Air Fortress (NES)
HAL Labs (Their minds are going.)

The Short Version: Remember how cool that escape sequence from Metroid was? What if we made a game that did that eight times with sluggish controls and a hero with none of the perks and upgrades who loses health steadily from any sort of strenuous activity like walking? TOTALLY RAD! Also, Jesus, I use too many parentheses in the course of this review.

The Long Version:
You know, I’m usually pretty good at remembering my personal history with games. I can tell you, for example, that I got a GBA and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for my birthday in 2003. I played it obsessively until I misplaced it and my original black SP on a cross country Greyhound excursion, after which I got a battered ‘Classic NES style’ one and Sigma Star Saga, which I had been awaiting with bated breath since I’d heard it kind of sort of resembled Guardian Legend in concept- though in execution it was like someone tried to force R-Type and I don’t know, Big Sky Trooper, to mate and produce a chunky, slow moving offspring. I can remember getting Metalstorm for my birthday as a kid and inexplicably having a stupid crying fit (“What the hell is wrong with children’s brain wiring?,” I ask as I look back- a lot) and making Dad take it back. Maybe I thought I didn’t deserve it. Maybe Nintendo Power’s review made it sound too hard. (I wasn’t very  coordinated for as much as I played the old NES. It must have taken me months to beat TMNT II. Yet I could somehow finish the Guardian Legend. Maybe the armored bikini was incentive.)
I cannot remember where, how, or when I got Air Fortress. It was probably a birthday or Christmas gift, but I’m also willing to accept that it was delivered by pixies on the Solstice, or fell off of Robocop 2. AF merges open exploration of evil alien strongholds and side scrolling shooters, if by ‘merges’ means ‘putting similar looking things next to each other and hoping the Gestalt principle takes over.’ You play as one Hal Bailman, from the planet Farmel, who, with the aid of some kind of hyperspace bobsled, must save the world/galaxy/universe from a gang of marauding Biodomes. You do this by skimming the surface of the fortress, shooting the crap out of enemies and dodging improbably-made scaffolding. Once the game is satisfied that you’ve sat through that long enough, Hal lands and shuffles into a (rather crude- you can see him through the slats) elevator in order to SUCCEED IN THE INTRUSION OF THE (N)TH AIR FORTRESS. You could say that’s where the meat of the game lies, as you slowly shuffle Hal along on his journey to shoot the core a few times then proceed to find his way out, though it’s never the same place as he came in. Lather, rinse and repeat eight times, making the escape sequence tighter each time, and we have a game, basically.

Replaying this game made one thing really apparent to me- I’ve grown far too dependent on mini-maps, or any sort of in-game mapping device. It’s absolutely maddening (seriously, I turn red and fleshy like John Madden- that’s how angry) when you spend a seeming eternity hunting down the base’s core in the first place, destroy it, only to run out of time while making your getaway. The game was merciful enough to give you start of level passwords, but that was about the only break offered. Getting blown up in Fortress 8 and losing an hour’s worth of work being slowly wheedled down by evil robots and Hal’s own apparent poor health because of a freaking timer was enough of a deterrent to really, put me off the game for over ten years.

And yet, somehow I can’t bring myself to actually say I HATE this game. NES titles tend to bring a Stockholm Syndrome element with them, and this one’s no exception. Hal is a slow walker, the recoil of his weapons knocks him back a bit, and as I’ve mentioned several times, he loses Energy steadily from moving or firing his weapon, which encourages you to KEEP MOVING because you don’t know if the killer mech you’re blasting away at is going to drop a life-up and make the brawl worth your effort. Hey, wait a second- avoiding conflict.. moving swiftly and efficiently… this game is fucking Tactical Espionage Action, isn’t it? Though Hal isn’t exactly a Snake. He’s more like- no, he IS one of those Lego spacemen with the jet pack you have to remove their head to put on. The constant pressure to go, go, go, but not too much, and definitely not in the direction you just went (FACK) sucks you in, and they do manage to keep things at least half fresh by saving enemy types for the later levels when they could have easily blown their sprite wad on the early stages. (The black Hals are particularly bastardly since they tend to move faster than you can ever hope to while using all of your attacks against you.) The music’s mostly alright, the title theme sticks with you in an an annoyingly boisterous way, and after the cores are destroyed, the entire level goes dark, the music shifts to a quiet, tension building number, punctuated by the slowly building rumbles and shudders of the base collapsing around you. No timer- you just have the shudders of the dying fortress to remind you to keep freaking moving.

Air Fortress, if you’re from a parallel dimension where it WAS a huge success, didn’t really seem to leave much of an impact for the things it did get right. Hal’s Kirby games, on the other hand- well, okay, they’re pretty much better overall. But I, for one would have been plain tickled if HAL BAILMAN and LIGHTSHIP had ended up as Assist Trophies or something in SSBB. Let’s remember HAL BAILMAN as he was- yellow, sluggish, and uh. Intrusive. He was truly a man who liked to intrude things.