After Burner: Black Falcon

Review - Gary finds harmony in Sega's retro simplicity

It's now become something of a cliched way to start a review, and could be blasted for edging towards "New Games Journalism", but I can't help but tell you about the wonderful experience of playing this new After Burner for the first time. A little less than 20 years ago I stood before an arcade machine like no other I'd seen before - at those times you'd have a two button and black stick affair - After Burner was different. It was innovative, new, fresh and impossible to walk past without your index finger twitching as if placed on a trigger. A huge, slightly phallic, metal joystick was set before me and I gripped it with amazed anticipation. I slotted the 10p (or so it cost back in them days) and I flew through the skies trigger down; hails of bullets taking down bogie after bogie. I remember specifically the roll - you whacked the stick twice to the side and the plane went over delivering a level of satisfaction lacking in games of the time. It was in glorious colourful 3D during a period when the industry was steeped in side scrolling beat-em-ups. Yessireee, After Burner was something special.

Imagine my delight then when I booted up today's incarnation, After Burner: Black Falcon made exclusively for the PSP. It's understandable that Sony's handheld was the platform of choice - After Burner was never a game of depth, more a quick blast of frantic missile-launching exploding-aeroplane madness, playable madness at that - perfect for portable gaming then.

Black Falcon is a loyal heir. It is apparent from the outset everything that made After Burner so compulsive 20 years ago remains. And, rather pleasingly, it holds up against recent graphics-led titles. The Ace Combat franchise offers a real world 3D flying experience, After Burner: Black Falcon is an altogether more arcadey experience - you can only fly in one direction, which rips the freedom from your thumbs - you can't turn, only dodge oncoming projectiles. So, where you might expect to be able to be looping, rolling, swooping, Black Falcon offers a more linear action intensive experience than Ace Combat.

Engaging enemies isn't as you would expect either. The predictable lock-on mechanism remains, but it isn't typical to the genre where timing and a steady hand are critical, the third-person (or plane, as it were) camera forces a simplistic play where locking on to an enemy is easy, and releasing a missile nothing more than pressing X. It's dot by dot gaming at times but in this simplicity lies Black Falcon's appeal. Such is the nature of the gameplay that it feels more like a Dance Dance Revolution style-timing affair - as you progress, more enemies appear on the screen, the more times you must lock on and release missiles. Planes flank you on the sides forcing you to use the machine gun (another button) to destroy them; there's ground forces like tanks and anti-air that require bombing (another button) to destroy, all this while dodging on-coming projectiles. What's left is a complex button combination gaming experience that rewards you for combos (essentially buttons pressed in the right order). The better you do through the round the more money (yes money) is made, the better planes you can buy, the more effective weapon upgrades you can utilise, the more powerful an opponent you become. It's not in-depth gaming and doesn't attempt to be, but it is a totally engrossing twenty minutes of fun as and when you need it. The gameplay doesn't vary, the levels repeat themselves and the goal is always the same. The writing is terrible and the narrative, while I hold affection for it, is appalling, but having donated many hours it's obvious that the story bears no importance to the experience. This is mindless gaming done 100% right as long as you don't expect anything other than a solid and fun (being key) experience.

Black Falcon goes against everything a decent game demands. It's ridiculously repetitive, completely basic and stereotypically reliant on past generations of gameplay. There's a paper-thin narrative, appalling sound and a pointless upgrade system, but none of this detracts; After Burner: Black Falcon is perfectly suited to the PSP and the type of gaming drawn from handheld consoles. It's fast, furious, and perfectly suited to a twenty-minute bus journey.

After all these years I still love After Burner. While the large metallic joystick and arcade unit might be dust in the ether (actually there's the original arcade unit I remember for sale on eBay now) I'm at a point where I can't walk past my PSP without picking it up - a beautiful thing considering my occasional lack of enthusiasm for Sony's handheld unit.

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