230 · Stealth ATF
Stealth ATF is a flight simulator in which you pilot a F-117A, a.k.a. Nighthawk in several missions.
In every mission's beginning and ending the player has to take off and land the plane respectively, from a side view. Failing to land after completing the target objectives means failing to succeed in mission and thus having to replay it.
Show Notes
Longplay
Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk
F-35
Top Gun Gameplay
Imagineering
Disney Imagineering
Stealth ATF puts you in a Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, the plane from every 90s military poster, and tries to make a flight simulator on a console that could barely draw a horizon. Mike and Sean flew this one while Joe, the cold open insisted, was just in stealth mode. It is Imagineering's first NES game, published by Activision, and it is more ambitious than playable.
What works
- Three games in one. Every mission is a takeoff, a dogfight and a landing, each with its own controls. Taking off is nearly impossible to fail: hold A to rev the engine and pull down on an inverted D-pad.
- The lock-on missiles. A square appears around the enemy, the missile arcs away, and after an awkward pause it blows up. We kept coming back for that moment.
- Night missions. The cockpit and the planes look different against the dark. It is mostly cosmetic and still a plus.
- Fun in spite of itself. Once the odd rules of the world click, the dogfights are enjoyable, and what it pulls off on this hardware is impressive.
What doesn't
- A world with no ground. The screen is a flat horizon and tiny dots. Nothing tells you how high you are except the altitude number, so 50,000 feet looks like 10,000. Enemies wrap around the edge and seem to teleport, as if we were flying around the inside of a cylinder.
- Jerky motion. Where Top Gun was smooth, a light tap on the D-pad swings the horizon about 15 degrees, and planes flip past at 10 to 15 frames a second.
- No throttle in a dogfight. Both face buttons are taken by the gun and the missiles, so you cannot slow down or speed up, and the only way to get anyone back in view is a front flip or a back flip.
- No sense of being hit. Damage is a different beep and a meter to glance at.
- The landing is a solved puzzle you have to fail your way into. Once you know the throttle, nose and speed, you never crash again. Learning it costs crashes, and each one sends you back to the start of the mission and about seven minutes of dogfighting.
Worth knowing
The stealth mode, the feature in the title, is one press of Start per mission and then missiles stop locking on. We called it a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it is easy to play the first level without knowing it exists. The real plane is stealthy by design anyway. The cacti swell as you fly low, which gave us a theory about Cactor's planet. And Imagineering's next games, Ghostbusters II and A Boy and His Blob, have nothing to do with planes, so all this engine work goes unused.
The bottom line
Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List. Sean's pitch for the curious is a good one: if you like primitive flight sims, blowing things up and crashing while trying to land, give it a shot. We would not send anyone looking for it in 2022. It is a unique idea that does not fully deliver.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Something Deadly in the Air
- NES Longplay
- Introductions
- Overview
- The player completes mission briefings in the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft; controlling every aspect of the military flight experience from exiting the runway and battling other fighters while airborne to landing the plane after the battle is over
- Gameplay
- Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk
- UI
- Take Off
- Fighting
- Limited missiles
- Damage to aircraft
- Altitude
- STEALTH MODE
- Landing
- Controls
- Different Runways
- Some levels will have a very long runway on solid ground, while others may have a very short one on a carrier out in the ocean.
- A crash means you have to redo the whole mission
- 3D
- Altitude is crazy high yet the ground looks imminent
- Because it’s just a horizon line there’s not much to help
- Variety of missions
- Top Gun
- Select Missiles
- Less loose in the cockpit
- More landing instructions
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Published by Activision, but the developer Imagineering (Not to be confused with Walt Disney Imagineering) was mostly making 2600 games before this. This was their first NES game
- We’ll see a lot more from them, but coming in 1990:
- Destination Earthstar (NES)
- A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia (NES)
- Ghostbusters II (NES)
- Heavy Shreddin' (NES)
- EGL
- Next week - The Three Stooges
- NEStalgia Byte - Battle City
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Stealth ATF, something deadly in the air.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. And that's it again. Don't worry. Joe will be back. He promises. Joe will return in. I don't know. The next episode. Yeah. I'm pretty sure. I mean, we hope to see him in three stooges. That is the next episode. But maybe Joe used his stealth mode here and he's actually on the podcast. He's just invisible. Yeah. He's stealth AF.
Yeah. Instead of ATF. For those of you that aren't aware of the game, stealth ATF has you controlling a Lockheed F-117. It doesn't sound right to me. That's too many numbers. Usually I'm used to like F-35. So F-117 must be just a bigger. It's the Lockheed one. The one that looks cool that you thought looked really cool in like the 90s when they started to like put out posters for, you know, warplanes. There you go. Yeah. It's time to start idolizing warplanes. The B-17 bomber is done. It's all about the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk now.
I will say that like, you know, this plane is probably like, you know, aside from just because like the F-15 or 35, whatever those actually are, are the most iconic just because of how common they are. Like this was like super cool. And I used to like think about this plane when I was a kid. Did you? I didn't think much about planes when I was a kid, but to be fair, you know, that's because, you know, just in general, I had a lack of interest in most things that didn't have to do with video game versions of them. So had I been exposed to stealth ATF, that might have ignited my love for the Lockheed F-117. Okay. I can grant that.
Now, the stealth joke that I was making earlier about Joe comes because the whole like gimmick here and in the name of the title, stealth ATF, is that this plane has a stealth mode that can be used once per mission so that you can basically be invisible on enemy radars and they actually like lose sight of you and have no idea where you are. Sounds really cool. I don't know how well it works in the video game. I guess we'll get into that. But the overall idea here for this game is just that it's a first person, like you're in the cockpit, being briefed missions that are mostly just take down other enemy aircrafts.
You know, the number just kind of increases or the types of enemies changes. But for the most part, that is your objective is to kind of go on these large battle, large empty battlefields, take down the enemy planes, successfully land your plane and then move on to the next mission.
Sean, the game kind of feels like Top Gun here. Sure. I'd say that, you know, on the surface with, you know, the UI and the nature of, you know, what you're doing, like it bears some surface resemblances to Top Gun. But I think they're very different games. Whereas like Top Gun was kind of an arc, not quite an arcade experience, but it's still, I still think it played by those rules. This one is definitely trying to go more simulation.
I don't know if you've got that vibe. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that because definitely just in the amount of information on your, on the user interface screen, whether you're in the cockpit or taking off or landing the plane, they are trying to go for something here where, you know, you're either in training or on an actual mission. The idea of taking off in the plane, then going out to the battlefield and landing the plane, like each one of those things is kind of its own element of plane simulation, right?
Like some, some games like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, which is like a big thing now, that game is mostly a landing simulator game. Like, yeah, you can play to like, you know, fly to find the, the airports or the landing places, but you could also just turn on GPS navigation for that stuff. The actual challenge is in the landing of it. That's a whole game. This game decides to make it like three different steps or three different modes, if you will. You know, the, the, the, the takeoff the runway, the shooting down of the enemies and the landing all into one concise thing.
What did you think about the actual like control of the F-117? Well, I know that Top Gun, um, and I don't want to just keep, just keep talking about this game in terms of Top Gun, but, uh, I mean, it's, it's very similar in this respect, where I know that there was like a takeoff and landing portion of that game too. Um, I'd say that in this version, uh, where they're trying to like show you that, you know, taking off and landing is hard, um, and requires skill.
Uh, takeoff is just literally press a button and, and, you know, pull back on your D-pad and then you, you take off. Um, and that's cool, I guess, just to have that little bit of immersion in there. Uh, the actual flying around, uh, is its own thing that I'm sure we'll, we'll speak at length about, but landing itself. Um, I, it's, it's definitely hard, uh, at first before you get the hang of it and kind of understand the little tells that the plane has.
Um, uh, you're going to crash a lot and then once you get it, you're never going to crash. Uh, because it kind of is just a, a solved game, I guess. Um, but it is still cool that they have those three, uh, those three sort of, uh, aspects of flying in the game. I'm, I don't know, did you have anything that, that really bugged you about it? Well, I guess I would say that you summed each part up really nice, especially that the taking off section of just like, yeah, I mean like what more do you really want to it? But you really are just holding down the A button to rev up the engine and then just, you know, going down on the D-pad to, because it's inverted controls in order to go up. That is really easy, almost impossible to fail.
Yeah. And I guess that from there though, like it goes from no challenge whatsoever, you know, thinking like, oh, maybe this will be like a fun arcade-y style game where like, you know, it's not, it's not like super, um, like I need to be aware of my altitude or I need to be aware of all these different things. That immediately is subverted when you get to the actual mission and suddenly, you know, you're greeted with a user interface that has your altitude, your fuel level, your heading, your angle of attack, how much damage is done to you. Like that's just a lot of information in general.
Forget about the actual first person cockpit mode of it all. I just feel like, you know, did they need the whole like taking off thing? Maybe they should have spent more time in game explaining what, you know, what was going on here in the actual cockpit. Now, granted, that's what a manual is for. I just feel like it's really hard to wrap your head around this mission thing when you're first get into the game. Yeah, it really is night and day in terms of simplicity and then complexity between takeoff and like the actual mission. Again, it bears, it bears surface resemblance to Top Gun, but I did go back and play Top Gun and there really isn't nearly as much. Like freedom in Top Gun as there is in this game.
And the I think the biggest thing is because like they're not trying to simulate a 3D environment. And this game does not actually simulate a 3D environment, but it's trying its damnedest to make you think it is. So what you get is a featureless ground or ocean or, you know, surface. And then you get all of your bells and whistles on your screen, in your UI, in your cockpit. And then you've got, at first glance, just tiny little dots that are probably your enemies, both on the radar and out your windshield.
And a lot of what makes this part kind of confusing is that, because I don't really think that they fully simulated a 3D environment. I think the part that makes this very difficult is that there's no visual indicator of how high you are. It's just the altitude number on your cockpit. Otherwise, the game looks exactly the same when you're at 50,000 feet than it does at 10,000 feet. Like there's no like, oh wow, the trees look too big, I better pull up. It's just the number. So that doesn't really help.
So then there's this whole like, faux 3D space, which in some ways kind of works, but in some ways will just make your enemies sort of teleport. If they get off screen, and sometimes even when they're on your screen, they don't seem to behave like you obey the same laws of physics.
It's almost like you're sort of, you're actually playing on a giant cylinder than like in just a space above like a city or a forest. Like it's an odd, and I'm not really doing a good job describing it, but it just seems like the planet that you're on is shaped strangely.
Because like you'll turn around, and then something that was going in the same direction as you, and was never that far away from you, as soon as you like lose them, they're now like on the opposite side of the screen. I don't know if that's just like wraparound, because I just don't really know how space in this game works. Yeah, I think it is wraparound, and I think a lot of what you're describing here, Sean, is the problem that we had with a game a long time ago now called Star Voyager, which was a space simulation game where you could actually like find yourself going to other planets, and who knows what you would run into.
And it was more of a simulator game too, but the problem there was a game that was trying to be a simulation game while not understanding the limits of the NES itself. And this isn't the same problem as say what we had with like Nobunaga's ambition, where they figured out how to take all the complexities of strategy and divvy it out into like numbers that you would just look at the screen and basically be menu navigating the game. That might be a cool thing for like a game where you're like an air traffic controller, but not a game where you're in an F-117.
So what they've done here is they focused so much on, you know, what I think is a very fateful adaptation of a really fast plane dealing with other really fast planes trying to be in a dogfight. Like it's not easy to just shoot down another enemy plane, but because of the limitations of the NES itself and the fact that they couldn't like actually design any other elements than just ground and sky into it. There really is no sense of space because there's just the horizontal line that angles itself with your angling. So at least you kind of get a sense of your upside down or sideways or something, but there's no, there's no sense of actual space.
The wraparound thing becomes a problem because again, if you're going for realistic, that's not going to work here. But also the speed at which you run into the enemies means that this is going to be a much longer mission than what might appear to the player taking down for enemy aircrafts in any kind of shmup or most even like Top Gun, for instance. I think you said it earlier in the episode, John, that that was more of an arcade game. I agree. I think Top Gun felt a little looser in the cockpit. You got to like select your different missiles before going into the missions. The plane sprites were like significantly larger and came at you from the sides, kind of like how a shmup works, how they appear on screen in this game.
Because everything is dealt more with like, honestly, if you guys have ever played like Star Fox 64, it's dealt like those levels where, you know, you enter the 3D space of those boss fights. It's it just doesn't work here because of the limited graphical capabilities of the NES, in my opinion. I think that the biggest problem that this game has, and again, it is just the graphical capabilities of it, is just how jerky it is.
Like the biggest difference that I could find between Top Gun and this game in terms of playability is Top Gun is actually very smooth. Like the animation of your enemies of the stuff on the ground, like it, and just, you know, the particle effects, I'll put that in quotes, of like the clouds coming at you. Like it really gives you a sense of where you are in this, in the sky here. Whereas whenever you move, you're automatically, like just the littlest touch on the D-pad, that is like a 15 degree shift in like the horizon.
And then you've got these planes that, again, you're trying to simulate speed, but you're not going to have a different sprite for like 500 meters away and 490 meters away all the way down to right in front of you. So you just sort of got them shifting at maybe like 10 to 15 frames a second.
It's just like this very fast flip book of a plane like flashing past you. Now I will say though, that once you kind of get the hang of that, you could like, once you've trained your brain to think in 15 frames a second,
as one might have had to do if they had a really shitty computer back in the day. But you can actually kind of have fun with these dogfights. Like it's not, it's not impossible. And I actually was able to kind of get the hang of it to an extent that like, it actually felt like I was flying a plane for a bit. It's just, there's a lot of obstacles.
Especially if you have never played a game like this on this kind of hardware that can really take you out of it. Yeah, you know, that's exactly what I was going to lead into next, Sean, is that this is just a thing with older hardware simulation games. Is that at the time, right, they were kind of like top of the line simulators. And so people just learned to, you know, they learned to get around them and understand the controls. And they spent probably more time with it than we were able to maybe in this podcast. But even if you go back to older driving simulator games, like they don't actually simulate every aspect of driving.
Like they're more arcadey than we might expect them to be. This game too, like obviously isn't the most realistic physics demonstration of an aircraft. However, I think what this game was missing was at some point they needed to make a design decision over whether it was going to be a really intense dogfight between, you know, between you and the enemies. That and maybe like maybe make it more technical, slow everything down a little bit, giving you more time to focus on, you know, sneaking up on the enemy and being able to to hunt them down. Currently, I feel like it's just a little too fast for that. Or they could have decided to do the opposite and maybe, you know, open the world up a little more in terms of not being able to just.
OK, everybody's here and now everybody's not here. It should have maybe had more in it. Yeah, I think that if they could have put some kind of landmark on the ground, and I know that that's not that's not entirely possible. Like just to have something that you could that you can.
Anchor yourself with aside from just a blank slate that would have helped. Another thing that would have helped is and this is actually this would fundamentally change the game and it they'd have to get creative and maybe get rid of their newfangled stealth mode that we haven't really touched upon.
But this game needed throttle up and throttle down. Like you cannot have a dogfight really with with just like you're always going at the same speed like you can't slow down. You can't speed up because both your face buttons are for either missiles or your machine gun. And then you're up your D pad is for pitching yaw and all that. So you need to have another button to go faster and slower. That would I think bring a lot more to like being able to enjoy the dogfights in this game because otherwise the only way that I could do it is like, oh, I guess I got to do like a front flip or a back flip just to get everybody back in my field of view.
Otherwise, you weren't I just wasn't going to have a lot of fun with this game. Yeah. And it's one of those games where it becomes challenging to take down the enemy aircraft that actually becomes fun to when you when it happens. You know, it actually feels exciting when you get a guy, whether that's through the machine gun or the lock on missiles. I think that the lock on missiles are very satisfying because you see the little square around the enemy and you know that you've been locked on. It shoots the missile.
But then there's like a delay of a little bit because of the depth between you and the enemy aircraft that you're not quite sure if it landed. And then you get that moment of success when it blows up and you realize that you've made a successful target.
That's exciting. That is exciting. And I think that the arcs that they take do look really cool because it still is because you have no idea how far away it is and maybe it's going to miss entirely. But it is satisfying once you finally hit it. One thing that I'd say is not very satisfying is just the amount of feedback that you get when you get hit. Because I have no idea aside from taking glances at my damage meter. Like I have no idea how I got hit or what hit me.
I think maybe there needed to be a little bit more feedback as to like when you take damage. Maybe a little bit of red or like a screen shake. I think right now just a it's just like a beep that sounds like different than other beeps. Yeah and there's a lot of sound cues in the game so I think you know it was a conscious decision but yes they should have had some kind of flash as well or something.
I don't know if that would have been annoying depending on how much damage you actually take when the machine guns happen. Like maybe that would have caused a seizure like effect. But you know I would say that for the damage meter and all that stuff even just the way that like finding enemies and stuff like that. Did it feel like the AI kind of was helping you discover them or be on the same like they were they were obviously hunting you too. But like altitude never really mattered when it came to the dog fight. Like if I was 50,000 feet they were 50,000 feet if I was 30,000 like they were there with me. I didn't have to like calibrate myself to find them on an altitude level.
So for all I know like when they were even attacking me right it's like maybe they were attacking me from behind and there's just no real like way to know that. Or maybe they were attacking me from an angled an angle of attack you know that was different than where I was altitude wise. But I'm not able to like discern that information from the cockpit. You could argue that's part of the experience. I think that you're right that the that the computer is helping you because again I really don't think that they've really modeled a 3D space here. And more so have just have some clever tricks to make you think that you're in a 3D space.
Because you're right like they never seem to be all that far away. I think they're never always they're not always on the same like altitude as you but they're never like more than maybe 5,000 feet away from you. Just so that you can have fights where you are like more angled towards the ground than not. So it doesn't feel like it's more of a two dimensional game. But yeah they're never like you're never gonna lose them because you're way above them. You're gonna more lose them because they're they're behind you and you need to flip around to see them.
And the last part of combat here the stealth mode. Arguably the name of the game implies that this mode is is the cool feature which is that you hit the start button. And it allows you to go into a invisible cloaking for a small amount of time so that you can shake off the enemies. I played the first level of this game without knowing that that was like a thing. I didn't read the manual. I didn't understand. I thought like the stealth thing was part of just the aircraft itself like part of the naming convention.
I don't know. It's a cool feature and everything but it doesn't actually like you know maybe I'm just so focused on trying to hit anything. Of the other enemy aircrafts that I'm not worried about necessarily myself and this damage feedback that I need to think about. Oh better turn on stealth mode. You only get one use.
Yeah okay this this whole feature is a cop out and I think you're I don't I don't know for a fact but I think you're right in saying that the whole stealth idea for the aircraft is just the design of the aircraft. Like it's got all these sharp edges and weird and weird designs because it was designed to like deflect radar and not reflect it. So the plane in real life is always in stealth mode and they just sort of made this up to make it a gameplay feature. And I think it's kind of a dumb gameplay feature that you press start once and then all missiles just don't lock on anymore.
It's not fun like there's no like cool ways to play around with it. It's just a get out of jail free card. I think we've exhausted talking about this first person cockpit experience as much as we possibly can. And I think anything else really needs to be experienced by the listener. So I would say if this game has intrigued you at all just from a complexity standpoint you're worth trying the game here because maybe you'll find a different experience. I personally just feel like the the combat mission portion is just lacking important information and then giving you a lot of additional information that maybe isn't necessarily required.
Yes. So then we move on to landing. Sean you tease this a little bit at the beginning because I think I think you put it very nicely that this is a solved game but a very hard one to to solve. Once you figure it out it's the same thing every time. However figuring it out is left to a trial and error that results in a lot of crashes. And crashes don't mean that you just redo the landing you redo the whole mission. Yeah. It's pretty rough there and it's very frustrating.
But yeah. So then this mode like your face buttons are no longer shoot and missile. They're now throttle up and throttle down. And basically the trick here is you want to sort of you want to kind of lean into the landing but also throttle down. And then you want to as you're getting slower and getting closer to the runway you want to sort of pull the nose up and continue to slow down. But you don't want to go so slow that you stall and fall.
And then at some certain point you won't realize that you touched the ground because it does a very bad job of telling you where the ground is because it's like in this faux landscape where you're not landing on a flat line. You're landing in like a perspective where there's a horizon behind you. So you're not really sure where the ground is. But then you'll just realize that you've been at that same level and haven't crashed. So there you know that you've landed. Wow. Pretty impressive stuff, Sean, to walk us through like that.
I think what's even funnier, though, is like, you know, that is a very detailed explanation of what you can do to figure out how to land this plane properly. The 2022 solution is to just look up a picture or a video of a proper landing in this game and just mirror the exact stats. Because as long as the lines and the pictures like I'm not talking about the actual aircraft landing in a specific spot. No, I'm talking about in the user interface. There's all these different things that they put up on the on the landing screen to kind of show you like first.
Yeah, I know. It's it's the same thing with Top Gun. Remember where we were complaining about the landing there and you revealed that it tells you. But now Top Gun is more forgiving. That actually gives you the exact numbers you need to hit. This would be pretty interesting if it actually made it so that you needed to like trace the lines over like it had the actual angles that you want to be at and you just kind of have to line yourself up with them.
I'd argue then what's the point of even simulating it then at that point. Yeah. But what we get here is arguably a more frustrating experience, if only because they chose not to just restart from the landing mission. Landing is tricky and they knew it was tricky. Trust me. I mean, come on. And here we go.
Starting way back to the beginning is just cruel. Thankfully, I played this on an emulator because this would have this would have taken me out of the game immediately to know that like all my hard work in the dogfight immediately is undone. This just doesn't happen in modern video games at all, but it shouldn't be happening back then either. There are they are able to like create states to be like, OK, you're now in the like if you're going to even name these things right like one one is the first takeoff. One two is the mission.
One three is the landing. You should be able to just start from the beginning of one three every time you crash in the landing. Yeah, it's it's kind of a tough thing to balance there. I almost feel like they shouldn't even punish you at all and maybe just give you like a points bonus or something or like access to a bonus like mini game after if you pull it off on the first try. Because punishing you at the end of a completely different game with this with this little test of memorization.
It's it's beyond me. I think that they needed to just let you land without any punishment and just reward you if you did it correctly. Right. We need to talk to about the length of time. You know, the takeoff takes all of 10 to 15 seconds to get up in the air. Where the landing sequence could take maybe as much as 30 seconds because they give you a long runway in most of the levels. I think there is one where you have to land on a carrier, which is just crazy. But, you know, for the most part, they're just very infinitely long landing strips.
You know, that probably takes about 30 seconds. The dogfight isn't like some one to two minute experience. That's going to take some time. Yeah, it's like six to seven minutes at least. Right to hunt everybody down. So I don't know, like being forced to, you know, to do the whole like seven minute sequence again. That's a little wild.
Yeah, that's that was poorly thought out. However, you know, I could understand where they're coming from, too, of like crashing is failing the mission and the mission started at the base. It's a different game, though. Like it's a completely different mode. And there should be, like you said, checkpoints between shifts in game. Like, yeah, of course, maybe you shouldn't get a checkpoint after you kill each enemy plane because like that's that's part of the game. You have to you have to fight all of these and not them one at a time. But then you've just completely changed the perspective, the controls and your objective. So it makes more sense. Maybe give them a little leeway.
It's like crashing your car in the career mode of Gran Turismo and that being considered a player death and you have to start a new file. Gran Turismo. Yeah, you get five lives to start. Yeah. Funny enough. I don't think they've ever let you crash cars in Gran Turismo. Right. The car manufacturers probably would not allow that. I think the most you'll see is like broken windows. I don't even know if they do that. Mm hmm. Well, here, too, with the F-117, it's all or nothing. You know, damage doesn't appear to do anything when it's just, you know, anywhere under 100 percent damage. It looks like the same great looking airplane. However, you know, 100 percent damage or a crash in the landing sequence and you're up in oblivion. You have been evaporated.
Now, how about the variety of these missions? Right. And I'm considering a mission, the whole thing, the takeoff, the dogfight and the landing. Is there anything more here than just like the amount of enemies you take on or then, you know, the the setting? They try to change it this way. It's like now it's at night. Now it's over water. Like, what do you think about the actual variety? The only thing that I think was cool and it wasn't just like, well, I would hope that they'd have like different colors for things like and it's not all just above the same grassland.
The one thing that I did think was cool was was the night missions because they do kind of have a different vibe about them. And like your your your UI looks different. The planes have a different look against the sky and the takeoff and landing look very different as well. So I even though it is mostly just cosmetic, having the night missions, I think, was a plus that they did feel cool.
On the sequels and spinoff side here, this game was published by Activision, but the developer is Imagineering, which is not to be confused with Walt Disney's Imagineering. And we haven't heard that name before because they have mostly been making Atari 2600 games before this. This is actually their first NES game. But come 1990, we're going to see a lot more of them. I'm just going to list off some games here. Destination Earth Star, Ghostbusters 2, Heavy Shredden, A Boy and His Blob, Trouble on Blob-alonia. I know I know from, you know, just like word of mouth that A Boy and His Blob is, you know, a big game. But that title is pretty funny in itself.
I sure I think, you know, they might become something here. This was a interesting first attempt at making something for the NES. And it doesn't seem like they're going to repeat that. It seems like they're going to try a bunch of other games, mostly blob centric.
But I'm also interested, like how many Activision games have we played so far? Like they're, they're pretty, they're relatively new to the, to the game here too, right? The actual games we have played by Activision so far are strictly publishing games. They have not developed any of these games. We had Super Pitfall, one of the worst NES games we've ever played. And that was made by Micronix, who we haven't heard from in a while. Yeah, that's true. So they may be retired from making this garbage.
Ghostbusters, which makes sense because they're going to bring us Ghostbusters 2. So they just like bought the license and said, we'll just get people to make these games for us.
Predator, another, you know, franchise thing. And then our very next episode, The Three Stooges is also an Activision game, but not a Beam software. Sorry, not an Imagineering game. It's made by Beam software instead. Okay. All right. So we really haven't seen any of the Activision touch yet. It's really just been like, all right, yeah, we'll make money off of your game.
Yeah, it seems like that's the plan and it's going well. I mean, pretty soon there'll be a couple, you know, hundred billion dollar corporation. I can't wait. I just think it's interesting too, though, that the games that I listed off have nothing to do with planes or, you know, anything involving this engine. Like this whole thing that they made for this specific game is just going to go unused. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. I also, you know, maybe it's, maybe it'll be improved upon in Three Stooges.
Yes. Yeah, that's true. Maybe the dog fighting in Three Stooges will be better. Granted, they've only had a week, but maybe they'll make it, maybe they'll add some touches. Mm-hmm. You know, Sean, I'm just watching Stealth ATF, not to get back on an old subject here. I know we were kind of done. Yeah. But I'm in a desert level and I'm seeing these cactuses. And if you ride your altitude pretty damn low, the cactuses do get bigger, which doesn't make sense.
Cactuses, you know, or cactuses, you shouldn't be seeing them at 44,000 feet. And then they shouldn't be gigantic as you get to 10,000 feet. Like, at that rate, like, that's actually some bad pixel skewing, right? I mean, at this rate, maybe it's telling us that we aren't actually on Earth and we're actually on a different planet that just has mega cactus, which are several stories tall. Who's the cactus from Final Fantasy? Maybe he, maybe it's his planet. Yeah, cactor. This is cactor's planet. All right. You never see a person get into the plane. That's true. I think that's important information.
Well, you can tell we've run out of ideas for what else to talk about. So there is one more thing to talk about, and that is whether Stealth ETF is going to be on the Essential Games list.
Sean, we've talked at length about Stealth ETF now. I've exhausted what I can say about it. Do you have anything left to say about it? Um, yeah, I'm just going to expand upon, because I really only spoke for maybe 30 seconds about how I did actually have fun playing this game. Because there's a lot of frustration, and there's a lot of, like, trying to relearn how the world works and how, you know, moving in a direction, uh, it doesn't mean that everything else shifts around you.
Um, but once you kind of got all the weird ticks of the world, and you started to realize that, yeah, you can only move in this sort of predefined, um, uh, discrete changes in altitude and angle. Once you sort of got all that out of the way, um, you can kind of navigate, and you can kind of get the hang of stuff.
And the dogfights can be fun if you can keep them in your view, and you learn how to. And it's a lot of, like, having, it's fun in spite of itself, because this isn't the best design game, but it is still technically impressive, I think. And it was impressive that, like, how it felt once you got over all those weird hang-ups. But with that said, like, these are really weird problems that you're gonna have to run into, so, uh, it may not be worth it. But I'd say that if you're into weird, uh, primitive, uh, flight sims, um, and you like blowing stuff up, and you like crashing planes trying to land them, um, give it a shot. Not essential.
I don't disagree with anything you just said. Um, I think, file this one under people who love the NES, and then want to explore, like, one-offs or genres that they don't necessarily, like, are familiar with from their NES childhood. Because I can't imagine this game being, like, super popular. When you find out, like, oh, they actually had, like, a, um, a fighter jet cockpit first-person style video game. Like, I want to see how that was done. You have to be a fan, uh, of the NES and all of its limitations to enjoy this kind of game. This is not the kind of game that I would recommend anyone seek out in 2022.
But for, like, this kind of thing that we're doing here, and for all the people who are joining us for the ride, you know, it's another, it's another unique spin that just doesn't fully deliver. I, I think that's really all I can say about it. Obviously, that doesn't sound like an essential vote for me. But it's not, like, I don't know. We were pretty hard on it throughout the episode. It's not even close to, like, one of the worst games I played. It's just a little unforgiving, even for a simulation-style game. Sam would certainly put this in the jank folder.
There you go. But it would be, you know, in a good way, kind of. Next week, we have the Three Stooges. As we've said multiple times now in this episode. We said at the beginning, we said it in the middle, and now I'm telling you again. I think it's just, maybe that's because I'm a little shocked that we're having a Three Stooges game on the NES. How will it play? What will it be like? That's what we save next Friday for, because you will hear it in the episode. You will hopefully have played it, or after hearing us talk about it, we'll be determined to play it.
Or not if we don't like it. You get what I'm saying, right? You guys depend on us to tell you how to feel. And that's why we've created a whole nother podcast to tell you how to feel about Japanese games. It's called Nostalgia Bites. It's only on our Patreon, patreon.com slash nostalgia. We just did an episode called The Tower of Draga. And now, our next month, we will have an episode on Battle City.
Probably not a game you've ever heard of, because it never came to the NES. Sean, Battle City, one guess, what are we doing in it? I'm going to say that you are a detective that's trying to solve the murder of yourself in the afterlife. And you have to turn in your findings to this man named Ryan Battle. And once you do that, you get to go to the city. Find out if Sean is right in our Nostalgia Bites episode, Battle City. And stream the first six episodes of Nostalgia Bites now when you join us, patreon.com slash nostalgia. Nostalgia Bites
