Space Ace

I was fortunate to wander into my local Schaumburg arcade when a master at SPACE ACE was there with a big pocket full of quarters. You know how usually nothing is more boring than watching someone else play a video game? SPACE ACE and DRAGONS LAIR are the exceptions. Not having to worry about making any decisions (like when to joggle the joystick), I was able to just watch the action on the screen.

It's a helluva ride! A great acrobatic raygun duel (that I know dang well I would never have survived!). Beat the bad guy and the game goes into a humorous epilogue and a nifty surprise ending.

Played this game for the first time in 1985. The control method wasn't advanced, but hey, was it difficult! This was the first arcade game i ever saw and i was hooked. My old man wouldn't let me go to the arcade, because he was afraid I'd spend my whole allowance there, but I snuck out anyways. I learned later that this game owed it's good graphics to the fact that it was laserdisc driven. A real classic.

I have a three pack on DVD including Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2, and Space Ace. They play using your remote control. Same patterns and video as the originals - It was a great novelty to play through these again. Plus it was pretty hard too because I forgot all the patterns in the 20yrs since i beat the games originally. OK i need 10 lines of text apparently so. It is an interesting storyline Dirk the daring must rescue princess whatever from the evil dragon...um, in the 2nd iteration of the game Dirk the daring must rescue the princess again i think. Space ace must rescue someone from the evil Bork i think, oh well is this 10 lines?

This game, like Dragon's Lair, is basically an interactive cartoon. You are not directly in control of the character, but rather you sort of guide him. You use a controller to decide when he goes in a certain direction and you use a button to tell him when to blast enemies with his ray gun. Unlike Dragon's Lair, this one came after and added a few new wrinkles as it has different paths rather than there being only one correct way...like in Dragon's Lair. However, this one is also a bit difficult at times as it is very unclear at times what to do. I can see this one taking a whole heck of a lot more quarters than did Dragon's Lair for someone to finally conquer the game. With Dragon's Lair, you could actually get through a room or two the first time...I just do not see that happening with this one. You will be lucky to get by an obstacle or two the first time without perishing here. I also played the Sega CD version of this, and I do not think it was a very good conversion.

The story has you as Dexter, also known as Space Ace! You have been hit with the villain Borf's infant ray and you are a bit geeky at the moment. You and your cute sidekick, Kimberly (who constantly gets captured) must stop the evil Borf from turning his strange weapon on the Earth and thus reducing its population to infants. The cartoon actually is good, to bad you are going to be witnessing Space Ace die a lot, especially in the Sega CD version. You will also tire of having to hear the same cutscenes over and over again as you have to replay certain levels numerous times.

So it is fun, but I prefer Dragon's Lair more. This one has a better story, but like I said, it was just a bit easier to figure out what to do in Dragon's Lair than it was here. As a kid I was able to get by some rooms in Dragon's Lair the first time, here I was killed on every screen multiple times! However, the games are close and I think Kimberly was a bit cuter than princess Daphne in Dragon's Lair.