Air Fortress is a video game published in Japan for the Nintendo Entertainment System released in Japan in 1987 and later in North America in 1989. Only a total of 385 copies of the game were shipped to the United States in 1987, and it is believed that only 20 were shipped beforehand as a test run for the system. Within PAL-A regions, it was only released in Australia. This makes the American version of the game very rare.
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A decent mix of shooter and platformer, but it just gets obnoxiously difficult towards the end to waste your time.
This game is pretty fun until later levels, where enemy placement feels intentionally cruel. Not giving the player a decent ending unless they beat a second loop is also mean as hell, but at least they remix the levels by shuffling the warps around.
The 7th Air Fortress on loop #1 is hell incarnate.
The 7th Air Fortress on loop #1 is hell incarnate.
The low-key dread this one elicited when the power cuts out in each level.
I had this as a kid and I don't think I ever made it past like the third fortress. One day I'm going to find a password for the last stage, beat that with save states aplenty, and then mark it as "beat" on this websight. This game is so long and so repetitive that I would be absolutely justified in doing so.
Also I don't think I'll ever forget that this game implies that, during the side-scrolling shooter portions, the main character straddles his little spaceship in a prone position
Also I don't think I'll ever forget that this game implies that, during the side-scrolling shooter portions, the main character straddles his little spaceship in a prone position
With a name as generic as "Air Fortress" it's really no surprise why I ended up going past it so much in my set of games on my everdrive. I only just now tried it after a friend recommended it when I asked about more games similar to Guardian Legend.
You play as a big headed astronaut guy that makes me think of him as an orange Olimar. He rides a little ship thingy during horizontal shmup stages and parks at the end of them to get into the titular "Air Fortresses" (which are actually Space Fortresses) that turn the game into a sidescrolling shooty exploration-based jetpack platformer of sorts, where you must take out the big core thingy and then escape before it goes boom. Do this eight times to beat the game (sixteen to beat it for realsies, because apparently this game ghouls n' ghosts the shit out of you).
The first half of this game is honestly straight up easy, the shmup stages actually have some dead air at times, and I think I only died once during that stretch when I took a wrong turn during an escape sequence on the third fortress and got exploded. As soon as you hit stage five though the game hits a pretty absurd difficulty spike, the shmup enemies start researching advanced swarming techniques and the sidescrolling maps get a lot bigger and the enemies get even more horrendous to deal with. There's these awful jetpack guys who I'll dub "Evil Olimar" who do a lot of damage and just absolutely love to camp elevator doors when presented with the opportunity and make you take guaranteed damage if you come out, and of course they seem to be the only enemy in the game who respawns. Another bad one is the little chicken walker Metal Gears who vomit streams of bullets in your direction constantly, and similar to the Evil Olimars they happily put down constant suppress fire on you when you're trying to come out of elevators.
There's numerous times where it feels like you have no choice but to take damage in these sections and with how big some of these maps get you'll find even your tankiest health bar dwindling down pretty quickly as you try to map these places out as best you can. And unfortunately these maps use Super Mario warp pipes which makes pencil and paper mapping more annoying.
I grew up on the NES so I absolutely expect difficulty to pop up in some form with a lot of it's games, but the later sidescrolling sections are just a bit on the tedious side for me. Good Olimar just feels ill-equipped to deal with a lot of the later enemies since he can't shoot up or down and he moves rather slowly and the bigger maps are just too exhausting for me to bother with.
The music is pretty good, but it's also pretty limited so you'll be hearing the same "shmup" and "fortress" themes all the time, I do really like the slightly creepy theme that plays after you blow up the core thing and you have to escape the fortress while it's all dark from the power failing.
This absolutely isn't a bad game and I was actually really enjoying it in the first half, I just think it wasn't for me once it started ratcheting up the difficulty several magnitudes.
You play as a big headed astronaut guy that makes me think of him as an orange Olimar. He rides a little ship thingy during horizontal shmup stages and parks at the end of them to get into the titular "Air Fortresses" (which are actually Space Fortresses) that turn the game into a sidescrolling shooty exploration-based jetpack platformer of sorts, where you must take out the big core thingy and then escape before it goes boom. Do this eight times to beat the game (sixteen to beat it for realsies, because apparently this game ghouls n' ghosts the shit out of you).
The first half of this game is honestly straight up easy, the shmup stages actually have some dead air at times, and I think I only died once during that stretch when I took a wrong turn during an escape sequence on the third fortress and got exploded. As soon as you hit stage five though the game hits a pretty absurd difficulty spike, the shmup enemies start researching advanced swarming techniques and the sidescrolling maps get a lot bigger and the enemies get even more horrendous to deal with. There's these awful jetpack guys who I'll dub "Evil Olimar" who do a lot of damage and just absolutely love to camp elevator doors when presented with the opportunity and make you take guaranteed damage if you come out, and of course they seem to be the only enemy in the game who respawns. Another bad one is the little chicken walker Metal Gears who vomit streams of bullets in your direction constantly, and similar to the Evil Olimars they happily put down constant suppress fire on you when you're trying to come out of elevators.
There's numerous times where it feels like you have no choice but to take damage in these sections and with how big some of these maps get you'll find even your tankiest health bar dwindling down pretty quickly as you try to map these places out as best you can. And unfortunately these maps use Super Mario warp pipes which makes pencil and paper mapping more annoying.
I grew up on the NES so I absolutely expect difficulty to pop up in some form with a lot of it's games, but the later sidescrolling sections are just a bit on the tedious side for me. Good Olimar just feels ill-equipped to deal with a lot of the later enemies since he can't shoot up or down and he moves rather slowly and the bigger maps are just too exhausting for me to bother with.
The music is pretty good, but it's also pretty limited so you'll be hearing the same "shmup" and "fortress" themes all the time, I do really like the slightly creepy theme that plays after you blow up the core thing and you have to escape the fortress while it's all dark from the power failing.
This absolutely isn't a bad game and I was actually really enjoying it in the first half, I just think it wasn't for me once it started ratcheting up the difficulty several magnitudes.