Monthly Archive

I was flipping through games in Mame, trying some various stuff out.  No, I’m not one of those people who has every MAME rom on my computer.  I only have games I’m interested in playing.  So, I tried out P47 Aces and right away I found out that it was fast paced, and likely a challenging game to clear.  I like a good challenge and it piqued my interest further. Upon inspection on the Shmups forum nobody had cleared the game.  Soon after I found myself save state raping the hell out of the game, figuring out the bosses, enemies to point-blank, special positioning and all the like:  learning the game.  Leader boards can really do it for me when it comes to shmups.  Anyway, I found the game to be quite good.  Detailed and colorful graphics, parallax scrolling with some stages having more than 4 layers to them, a variety of stages and cool enemy and boss animations.

To me P47-Aces feels like a horizontal Viper Phase 1 or horizontal Gunbird  game mostly in regard to the enemy bullets. The bullets are fast and a decent amount of memorization is required for positioning during bosses.  Popcorn enemies are responsible for the non-fixed bullets and at times will flock in large groups, shooting many bullets, requiring you to herd their shots or dart in between some of them.  What I liked about the general gameplay is that it is very straight forward with what you have to deal with.  There is a simple order to the types of threats, but the speed of the bullets and how you must react made for a fun experience.  Here’s my stage run down.

-First stage is a countryside type stage, lots of rolling hills and a large green cliff side at the boss.
-Second stage is higher up on the countryside at dusk with some farmhouses seen on the ground in the distance.   A huge battleship consists of the whole stage.
-Third stage is a desert canyon type stage where the difficulty really settles in, as if the 2nd stage wasn’t intimidating enough.  Many larger aircraft are now appearing with more threatening patterns, and a new popcorn enemy that if isn’t destroyed fast enough will let out a fast large spread shot which webs into the bullets of other enemies quite annoyingly.  The boss scene takes place in front of a town built at the edge of a cliff.
-The fourth stage is the token water / huge battleship stage, seen in so many other World War themed shmups.  In this stage the sun sets and the colors of the stage change quite nicely, as a nice touch, if you time out the battleship, it will sink just as you see the sun setting into the horizon.   The animation on the water is pleasing to the eye and stretches out to the horizon.
-The fifth stage is over a lake with forested area around, the greenest stage yet.  The water comes into play here where enemy planes drop boueys that explode after a few seconds once they hit the water.  The explosions are cool, big water splash animations and a BOOOSHHH sound to accompany.  This stage is like stage 3 2.0: you are forced to multitask, destroying large planes, avoiding their balloons that shoot aimed shots, and also considering the popcorn enemies.  Point blank and herd or bomb is the lesson.  The boss is a plane set in the water,  one of its turrets shooting at you at first, then as you pass it takes off from the water and battles you.
-Stage 6 is my favorite: the true desert stage on a purple night.  A jazzy song plays here that is laid back and groovy.  And even an orange tinged, crescent moon is seen slowly scrolling in the farthest background.  This stage has the most layers to it.  A foreground dune scrolls the fastest in front of you at the very bottom, the desert over which your flying, then large cascading dunes followed by a few more layers of more scrolling desert.  This stage puts everything you’ve learned to the test, and makes you memorize it the most while introducing a new type of plane, a type of jet that looks like it bears the colors of the US flag.  It’s just oddly bannered in such a way, I don’t know why but I find it funny.  This stage has a tank hybrid boss, and is also the 2nd easiest boss of the game once you figure out the best way to beat it.
-Stage seven, still bringing new areas for stages, this one is set in a harbor city, the buildings of the city are the highlight of the background.  You are flying over a bridge that runs along the perimeter of the city.  In this stage you have to be aggressive in your point blanking, but it’s short.  The boss makes up for it, being the most hellish boss of the game.  It’s simply a war machine on wheels.  One of the most annoying things about it being that it shoots out missiles that upon explosion sends out rows of bullets from each side.  In the latter phases, the safe spots within those rows need to be known, as a big spray comes out periodically as well as popcorn ships swooping in for potshots.
-Finally, the last stage takes place over an arctic ocean, snowy mountains in the background and glaciers in the foreground, reflected off of the water.  In this stage you’re hunting down the escaping enemy ships.  The stage is basically 4 mini-boss aircrafts with popcorn enemies filled between them.  Once again, the popcorn ships attempting pot shots at you as you try to take down the mini-boss crafts, which have four phases to them, the last being the most dangerous.  Varied bullet blasts that sweep the whole screen.  Clutch dodging required or bombs if you have them.  The boss has something like 5 phases and is actually a walk in the park if you reach him while fully powered up, and have at least one life or a couple bombs to spare.  If not powered up, it is an annoying battle, but could be bombed to death with 2 lives worth of bomb stock.  I had to reach it by no-missing the whole game, apparently.

The game had some fairly memorizer heavy parts, it required me to no-miss untill the end of the game.  Dodging bullets was fun the whole time, and the way enemies die was done well.  The bosses deteriorate after each phase, as well as some of the stronger aircrafts.  The death explosions were cool, usually showing the craft splitting in half or breaking into smaller, distinct pieces.  The game gave a great impression of destroying stuff.  Popcorn enemies ‘parts’ would kind of lob up into the sky playfully, almost like popcorn does when it pops.  Sometimes during the game it’s fun to watch that popcorn pop and watch their debris fall.

Yeah, I should mention the music was done by Manabu Namiki too.  A very classic shmup soundtrack that did its job, and bragged only a little bit with catchy melodies, holding steady with the atmosphere and tension for the rest.  A funny and cool thing about the game is that ramming into stuff, terrain, enemies or bosses doesn’t kill you.  It just bounces you away.  I really liked this about the game, I think I would have been more frustrated as there were some parts where you make contact with enemy planes but don’t shoot.  The funny part is that the core element of scoring higher revolves around bouncing off of stuff.  Every bounce is worth 100 points.  On top of that, there are certain places that you can bounce to gain points very quickly.  Basically getting your sprite stuck into an area will rocket it up a bit.  I didn’t bother with it much during my run, but I do show a few places where that is possible.

Also, about my run.  I recorded an .inp of my 1cc in Mame Plus .133.  Kaisero has offered to make the videos of my run since my computer can’t handle the recording.  I will update this post with those videos when they are up.   I think you will enjoy watching this game.  But I encourage anyone looking for a slightly memorizer, challenging, fast and thrilling shmup to give P47 Aces a go.  I did have to do a lot of specific practice with save states to accomplish the 1cc, but I had plenty of fun doing so, conquering certain parts of the game.  The game is only about a half hour so the stages go quick and there isn’t a whole lot to learn in between the tough parts.

I used the chick with big boobies ‘Kim Blaire’, but there is a loli, a generic tough guy 24 year old and a geyser who goes by the name “Captain Uncle” for the characters.

A note about the music:  The sound emulation is slow, apparently!  I checked out the actual soundtrack and it’s so much faster that I find it weird!  I’m used to the slow music, hahaha.