Game Publisher: Activision

Year: 1989

Type Of Game: Awful Cockpit Shooter

Players: One To Two Players Alternating

Story: The Stealth Advanced Tactical Fighter, America's most closely guarded military secret, is in your hands. You're at the controls, flying top-priority combat missions against enemy forces around the world.

Luckily, you're prepared for the worst. your aircraft has all the right stuff -- maneuvering ability, speed, weapons, capability, and deception. One you get the bogeys in your sights, you can pulverize them with missiles or cannon fire, then move on to your next target. When the bad guys lock on to your craft, you just kick into "stealth mode" and drive their radar systems crazy.

Each time you complete a mission, you move on to another theater of war. Your opponents get meaner and tougher -- but so do you, and soon they won't stand any chance at all.

Thanks to the NES Triforce for the manual story. spelling corrections made by me. [all I did was send it thrue a spell check]

My take on the story: Oh my gosh. How can they program a game this bad, give it a story, and expect any good comments to be said about it?? as Mom says, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all..........

Okay, if I could only say nice things about this game, this review wouldn't get past 2kb, so let's move on, this game is probably one of the worst out of two games I've ever bought,[the other being F117-A Stealth Fighter], they both play slightly different and have a somewhat different story but both are crap, comparing one to the other is like comparing cow feces to cat, one smells worse and another is bulky, so depending on your perception is what will guide you to which hate the less.

Okay, I got this one here a while back out of a large Funco game order. After looking at the game label art I was somewhat unimpressed, the label to the game was a very bad artist concept of a Stealth aircraft, oddly enough in the game the aircraft they use is the F117-A, no idea why they used a lame unrecognizable drawing of what vaguely looks like one. After playing the game you'll find the label says it all. These people have no idea what the plane looks like, how it should play, or what is fun.

I have no idea what the people at Activision were thinking, perhaps after the videogame crash they needed to re-learn how to program games, perhaps the NES was harder to program for than they anticipated, perhaps the game was used as a U.S. torture device against Sadam Hussein's men, in any case, we still to this day don't know what possessed them to put down such wrath on videogame players around the U.S. For you non-U.S. citizens, be very thankful.

The only good thing about this being under the Activision brand is they blatantly put the dudes names in the credits before you play the game, so if you own a copy you know who to send the death threats to.

And what the gay are you shooting down in the first two stages? They look like the SR 71 Blackbirds, how's come you are shooting down American Aircraft while you are on the American side??? And only a handful of Blackbirds were made, you play two stages and you've wiped out more than the U.S. ever built, let alone still has flying, and they aren't even combat aircraft, they are recconasaince, they had little if any defensive weapons, usually I don't attack any game on its technical foul-ups, but this one has one mess up right after another. I did play to level three,[that was all I could stand of it], and you start to fight F14-like Aircraft, guess it supposed to progress harder every few stages with new aircraft, but their selection is very lame.

Now the part I've been dreading, the actual game review.

Play Control: F+

What where they thinking, you fly in a strait line and try to shoot down as many aircraft as you can, land and repeat, no turning around, no good use of the Cannon,[a.k.a. machine gun], you can turn left and right but there is no reason to, you'll usually loose the enemy craft you are trying to hunt down, and landing and taking off is bad too, took forever to figure that out, but it is the best overall in this category, which barely ups its score up much overall.

Graphics: D+

Okay, the game has gawd awful graphics, it has its good moments when you take off and land your plane they are fairly good and detailed, but during the "dogfights" or whatever it is just hideous. The ground is worse then it was on Top Gun, most of the enemy planes are real pixelated, just crappy.

Sound: C+

Don't know what's with the D's, I would say this is the worst game I've played, but I better score a little high just incase I am wrong. The Sound stinks, The gun sounds somewhat lame, The missile sounds realistic, so does the engine and the speed you throttle it up to, this game would have scored higher here and in all the other categories if it could be played.

Music: D-

ARGH!! Get me a ice pick, they tried but failed miserably with the music.

Theme and Fun: F-

Woohoo, let's crash a $30 million dollar jet and make the pixelated Brass mad, that's all we can do for fun.

Frustration: A

Frustration started with the first five minutes of game play half a year ago, now after the completion of this review it will be locked away to the back end of a closet.

Repetition: F+

Nothing is repetitive, can't play it too long to notice much more of a pattern other than "this game sux".

Challenge: A+

If you swore to play this game to see the end, well you don't know what you got yourself into.

Replay Value: Replay value shown bellow on a parody of a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial.

Little Boy: How many hits with a hammer does it take to get to the center of a Stealth ATF cart?

Old Looking Turtle: Sorry sonny, I never tried it with a hammer, always used a sledge.

Final Pluses: The good reasons to own this game amount to 0.

Final Minuses: Just take my advice and stay away, the whole game is a minus.

Changes: Changes????? They shouldn't have even published the dang thing. They should have vaporized the demo-carts, burned the computers the game was made on and execute the programmers.

Overall C- Only because they actually dared to get the public to buy this pile of reeking crap. Now I know why Howard Lincoln wanted video rental places to stop renting out games, because people would know about this one and kill Activision, and hurt Nintendos' profits.

Final Note: Unless you are a major collector wanting to add to your stack of games, or like crappy games that make you appreciate good games more, stay away from this game.

Value: Personally, I think Funco should sell this one at ten cents, I got mine loose at the rip-off price of $5, loose about $.50, complete maybe $3.50

Related Games: F117-A Stealth Fighter.....forget these crappy titles, go get a game in the Top Gun series, or Ultimate Air Combat.