ACE: Air Combat Emulator

The Good
'Air Combat Emulator' is a very early combat 'flight sim', with sprite-based graphics and simple blippy sounds. It was more at home on the 8-bit machines, where the competition was less fierce - by 1986, this game looked very poor in comparison with Microprose's 'F15 Strike Eagle'. Released in the UK by 'Cascade software' (who only ever did four games, but stuck around for years), and followed by two sequels - 'Ace 2' was a split-screen multiplayer game, and 'Ace 2088' was a sci-fi, 'Star Raiders' game, but not as good as 'Star Raiders'.

The Bad
The graphics are extremely crude - the sky is blue, and the ground is green. You can eject whilst flying upside-down at an altitude of one foot, and live, and if you raise the undercarriage whilst on the runwau you explode. It's not much more advanced than a typical arcade game (River Raid springs to mind), and the claims that it offered unparalled realism were hollow.

The Bottom Line
Very poor early combat / flight action game.