Another day, another Super Nintendo game beaten. For this blog entry, I take to the skies with a little game called Pilotwings. BACKGROUND:
Again, this is a Nintendo IP I'm only familiar with because of Smash, thanks to its small but meaningful representation as a stage and as an item in the more recent games. Other than that, I know jack shit about it, so I'm basically going in blind here. SUMMARY: You are a trainee in the Flight Club (not to be confused with the club we don't talk about), and your objective is to go through and pass a series of training exercises presented by the club's various instructors. Each exercise has two to four activities you must complete, each having you take control of a different aerial vehicle each time. In order to succeed, you must earn a specific amount of points, which is determined by how well you perform in each activity. Doing so will unlock the next training exercise. The first activity has you pilot a biplane, and the task involves you flying through rings, and then landing on the stage's runway. Controlling the plane is tougher than it looks, and landing on the runway is a serious challenge. Points are awarded depending on how many rings you pass through, how quickly you clear the level, and how well you stick the landing. In the second activity, you go skydiving. As you descend, you'll have to try to pass through rings, and once you're low enough, you must deploy your parachute and land in a specified target area on the stage. Maneuvering yourself in order to pass through all the rings is quite difficult, and I often found myself missing rings anyway no matter how hard I try. Sticking the landing is also a challenge in itself, because some of the landing areas are small (especially the ones that are worth more points), and it is rather easy to accidentally fall into the water. Next, you get to take control of a rocket belt (AKA a jetpack). It works rather similarly to the biplane level in that you fly through rings and shit, and also has the landing area objective of skydiving. The key difference from the other two activities is the full range of motion the rocket belt grants you, as well as the easier to handle controls thanks to the different levels of thrust. This is my favorite level of the bunch. The fourth level has you controlling a hang glider and taking advantage of thermal currents to launch you upward. Again, you have to fly through rings and land in a specified area, but what makes this stage different is the glider's ability to make sharper turns and its dependence on thermal currents to generate lift. If you earn enough points in a level, you may be able to play a bonus stage. These levels are strange and feature wacky characters. One of them has you try and maneuver a penguin and have it dive into a pool, and another has you play as a man in a chicken suit and launch yourself as far as you can. I wish you could play them outside having to earn a lot of points. Passing all the training exercises unlocks a special mission in which you pilot an attack helicopter. These missions take you out of the innocuous setting of the regular game and drops you in a literal war zone, because your objective now is to survive getting shot down by surface-to-air missiles (which, by the way, you can shut down with missiles on your own) long enough to land on a helipad and rescue a bunch of people. I was taken aback by how quickly the story escalated and how suddenly I was dropped into the thick of it, but I enjoyed playing the mission nonetheless. Completing the helicopter mission unlocks Pilotwings Expert mode, where you go through harder versions of each training exercise in unique stages with different weather conditions, plus a second helicopter mission. Getting through Expert mode is the end of the game, but thanks to the game's password system, you can revisit missions at your leisure. The graphics of this game are quite impressive given when it came out, using the same background effects you see in F-Zero and Super Mario Kart to achieve 3D-looking graphics. The backgrounds themselves look great to boot, and they get a good variety of locales for you to fly through. VERDICT: I'm not really huge on flight simulators, but I did enjoy playing Pilotwings. While the level objectives themselves weren't too varied (it's just 31 different flavors of "fly through hoops"), the variety and challenge the different vehicles provided was enough to satisfy me. There's not much in the way of a story, either (other than the out-of-left-field helicopter missions), but that's not really a dealbreaker, in my opinion. If you're looking for a flight sim that (mostly) isn't combat-focused and is more on the casual side, I feel like this is a good place to start. - end -
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July 2024
Derryck
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