Space Ace - It's always about a girl

Twenty some years ago when my love for video games was just beginning there was this one arcade game I couldn’t get enough of. It was Dragon’s Lair and I used to beg my mother to take me to Show Biz all the time so I could play it. My pre adolescent self loved seeing the cartoon on screen and wanted to keep it going as long as I could. Space Ace is the 2nd game that team made, set in the future and every level had two separate branches the action could take.

While Dragon’s Lair was basically a collection of short scenes with a big finish, Space Ace is more like an episode of a cartoon played from beginning to end. It tells the story of Dexter/Ace, trying to rescue his girlfriend Kimmy from the evil Borf who shots Ace with his ultimate weapon, the infanto ray which turns Ace into his childhood self. During sequences you can energize and return to Ace and take a different, more gun ho path through the segment, or continue to play Dexter and play a less combat scenario.

The Dragon’s Lair/Space Ace games basically invented what we now refer to what the developers of Shenmue coined QTEs (quick-timed-events) where you had to press the direction or a button within a certain time window to advance the game. There is no gameplay involved other than pressing the appropriate button at the right time to keep the action going.

The iPhone version was created from the HD master and looks better than it ever has, excluding the full 1080p Blu-ray version of course. A slightly transparent control pad appears on the bottom right corner of the screen and the shoot/energize button on the bottom left. It has three difficulty modes just as the original did and also gives you the option for infinite lives as there are no check points. The easiest setting will actually highlight the button you need to press so you don’t have to learn by trial and error as I did decades ago. It doesn’t really seem like a game at that point, but sometimes you just want to see show and not have to memorize everything.

This game really isn’t for everyone. Some argue that it really isn’t really a game and I admit that my love for Dragon’s Lair 1-3 and Space Ace is aided by nostalgia for the games. There is no doubt that it is a part of gaming history and several other developers have used aspects from it in their games. The folks over at Quantic Dream the development team behind Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit are doing a lot of interesting things for the upcoming Heavy Rain, my most anticipated game that of the year, and they owe a lot to Space Ace in particular as it was the first to offer branching paths during the scenarios. I’ve bought this game twice already and now I’m pleased to have it in my pocket.

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