Space Ace

Published on Game On 05/90

Welcome to Space Ace, an action game where you steer an exceptionally fragile ship through narrow corridors (and space, occasionally).

The intro screen shows promise: Somebody decided to build what looks like a public restroom in space and added giant Tesla coils for dramatic effect. The geometry is purposefully lopsided, presumably to unsettle potential visitors so they don't stay there for too long. I guess there are also showers, and that's a soap ball in the top right corner. While the central spaceship's design is quite awesome, I'm not sure where it fits into the game, as the vessel you get to fly certainly looks nothing like this.

There is something extraordinary weird about the music that's playing here. While it never sounds off-key or outright wrong, it is sorely in need of some proper structure. Throughout the tune, it feels like the musician got bored of whatever melody he was working on and then just switched to something else for a couple of beats. This happens so frequently that the result is a confusing, meandering mess with abrupt transitions and drums that erratically change tempo until they seem to stumble over themselves.

Megamax

Published on Game On 04/90

When platform games emerged in the early eighties, there was this period in (European) home computing where single-screen titles like Manic Miner were regarded as genre archetypes. This resulted in a lot of games in the same vein with awkward controls where each jump was a leap of faith and being one pixel off the mark often had disastrous results. Megamax is very much informed by these quirks and therefore feels like a platformer from the very distant past.

The title screen certainly looks very "old school" for a game released in the early nineties, with a logo consisting of chunky, double-sized sprites. The reveal of the letters is accompanied by the kind of screechy sound effects that movies or TV shows still like to use whenever somebody is playing video games somewhere off-screen. The game transitions into a piece of music from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. At least that's what HVSC's SID Tune Information List says; I would not have recognized the melody otherwise. It sounds pleasant enough, though, if a bit plain. Manic Miner also made extensive use of classical music, but its arrangement of the Blue Danube is an assault on the ears.