Imagine that you’re a game developer and you want to do what all game developers do: you want to make a game. Not only do you want to make a game, you want to make a flight sim game. You want to make a flight sim game worthy of Maverick & Iceman and you want to make it for the Nintendo DS.
Now imagine failing miserably.
This is what it must feel like for [url=http://www.majescoentertainment.com/catalog/works/f24stealth_ds.php]Majesco Games[/url], makers of the amazingly abysmal game [url=http://au.gamespot.com/ds/sim/f24stealthfighter/index.html]F-24 Stealth Fighter[/url].
There isn’t a lot you can say that’s good about this game, to be honest.
I’m going to try my best… here goes…
…
Nup. I can’t do it. It’s just [i]that[/i] bad.
From the moment the title screen pops up, you just know this game is going to be bad. The title screen looks like it came off of an old Super NES game that might’ve kicked ass… but here on the DS, it feels wildly misplaced and just looks silly.
It proceeds to get worse as you start a new game and are given instructions on how to play with a cheesy 4 screen instruction manual on what you’re supposed to do. This isn’t a game, no… it’s a blender and you’re just going to dice, slice and chop all those feelings of enjoyment you might have had if only you had bought another game.
But to be sure, let’s give it a chance.
Start the game and you’re given a really cheesy Super NES style animation of your “stealth fighter” taking off. He looks back and… yeah… you’re flying against a Super NES graphic of water. Yeah. How fucking original.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/02-F24-01.jpg[/img]
[i]”Holy !@#$, HQ what the hell do I use for an exclamation point now that I’ve used it to say “shit”?! Agh, it’s pointless anyway, I guess HQ. I think I’m just going to crash into either that… wait… is that a truck or a house… shit… I can’t tell… seriously, being an F-24 kamikaze is going to end up being more fun than playing this damn game any longer, HQ… over.”[/i]
Oh wait! There’s another “stealth fighter” to shoot down. Now if only your controls weren’t poorly implemented.
You see, you get a selection of using either the on-console controls (D-pad, buttons, etc) or using the touchscreen and treating that touchscreen cockpit like a real control interface. I bet that sounds like it might be cool.
Guess what? It’s not.
In your touchscreen cockpit, almost every single instrument and panel doesn’t work, and half the time you won’t be able to grab the joystick with your stylus because you’ll be too busy trying to work out why those instruments even exist if they’re not letting you press them.
I mean sure Majesco, it looks nice (well… no), but with the DS having such a small screen real estate, you really shouldn’t be wasting it with niceties on a game that isn’t all that nice to begin with.
Your D-pad controls are pretty regular. Up to dive, down to pull up, and you can change them around. You can fire with your buttons… it’s all relatively basic… but then you get screwed over by the games’ mechanics.
You see, the people who programmed this game must have been either drunk, drugged, or just severely stupid and greedy when they were making this game. The whole point of the game is to fly around and blow crap up. Sure, that sounds nice and easy enough, except for that with a combination of control issues, you also lack a real element of speed and sound. You’ll catch up to your opponent for a few seconds, fire a few shots, and all of a sudden they’ll disappear again and it’ll just become one severely irritating game of a cat chasing a mouse with a few sidewinder missiles attached to it.
Ugly sidewinder missiles. I cannot stress how ugly this game looks too, mind you. It might have been fine 10-15 years ago, but today it’s just plain ugly. [url=http://au.gamespot.com/genesis/action/flashback/index.html?q=flashback]Flashback[/url] for the Genesis / Megadrive looks better than this piece of crap.
If you managed to survive the boredom of chasing an enemy that’s always the same, graphics that looked ugly with cheesy animations, and a mostly useless touchscreen functionality… if you’ve managed to survive all of that, then I’m sure the old-MIDI-styled music will make you want to hurl.
This game is bad. I stress the word “bad” because I actually think it’s bad enough to be considered worse than [url=http://au.gamespot.com/ds/action/topgun/index.html?q=top%20gun]Top Gun[/url] and that really was bad.
It’s as if the developers sat around and decided they wanted to make a flight sim game. Then they got a coffee and said “Fuck it, we don’t care anymore. We’ve got some code… it’ll work. Let’s send it off for gold status.” I don’t actually know how anyone could consider this game “finished”, to be honest.
Hell, the title seems to be either a misnomer or false-advertising in and of its own right. For its own merit, the only thing “stealth” that his game seems to have is the way you’ll potentially have hours and hours of what-could-be possible fun ripped away from you playing another game because you decided to pick up this pathetic waste of time.
I’d love to say that it “stealthily” takes money out of your wallet, but you have to make that first effort.
This game is a prime example of why Nintendo should release demo cartridges of games. Make them $1 or $2 to offset the cost of the cartridge, fine, but allow gamers the chance to see what massive wastes of time they shouldn’t spend money on.
For games like F-24, gamers shouldn’t have to rely on marketing savvy like [i]”Use the Touch Screen to execute launch procedures from within the cockpit and assess enemy targets during briefing”[/i] or [i]”Engage in intense aerial dogfights against hostiles”[/i] because shit, that almost makes it sound fun.
Don’t be misled… it’s not. Tetris is a better flight sim than this.
Yes, I know what I said.
[i]Screenshots taken from Majesco’s website on F-24: Stealth Fighter.[/i]