#3: Pilotwings

Fly me to the moon...

Pilotwings is a flight simulator of sorts. It doesn't strive for realism in terms of what you have to do in order to fly a plane but instead goes for broad strokes in a series of mini-games. You don't have any flaps to control when you're flying the plane, for example, you just have a throttle higher button, a throttle lower button, and the D pad to aim your plane. Later levels do include wind that you have to deal with, but your way of dealing with it is to just aim a little into the wind.

On top of flying a plane you also get to ride a hang glider, skydive off of a helicopter, and fly around with a jetpack! The idea of each mini-game is the same thing... Hit all the targets (rings to fly through, bars/balls to touch, etc...) and then land on a target. The closer you are to the middle of the target the more points you get. You get to play each mini-game of a level once and if you accumulate enough combined points you get promoted to the next level.

Big Al doesn't care that I fell in the ocean.

For bonus points you can try to land on a small moving platform. Positioning yourself is hard, because of the wind. Also while there are 2 camera angles you can use neither one is very good for landing on the pad. The most likely result is that you crash into the ocean. With a super heavy piece of equipment strapped to your back tightly enough that you don't fall off when the jetpack fires. I'm pretty sure I'm dead. Big Al only seems to care about a little water damage in the jet engine.

Hell No! We Won't Go!

Pass enough levels and you unlock a 5th mini-game where you pilot a combat helicopter in an assault on some island stronghold. There are surface-to-air missile turrets shooting red globes at you. It's hard to tell where they're going to hit and even harder to actually maneuver the helicopter so mostly your strategy is to weave erratically and just hope you don't get hit. I remember beating the game in the past but my stubbornness wasn't enough this time around and I gave up after 5 tries.

This game seems to get incredible reviews and I'm honestly not sure why. I'm pretty sure this game was developed not to make a good or fun game but to show off the capabilities of the SNES graphic chip. In particular it made use of the 'Mode 7' that tried to simulate 3D images on a 2D surface. I can remember getting frustrated as a kid with the hang glider game in particular since I could never figure out when I was going to land. When playing through this time I don't think I even came close to the landing pad. I didn't fall into the ocean so I still got some points which let me get promoted.

Pilotwings also didn't have a multiplayer mode which tends to be the saving grace for mini-game compilations. If I'm playing by myself I'd rather play a full flight simulator than the weak substitute here. That said, this was a launch title, and I do remember finding it amusing, and the difficulty of landing did provide clean 'turn swapping' breaks for my brother and I. I do think it did a fantastic job of showing off some of the capabilities of the new hardware.

Rating: B