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Space Ace
Score: 30%
ESRB: Everyone
Publisher: Digital Leisure
Developer: Digital Leisure
Media: DVD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Arcade

Graphics & Sound:
Spending a few minutes watching Space Ace gave me the impression that Don Bluth, the man behind big animation features like 'Anastasia,' may be pulling our leg. I mean, the guy must be a millionaire by now, so why would he let mediocre animation like this hit the market? Granted, it's over 10 years old, but Space Ace doesn't even manage to pull off the good looks of its cousins, Dragon's Lair I and II. Very sad... How a follow-up product to what was undeniably a hit phenomenon could take a giant step backward in quality is beyond me, but here it is. The major innovation for Space Ace was supposed to be that it contained branching paths, where you had more than a single choice per scene. Not only does this mean that the flashing indicators from the earlier games go away or are obscured, but the animation starts to look fairly random. There's little or no continuity from scene to scene, and the Bluth team (or maybe it was just Don) must have really rushed this one to market. I can't even remember seeing Space Ace in the arcade, so it may not have made the impact Dragon's Lair did.

Gameplay:
The story in Space Ace is somewhat more interesting, and Bluth says in an interview on the DVD that he wanted to answer all the interest kids had in space games by moving away from the swordplay of Dragon's Lair. Playing Ace, you find your girl has been stolen by an evil Bad Guy who has a raygun that turns people into little babies. At the beginning of the game, Ace is hit with the ray, so he spends the game changing into a little boy named Dexter until he can power-up and become Ace again.

Where the Dragon's Lair games had you choose one of five options (4 directions plus your sword), Space Ace has the added depth of branching paths. This way, you don't always have just one place to move, and the animation is supposed to change depending on your decision. It works, and the less linear gameplay could be held up as a reason to like Space Ace over the earlier games. However, since the gameplay is all about watching animation and responding to visual cues, you notice right away that Space Ace looks like hell! The colors are bad, the animation is scratchy, and everything is rush-rush-rush, like they didn't have the time to draw enough frames for every scene.

Extras on the DVD include interviews with Bluth on TV from the 80's (hilarious!) and interviews about the creation of the games. It's very funny to listen to a talk-show host compare Space Ace with Tron and hear Don Bluth saying that Tron is incredible, but that he thinks live animation is where videogames are going. Don, I'm glad you made a million in the movies, 'cause that prediction didn't exactly play out.


Difficulty:
There's so much jammed into Space Ace that it feels rushed and sloppy. Control doesn't become an issue, but figuring out all the moves is much more frustrating for this game. Because of loading between scenes, it's hard to stay in the zone and keep interest levels high, even with the whole game being under an hour long. Total animation couldn't be more than 30 or 40 minutes, so you do the math on how much loading there is.

Game Mechanics:
Moving through scenes is as easy as pushing a direction on the D-Pad or using your blaster when it's called for. I could hardly see any of the visual cues through the animation, but they're there most times. No save or checkpoint feature is in effect, so dying means playing through the whole thing over again. Not my idea of a fun time. It's certainly possible to play Space Ace on a standard DVD player as well as the PlayStation 2, and most people will be shocked to see this type of entertainment after watching smooth polygons, CG movies or cut-scenes and killer anime. We're all used to a certain quality at this point, and Space Ace doesn't even come close to chinning the bar.

For some art-school animation major, there may be subtleties here I'm missing, but the experience of playing Space Ace is really a downer. It could justify a rental for anybody who played Bluth's games in the 80's, but I would still steer you toward Dragon's Lair or Dragon's Lair II for a better experience. Space Ace looks bad, plays bad, and just generally should have stayed back in time with Bubsy 3D.


-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Paddock

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