confusing in the later stages. Then, the icing on the cake, somewhere in each air fortress is a big red core which must be destroyed. Once you destroy the core, you only have a certain amount of time to make it back to your ship before the whole thing blows like the frickin' Death Star. You'll need as many of those bombs as possible to get through barriers and blow up the cores, so you'll need to use them sparingly. They're really just exponentially more powerful shots, like the missiles in Metroid (heh, you even collect them in increments of five).

Let me tell you, this game is flat-out fun, and challenging. The later levels can get frustrating, but what worthwhile NES game isn't like that? Imagine having the somewhat limited flight abilities of Kirby, with Samus' weaponry. Yeah, it's pretty much that awesome. Also, firing your weapon while hovering will cause you to move backwards for a split second from the recoil. It was a pretty unique display of physics for the time, in fact I can't even think of another NES game off the top of my head that utilizes anything like that.

You know what else is awesome about Air Fortress? The music. In typical HAL fashion, the game has some friggin' fantastic and catchy tunes. The main title theme is a fanfare unlike any I've ever heard in a game (aside from Smash Brothers of course), and sounds like it could easily have been a John Williams opus, if it was coming from the London Philharmonic and not a little grey shoebox full of circuit boards. Of course, for those who are fans of that 8-bit sound, you could easily listen to any of these songs repeat indefinitely. It makes for some superb driving music, I know from experience.

The only thing negative I can say about Air Fortress is that each stage looks identical. There's very little variation from the same colors and tiles. You would've thought they could at least use the same tiles with different color schemes. It doesn't detract from the game play at all, of course... and besides, if you're the type of person who is immediately turned off by a game simply because of the graphics, you probably don't have an NES anymore. Ironically, the game was pretty graphically advanced for its time.

Even the dreaded 'password save' feature is no big deal in Air Fortress. The passwords to continue where you left off are only four characters long! You hear that Capcom? We shouldn't have to use graph paper to chart out our saved games in Mega Man!

Anyway, if you think you're a HAL completist because you have every Kirby game that has ever been released, you're missing a vital part of the Kirby lineage. I guarantee without the hover mechanics introduced in Air Fortress, Kirby would just be another cute, recycled platformer clone, and not the floating pink ball of... whatever the frick he's made out of.

This game is recommended for: Pretty much everybody. Sure it can get difficult in the later levels, but even noobs and little kids can have plenty of fun in the first few stages. Buy this game, it's cheap. I mean like $3 cheap.

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