Animal Urges All too often we, humans, forget to bitch. We don't forget to eat or breathe, or brush our teeth in the morning (most of us anyway). But many of us do forget to bitch on a healthy, regular basis - to let off steam, to get really angry in some well-cushioned, round-cornered environment. What do we do instead? We push people in the train and growl at our coffee guy. If you can't tell yet that I come from New York City, you probably don't.
But why is it that we so often forget to engage in these incredibly healthy habits of screaming noiselessly in office corners or whining to our friends over stale pretzels and beer foam? Perhaps we feel that we don't have enough good reasons to do so? After all, bitching about work, life, and corrupt politicians does get pretty old after a while. What we need is some fresh new things to blame for our misery.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the one, the only, Sega After Burner II.
Crashandburner After Burner, in case you haven't yet perused the Quick Facts column, is a cell phone game. Which, given my highly objective (even if I do say so myself) standards for cell phone games, should be firmly to it's advantage - all I ask is that it be a fun, engaging game playable in short bursts. I am not asking for the same depth, complexity or graphical richness as I would from a console or PC game. Unfortunately for this game, I do ask for basic playability. How callous of me.
The basic problem with After Burner is that it sucks. It sucks, badly, horribly, loudly, it sucks and it sucks and it smells, and then it sucks some more. But perhaps I am being too judgemental here? Fair enough - step up and see for yourself.
The Takeoff
In After Burner, you pilot a military jet with the purpose of annihilating everything in sight. How US AirForce of you. Just like the US AirForce, that isn't the official mission statement, but the fact that your guns are automatically always on (and can't be turned off) kind of gives it away. You take off (or, more precisely, you are taken off) a very pixelated aircraft carrier and off you go. Then the planes start coming. The enemy planes in ABII do exactly four things:
- they appear (usually in packs) as little dots in the distance and then close in
- they shoot missiles at you
- they allow you to target them for missile attack by passing over them with your targeting rectangle
- they blow up when you hit them with a missile or your never-ending gunfire
They do these four things, roughly in that order, over, and over again until your eyeballs start popping out in frustration. Meanwhile, the ugly brown squares on an ugly green background that pass under you are magically transformed into ugly green squares on an ugly brown background. Once in a while you are even awarded with some semblance of man-made structures (we will call them houses), which are equally ugly. These are called background graphics. They (apparently) are there to further entertain you. They fail.
But hey, you say, sure, it's a little simplistic, and maybe a little outdated, but I don't see anything that horrible there, really. So the AI is a little dumb. Doesn't mean the game can't still be fun...
Crap Gameplay for $1000, Alex Surely, you are correct. I mean, Space Invaders didn't have real smart enemies either, but it was still a fun game. Unfortunately, the one-hit wonder that is ABII continues screwing up at super-sonic speeds. Let's talk controls. The developers were clearly highly concerned with not overcomplicating this game, and were careful not to overload you with options. Here, in the end, is what they decided you can do with your plane:
- move it a little up
- move it a little down
- turn a little to the left
- turn a little to the right
- engage the afterburner
- shoot missiles
Now this indeed, is incredibly fun. Fun, that is, if your idea of fun is anything like trying to dance hip-hop in a portable crapper. Basically, all of your time in ABII is spent darting like a mad fly across a tiny span of space in frantic attempts to avoid missiles which fly at you in dozens, constantly. If that's not enough, occasionally, a missile will come from behind and try to sting you in the ass. And then there is that occasional enemy plane that by some miracle finds itself directly behind you and tries to kindly shower you with gunfire. And did I mention that missiles carry with them a cloud of pixelated white noise (I am suspecting this was meant to be smoke) that tends to completely block your limited field of vision? No? Well, they do.
To make things yet worse (can you believe it?!) the button controls in ABII are not configurable, and you are forced to use the default mappings. On my Motorola e815 that meant having to use my round select button and the tiny directionals around it, which happen to be located right next to the End button. Which ends the game. Instantly. Swell. Thanks for giving me the option to use the keypad! Playtesting at it's best.
Going for the kill Believe it or not, even all of the above would still not be enough to completely kill this game, had some intelligent gameplay options been provided to try to deal with this madness. But ABII features NO UPGRADES OF ANY KIND - no improved weapons, no shields, no decoys, no smarter targeting systems, no wingmen, no radars - NOTHING. Very soon you begin to understand the mysterious correlation between the ridiculously high number of continues that you are given and the fact that you are dying every 7 to 10 seconds. As you scurry in agony back and forth across the screen you may discover a "secret" move - if you lean all the way to one side, and then directly to the other - you can do a horizontal "roll". This can be marginally helpful in avoiding the missiles and will extend your average lifespan to 12 seconds. But then you are on your own.
If by some miracle you manage to stick with this game past the first five sessions (which are bound to end with various degrees of fury), it is possible to work out some better survival tactics that will let you reduce the rate of your demise to something more reasonable, at least at the lower levels. However, in all honestly, it hardly makes the game any more fun, and in the end, ABII is still a rather frustrating, uninteresting experience.
We hold these faults to be self-evident... Whoever it was at Sega that came up with the brilliant notion that doing a straight port from a 1987(!) arcade game (which had a huge screen, a moving cabin and a force-feedback flightstick) to a 2005 cell phone game (tiny screen, cramped keys, and 18 years of game development progress to expect something from) would constitute a good way for Sega to enter the mobile game market obviously has another thing coming.
The bottom line is that, much like with Michael Jackson's face, there are just to many damn things that are wrong with this shameful re-incarnation of a classic game: the gameplay is terrible, the graphics are a only slightly better than ATARI's classic TankWars (and that game was a HELL of a lot more fun!), there are no discernable missions, the controls are crap, the difficulty is ridiculous, and the fun factor is non-existent.
There are only two things that can be contrived as being good about this game, which is that it loads fast and that (at least for a little while) it gives me a new topic to bitch about. Cuz God knows, I don't get to do enough of THAT.
In the end, Sega is still a good company, and should know better than to release product like this. So, simply put - do better next time, Sega. Just do better.
Summary: A straight, mindless port of a 1987 arcade game. The result is about as good as a 1987 Volkswagen today. Apparently being listed under the 'Classic Games' category is a valid excuse for putting bad games out there.
Already played it? Trade it for another game at
Systems: Cell phones; played on a Motorola e815.
Genre: Flight sim/air combat
Setting: Your eyes on the back on a plane.
Mood: Rather gloomy, seeing as how you keep dying all the time.
Story: You die. Then you die. Oh and then you die. Finally, you die.
Graphics: 1987 quality, and not a pixel prettier.
Music/Sound: It's sound OR music. If you insist on your phone making SOME kind of noise while you die, go for the former.
Voice Acting: Maybe THAT could have saved this game... But no.
Script/Dialog: Winner of Best Lack of Script or Dialog Award, 2005.
Similar Games: The original; other flight simulators minus all the good features.
Gameplay: You keep wishing you had a parachute, and a penny for every time you wished you had one.
Strengths: Fast load times, good catalyst for shaking your video game addiction.
Weaknesses: Gameplay, graphics, controls, lack of options and storyline, difficulty level, mission structure - yeah, that about covers it.
Depth: Please!
Length: Limited only by your ability to withstand mediocrity.
Pace: Fast
Difficulty: Oh it's difficult all right.
Control: Poor; problematic button placement on some phones; utterly unconfigurable.
Learning Curve: Long. Unless you quit first.
Replayability: That would assume you had enough brain damage to finish it once.
Will keep you up until (a.k.a Fun
Factor): Basically until the disbelief at what you just paid 5 bucks for wears off.
Notable Features: Overall crappiness.
Fav. Character: No candidates here.
Instant Classic: There will only be one classic with the After Burner II name, and that's the original 1987 one.
Publisher: Sega. Yes, I can't believe it either.
Developer: Sega.
Release Date: 2005-06-25
Players: 1
Multiplayer: No
ESRB: N/A
Target Audience: Fans of the classic; air combat lovers.
Recommended For: People at Sega, as a lesson in what NOT to do again; EXTREME fans of the original game.
Not Recommended for: Anyone looking for a playable air combat game for the cell phone.
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| PlayerPlaza Games
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