Ace Combat

WRT to Electrosphere, I believe that Jaeger of Strider Squadron is implied to be the father of Erich Jager in Electrosphere.

Eat my ass Mihaly, you and your burst railgun. Also, got odd "I am the bone of my sword" vibes out of him saying "my plane is my body".

Also, it might just be my shiny new Su-35S, but I feel like the last fight with him was much significantly easier than the previous encounters despite his plane being superior to the plane he used in all previous battles. Like, I feel like I had much longer windows to shoot him than in any previous encounter. Maybe he was too busy trying to bring his railgun to bear to dodge my shots like in the previous encounters. And cipher on a cracker that railgun is LOUD]].

EDIT: And fuck yeah, got the Su-57 and the Pulse Laser. Now to go through other tech trees and get parts I want. The big goal is the machine gun aim assist, which I will be leaning into heavily, especially when I do my machine gun only run on normal (the No-Damage Run will be easy modo because fuck the fucking spiteful AA guns and I want to stack the deck as much in my favor as possible for that challenge.) In case you were wondering, apparently, the machine gun pods on the MiG-21 do work for this medal.

Edited by Balmung on Jan 22nd 2019 at 5:06:09 AM

Well what do you know, PLSL worked like damn charm, did it in one.

I’m going to have to play X again after this to see if anything in that clashes with all the satellites getting fucked.

Also, and don’t actually answer this, Why do I get the feeling that amidst all the new chaos Belka is gonna take the opportunity to once again do nothing wrong?

Edit: Just finished 16. God fucking damnit. Belka, you are what V2 was for. Poor doggo; Rest In Peace, sweet prince.

Edited by TheAirman on Jan 22nd 2019 at 2:19:34 PM

3 is more like 4/5/0

Where as this is almost an exact copy of how 6's narrative is told, they must have really liked t since they are using it agian.

I dunno, Avril seems like a much stronger character than what's-her-name with the dead husband.

I mean your not wrong, but its still the same structure.

Plus.... Avril just vanishes less then half way into the game.... :/

Speaking of strong characters who vanish for half the game, Tabloid was by far the most developed member of Spare, but they give you Count instead, who is probably the most generic member who still speaks. What the fuck is up with that?

Standby.

Edited by Deadbeatloser22 on Jan 22nd 2019 at 11:50:05 AM

Mission Complete! Anyone else think those drones at the end look suspiciously similar to the Cariburn? Nice cameo at the end there.

Now to get me some super planes

Holy SHIT that last Airstrike Impossible. That was the most extreme tunnel run I've ever done in an Ace Combat, and it didn't help that I did it in the Su-57, whose hugeass 45-foot wingspan barely fit. I want my X-29 back. Or even the F-20 or MiG21-93. If there's one thing in that game that would have been easier in a small, early-game plane, it's that. Though, thinking about it, I'll bet that the Gripen would have done beautifully in that mission since it's small and carries SASM.

Yeah I nearly had a heartattack when I saw the size of that hole, I genuinely wasn't sure if my Raptor's wings were narrow enough to fit. And forget just flying through it, I think I might have PTSD from simply squeezing into the elevator shaft at the end. It should be blatantly obvious to anyone who's ever touched this series that we'd fly up it at some point, but goddamn if that wasn't the most hype as fuck way to cap off the game.

Edited by TheAirman on Jan 22nd 2019 at 12:25:42 PM

I said I'd try it in a small plane, but I have the best luck against the Ravens with direct-fire weapons and I'm pissed I got a C rank and now I'm trying it in the Su-33, and the Flanker series are even bigger lardasses than the Su-57, with the longest wingspan being the Su-35S's 50 foot wingspan.

EDIT: Turns out you can land a hit during the chase if you're using EML, PLSL, or TLS, but it doesn't really matter. That said, the chase is actually a little easier in less agile aircraft, just due to the lower risk of oversteering.

EDIT EDIT: Time to start easy modo No-Damage Run.

Edited by Balmung on Jan 22nd 2019 at 1:13:36 PM

Eh, two QAA Ms from the Raptor were all takes, at least on normal. As soon as you finish the tunnel chase and enter the chamber just yaw to the right and fire once it comes back around the elevator shaft. Smacks it dead in the face no problem. I actually just used yaw to turn during the tunnel chase, none of the curves are too steep for it and its by far the safest way through. Might not get you the time you want, but it gets the job done and you can always worry about rank in free mission.

No, I mean before that. In the second tunnel, you can get a clear line of sight and lasers and the EML will connect. Once the drone is in the shaft, it's a sitting duck for anything.

I really wish I had an S rank guide so I could be sure what to aim for.

As for QAAMs, since I did the Russki/Su-37 tree I didn't really have anything that could do QAAM. Though I did afterwards go back and unlock the Berkut, though it was as much because I wanted a fast UGB truck for Pipeline Destruction as anything.

Gotta say, I never expected the Zone of Endless plot threat to come back from Ace Combat 2 and Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy

EDIT: Kind of fucking around since easy mode is easy AF, and it turns out that if you're packing 6 or 8 AAM (and I'll bet a power-boosted TLS would also do the trick), you can absolutely smash all of the Arsenal Bird's engines and AAM batteries in mission 3. It doesn't really do anything other than score a lot of points, but you can absolutely do it.

Edited by Balmung on Jan 23rd 2019 at 3:00:46 AM

They sure busted out all the plot threads and callbacks for this one.

Though I am unsure as to why it was pushed back for 2 years, while the game is good the story seems compacted enough to be more then one game, and the aircraft tree is anemic... so like I cant really tell where the dev time went. :/

As I understand it, adapting the True Sky cloud rendering engine to their own ends was a huge time sink.

Also, the plane roster (29 (28 standard + F-4E pre-order bonus)) isn't actually particularly small. AC6 had 15, ACZ had 36, ACX had 40 (of which 11 are fictional), AC04 had 21, AC3 had 24 (all fictional), AC2 had 21 and its remake had 28, and Air Combat had 16. Only AC5's roster of 53 stands out as significantly larger, but it's also the only one that's even more padded by variants, many of which are even less different than AC7's abundance of Flankers and nearly as many of which are, in fact, Flankers. Given a promised total roster of at least 32 after all DLC, AC7 beats the average (mean and median) for Strangereal Ace Combats (in fact, using AC2 instead of ACAHL or taking both together, it does so at release - it only falls below the mean if you use ACAHL but not AC2, and post DLC, AC7 still pulls ahead). Also, keep in mind that those planes are very highly detailed, as are the non-playable aircraft, and for once, the stuff on the ground looks better than a box with a dowel rod sticking out of it, and there's plenty of modeling work to go around.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened to their original time budget, but they shipped a mostly bug-free product on an entirely new-to-them engine, and that's more than a lot of developers can say.

The fictional aircraft are part of the plus to me so noting them separate doesn't help, though it is worth noting that AC:3 is the only one of the ones listed with less that I have actually played, which probably contributes a bit to the anemic feeling.

Well AC:6 too, but I could have sworn it had way more then 15.

At the very least, keep in mind that, with the season pass, and assuming no further DLC, it's at least pretty close to ACZ in plane count.

Also, I'd still very much give ACX, 04, and AHL a recommendation, even if their rosters are a bit smaller. 04 is generally one of the best regarded games, and ACX is a hidden gem on the PSP, even if it's hard as nails, and AHL is a very solid entry in its own right. And the + version has Nintendo-themed plane skins, which is kinda neat.

I did play X and liked it quite a bit, at this point though I don't even know where I would find 4

Ebay, probably.

If you don't have a working PS2 , it can be emulated pretty effectively, though AC04 suffers some graphical glitches that 5 and Zero don't when emulated.

Edit: I was right, you can find a used copy of Shattered Skies for under $5 on ebay.

Edited by Balmung on Jan 23rd 2019 at 4:06:47 AM

Played some Ace Combat 5 yesterday. Bit hard with old controllers, and I ran out of missiles when getting the kestrel out of port - forgot how much ammo conservation you needed to do even that early.

I'll try to emulate 4, 5 and Zero soon, but my PC literacy can be very bad. I even failed to get mods running on Minecraft, so I don't know if I'll get the emulator going alright.

Failing that, I'm scouring eBay. Is the consensus that the games above are the best ones?

Edited by GoldenKaos on Jan 24th 2019 at 2:51:18 PM

Yes, though I'd call 7 better than 4.

Also, 7 is setting series sales records, more or less matching 4's numbers on physical copies which means that based on the typical ratio of digital to physical sales, 7 is beating the previous record 3:1.

Hopefully they get the message that its not that Ace Combat as a series no longer interested people....

We just hated the attempts to shoehorn it into the real world, and wanted out magic space lasers, AI, windowless cockpit, flying super weapons, and Belkan conspiracies back.

Given that I'm pretty sure 7 has already sold nearly as many units as every other Ace Combat put together and topped the Japanese sales charts and the only thing that beat in the UK was New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe, and the PC release hasn't even happened yet, odds are very good that there will be an Ace Combat 8.

Only thing that's holding me back is the fear of the PC port being inferior. Otherwise, I would've already bought and pre-installed that sucker.