#108: Wings 2: Aces High

CAW!

I'd never heard of Wings 1, and I'd never heard of Wings 2 either. I assumed it was going to be some kind of flying game, maybe a scrolling shooter like Legendary Wings on the NES? It turned out to be a World War I simulator where you play British pilots running various missions in biplanes.

Je suis un pilote. Je peux volez!

You end up playing in a variety of missions. You can fly a top-down view and do bombing runs, or you can do a third person behind the plane view and do strafing runs or dogfighting missions. The controls actually seemed pretty realistic for a WWI biplane, and I was enjoying myself despite not really knowing what I was doing a lot of the time. I only succeeded in one mission and got my 5 guys killed off otherwise. Once by cutting my engines and flying into the ground!

Level up!

On the plus side the one mission I did complete gave me some experience to spend on making my pilot better. I like leveling up and getting better! The game also had a series of passwords so you could play again and pick up where you left off, which is nice.

I really liked the sound and music in the game. It wasn't amazing, but it really fit in with the theme of the game. The graphics were perfectly functional and there wasn't the sort of lag I've come to expect from a bad SNES game.

All in all... A pretty good game, actually. I would have had fun playing this as a kid for sure.

Rating: B+

#104: Super Batter Up

Swing batter batter batter batter...

Super Batter Up is, unsurprisingly, a baseball game. A baseball game that was entirely new to me, even. Was it going to be good, bad, or ugly?

RICKY!

I start off and I get to pick from actual MLB teams. I took my favourite team from that era, the Oakland A's, and played against my hometown team the Toronto Blue Jays. And even 22 years later I still recognize most of the names. I didn't see any MLBPA logos or anything so I wonder if they were even allowed to do this? Anyway, it's certainly a good start to the game!

Jays win! Jays win!

I played a game and I got blown out. I simply couldn't score and the controls were clunky enough I couldn't really field well either. It has the standard baseball game problem where you control all of your players at the same time. So if you move the shortstop towards the ball but he isn't close enough to actually get to it you've also managed to move your outfielders out of position so they can't get to it either. The AI doesn't suffer from this problem so they were always able to get to my hits. The runners were so abysmally slow compared to actual baseball that even if I hit the ball into a gap I couldn't ever get a double. The AI got lots of doubles though because it would take so long for me to recover from my bad movements.

Pitching was also annoying. You had the option of throwing a ball in the dirt, but I couldn't figure out a way to see that the ball was going to be unhittable until it was too late. This meant I would sometimes strike out without having a chance to adapt. It also meant I could guaranteed strike out my opponent by just throwing balls in the dirt over and over again. I don't find that to be fun, so I didn't do it after I tested it out to verify I could.

The game does have tons of amazing bells and whistles. Toronto was the home team so it played the notes from the last line of Oh Canada! I tested again with Detroit as the home team and it played the end of The Star Spangled Banner instead. I think that's pretty awesome. It also played a lot of typical baseball game organ music during the game which was nice. It had an animation for the 7th inning stretch and played Take Me Out To The Ballgame. When a homerun was hit it animated all the guys who were on base waiting at home plate to high five the batter. Eckersley even pitched sidearm!

It felt like this was a game made by some people who loved baseball and were able to add lots of neat things in. But then they went and failed at making a core fun game. Oh well.

Rating: C-