Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 14: DragonStrike (MS-DOS) and DragonStrike (NES)

This week on Super Adventures, I've finally got another excuse to Photoshop together a title image. The weird thing is, I started adding the ripped cover effect to it before I noticed that the Amiga version's cover already uses a torn paper effect (you can see it the top left behind the dude). That's such a weird coincidence. Their effect is better, but I think mine came out looking okay.

Anyway DragonStrike came out in 1990 and is the 10th Dungeons & Dragons game. Meanwhile DragonStrike (NES) came out in 1992 and is the 21st Dungeons & Dragons game. It was pretty common at the time for different systems to get wildly different games that all shared the same title, but in this case it's only the NES release that just had to be awkward.

Covering both games at the same time requires breaking the timeline a bit, but doing it this way means I get to compare them, so you're getting double dragons this week.

Ace Combat 2 (PSX)

Developer:

Namco

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

PlayStation

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Ace Combat 2: the classic PlayStation dogfight 'em up by the people who've watched Top Gun.

It was made by the legendary developer/publisher Namco, who started creating their own video games in 1978 and didn't stop until 2005, when some mad businessmen fused them with Bandai Games to create a hybrid creature called Bandai Namco. Though the interesting thing about Namco, is that they were responsible for games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Time Crisis, Ridge Racer, Splatterhouse, Soulcalibur, Tekken, Klonoa and Katamari Damacy, and I somehow haven't covered a single one of them yet. I wrote about Tales of Symphonia by Namco Tales Studio (formerly known as Wolf Team), but I think this is actually the first proper Namco-developed game on Super Adventures!

Here's another fact for you: for some reason the first game was renamed Air Combat when it was released in the West, even though the Japanese game's title was in English to begin with. This is doubly weird and confusing because the Ace Combat series is the successor to Namco's arcade flight sim series... called Air Combat. I could understand why they'd want to use that brand if it already had some value in the West, but it doesn't seem like the arcade games ever made it outside of Japan. Anyway by Ace Combat 2 everyone was using the same name and the confusion was over (until the sequels).

You might be curious why I'm starting with the second game. I've got a few reasons, but I think the main one is that I actually finished it, many years ago, and I'm really curious how the hell that happened. Is it really that good, or just really really short?