267 · Top Gun: The Second Mission

• You earned your wings in Top Gun. Now let’s see if you can keep em!
• NES Longplay
• Introductions
  • Turns out people didn’t need to wait 25 years for a sequel to Top Gun. It was right here on the NES
  • Just like the movies, the enemy is never given a name or country
    • The enemy is not explicitly identified but boss characters are all highly advanced Soviet Union prototypes from the time, and the enemy aces have stereotypical Russian-styled names such as "Gorky", "Demitri", and "Stalin".
• Gameplay
  • Adventure Mode - Take off, dogfight, land in only 3 missions
  • So what’s changed?
    • New Graphics (the best dogfighting we’ve seen on the NES so far?)
      • The first game looked a little bit more early computer like. Especially with the way information was read out. In this one, everything in the cockpit is a bit more seamless
      • Another game where nearly everything in the cockpit is of use, even if you don’t know it.
        • There are 4 vertical lights near your radar that will go off when what they are particularly checking for is achieved. For example, the third light from the top lets you know you have a missile lock on the enemy
    • More references to real aircrafts and missiles
• PHEONIX - You get 20 missiles. The range pretty much takes up the entire vertical length of your viewscreen, and roughly half of the length.
• SPARROW - You get 40 missiles. The range is roughly 2/3 the size of Pheonix.
• SIDEWINDER - You get 60 missiles. The range is about 1/2 the size of Pheonix.
  • An improved landing sequence
    • Mostly because it’s shorter, but also because the information is more clearly displayed to the player
    • 1 vs com or another play in ariel dogfighting
  • Is it enough or is this what we would now consider DLC?
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • Top Gun: Guts and Glory
    • Game Boy game that attempts to do the whole flight simulation thing that the NES games are doing. Pretty crazy task
  • Top Gun: Firestorm
    • Isometric flight combat game for the GBC and GBA
• EGL
• Next week - Top Players' Tennis
• NEStalgia Byte - Chaos World

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 Top Gun 2, the second mission. You earned your wings in Top Gun, now let's see if you can keep them.

00:21 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And turns out, people didn't need to wait 25 years for a sequel to Top Gun. It was right here on the NES. Yeah, I'm pretty surprised by this. I mean, I guess you probably told us there'd be another game soon, but I didn't expect it to happen so soon. Well, I feel like Top Gun 1 was actually quite a while ago, wasn't it? The game? Whoa. Yeah. Like, in our years or their years? In our years. Yeah, yeah. In our years, yes, it was also a while ago. I guess, I mean, I guess in the grand scheme of things, you know, there was no Top Gun 2 in 1990, but we got a Top Gun 2 as a vidja game, you know what I'm saying?

01:13 Yeah. I think both of you are making a solid point here, but Joe is saying that we recorded Top Gun a while ago, which would be true. We recorded it back in September of 2019, whereas it is now, yeah, it is now March of 2023.

01:29 But the actual time between the games is three years, November of 87 to February of 1990. So not even three full years, really. So just to, that puts things in perspective. But granted, Top Gun fans are at least eating somewhere because they weren't eating in the movie theaters. Because as I mentioned, Top Gun Maverick, which came out last year on our timeline,

01:54 did not, did not come out with this game. This game is not based on Top Gun 2. It's not like they, they were like, oh, we have a great script, but we can't make it a movie. So let's make it a video game. This is really just Top Gun 1, the NES game with some additional features. Anybody want to argue about that? Yeah, I'm going to come out on the side that this is a premature adaptation of Top Gun Maverick. I haven't seen either movie, just as a note.

02:24 So I finally saw Top Gun 1. And I'm curious if you guys saw Top Gun 2, if there's any parallels between this and Top Gun 2 that wouldn't have been found in Top Gun 1. Well, you know, there are, well, no, your little thing that you threw in at the end there

02:37 is the thing, yeah, that little stipulation. I was going to say that the one thing that's consistent in the Top Gun universe, whether it be the games or the movies, because this is also true in Maverick, is that the enemy is never given a name or a country. And that is also true here. I think it's amazing that a movie can have a villain that we never get to even know.

02:59 They're really just enemy aircrafts. But I mean, at least in this game, like, the names of the enemies will give you the idea that it's the Soviet Union. What would give you that idea? Would it be that the names, some of the names are like Stalin? Well, that's the, what I was going to say is that, like, are there similar, like, wink, wink, nudge, nudges in the movies coming from someone?

03:26 Obviously not Maverick, because, like, the international movie industry will not allow such things. But, like, in Top Gun 1, did they give any illusion as to who it could be? I'll be honest, from when I saw it, I mean, I just saw it maybe about, like, six months ago, and I hated it so much that I really don't remember.

03:47 I really thought it was a really bad movie. My girlfriend's been trying to get me to watch the second one. I know I'll probably like it, because everyone has told me it's really, really good. I'm just so reluctant, because I was like, even for, like, 80s camp movies, I was just like, even with, like,

03:59 even if I had nostalgia for this, I feel like I couldn't be like, wow, what a good movie. I don't want to turn this into a movie review podcast, but Joe, I feel like, just based off of what you didn't like about Top Gun 1, the things you're talking about, you won't like Top Gun 2. This was a movie that was made to get people to go back to the movies. So the only thing that's, like, really amazing about it are all the practical stunts and things that they- Well, that's probably what he'll like, not the camp and the volleyball scenes. Oh, they replaced the volleyball scene with a different beach scene.

04:31 Hate is a strong word. I was just like, I'm not invested in this story. It was just, it felt like a mess, you know? Like, anyway. Well, I liked the first game. Yes, Sean was kind enough to put it on the Essential Games list as the sole voter. Yeah, yeah, I was into it. I think I was, you know, colored by just, you know, kind of unimpressive stuff up until then. You know, my NES brain has matured since. I probably wouldn't make the same vote today.

05:03 That opinion might change in a couple weeks where I'll say, like, no, Top Gun is still essential. But right now, I'd say it was just happiness that there was like, oh, it's trying something different. A first person flight sim, and it's actually pretty fun. I still stand by that it was still pretty fun. This seems to have more going on. I don't know what you guys think.

05:27 Well, I didn't want to get too far off the initial question here, though, Sean, because you stood by the idea that Top Gun back then, at least, was an Essential Game. When you booted up this one, because it is close and mostly just, you know, graphical and some additional missiles and other, you know, making things easier, did you get the same impression? Not to give away your vote here or anything, but did you have an amazing initial impression all over again of like, oh, you know, this has a lot going for it?

05:59 I'd say that what we've seen since, things have impressed me more since Top Gun that makes Top Gun less impressive. I think a lot of what colored my view of the first Top Gun game was just how like, technically impressive it was while still being enjoyable to play.

06:25 I think that some games have done it better since, and I'll reserve my specific opinions on this one until later in the show, I suppose. I'll say this, for some reason, every time I play a game like this, like in this kind of first person aircraft shooter type thing, on the NES, I have like a weird brain fart where I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe the NES is capable of it, of this, even though this is like the, this is like the sixth game we've played like this, and every time I have the same reaction.

06:57 So once that wears off, that's when I can get into like, okay, what does this bring to the table actually, now that I'm like, done with the shock and like amazement that the NES is doing this. The game has an adventure mode where you have to take off on the runway, dogfight your way through a couple of enemy

07:16 aircrafts, and then once you've completed the dogfighting section, there's like a boss at the end, followed by a landing mission. The landing mission in the first episode was one of the most famous things that we've covered on Nostalgia, not even on purpose, I don't even think we knew that we were making a big deal about it at the time, but it seems that not a lot of people knew how that landing sequence worked, and it became kind of a thing that people have even given us positive reviews just because we opened their mind to how landing works in Top Gun. So, appreciate everybody for that.

07:49 That same experience is here with the addition of just the ability to, whether with a computer or with another player, do the dogfighting section as well, where you can try to take down a bunch of computer aircrafts or take down a second player. Those are the modes, but rather than break down those modes or talk about, you know, what they changed on a case-by-case thing, what's the big takeaway? What's the big thing they changed in this game for you guys that made Top Gun 2 not just paid DLC?

08:25 I'd say that I think that the thing that reads to me as the biggest point, which is probably really not actually a major thing, but is really just adjustments to, like, the environment you see and the amount of, like, tilt you're allowed to do on the plane, that makes this game feel so much faster to me than the first game. I did boot back up the first game again, and this game feels, like, a lot more, like, high-octane, like, exciting because it just feels faster. And I can't even say that I know that it actually is faster, but something about this game just felt more exciting now. Like, it felt like they really turned it up to 11.

09:05 Well, I think part of that is just sort of the visual design here where instead of this sort of blank ground or water that you're flying above, you have, like, a sonic-style, like, checkerboard below you that they're flashing between, and that kind of gives that bigger feel of speed or movement

09:31 where, yeah, it just didn't have that in the first one. Yeah. And I think... I also think in the first one, I don't think you were able to, like, flip fully around, right? So, like, I feel like just that, like, that, what you're talking about also combined with the fact that it really tilts on the screen. So you feel upside down, you feel like you're really tilting, you feel like you're really moving, kind of did it for me. The graphics in general have obviously improved. I went back to the first game, and that one had more of a... I don't even know if this makes sense because they're both 8-bit graphics, obviously, but it had more of an early computer look to it where things were a little more, like,

10:10 you know, they were a little more choppy around the console and the way that they decided to convey that information, whereas this one, everything's, like, a little more smoothed out, and the cockpit feels like something you actually live in. It's definitely sleeker design. It's even got, like, those flourishes that make it look like a piece of equipment aside from, like, just the... I mean, I think the first one did it too, but it... there was more... It's much more aesthetically pleasing this time, at least the console, and that combined with the environmental movement effects sort of, at first glance, give this a much more simulation feel.

10:52 I will get into where I think this goes wrong, but if you have more to say, Mike... The only thing I was gonna say was that it's just another game where nearly everything in the cockpit is of use, even if you... even if you don't know it. Like, you might not even take the time to learn all these things, but the thing I'm thinking of is those four vertical lights near where your radar is in the center of the screen, those lights just go off, and

11:19 if you... you know, it doesn't say, like, exactly what it is. You have to refer to the manual for it. But for example, like, if the third light from the top, which is, I guess, the second light from the bottom, goes off, then that's how you know that you have missile lock on the enemy, and that, you know, when you fire a missile, it will target that enemy.

11:36 It's like, they didn't need to put that, because they're not even giving the information, right? Like, it's something you have to kind of remember. But because all the stuff in the cockpit is, like, actively working, and you're having a hard enough time, you're going so fast, you're seeing so much on the screen, just in your viewfinder, to then look at the console and see all this other stuff going on, it just makes... it sells it much better. It's much more convincing that you're in this aircraft, even if it is in two dimensions.

12:08 Yeah, one on another... another note on that is it will also sort of try and sell that immersion by making these lights and alerts mean something by adding things that it doesn't need an alert for. There is a light at the bottom that will flash that indicates that you're doing a barrel roll. Now, the other way that you can figure out that you're doing a barrel roll is by watching you do the barrel roll. So, I think that some of it's there just for that, like, look, we did this thing,

12:43 and it's reactive, and no, it's not... you just made a problem for the solution... I don't know, I'm just rambling right now, but... I mean, I guess it's possible if you're tilted up high enough that you can't see the ground, and you're just in, like... I mean, I don't know, is there always something on screen you can see you spinning? No, you can look up, and there won't be anything. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, I mean, I guess there's, like, a rare occurrence where you would need that, but I don't know.

13:13 Maybe it was a... it's a nice quality of life addition. You get to choose your missiles for the aircraft, and really the only difference is the number of missiles you get, and, like, their range. So, with the Phoenix, you get 20 missiles, but the range is great, and then so on and so forth. It just decreases, right? So, you get the Sparrow has now 40 missiles, but it's only two-thirds the size of the Phoenix, and the Sidewinder... Sidewinder or Sidewinder? Sidewinder. Yeah. I would say winder. It's interesting, because I never went to school, so I wouldn't know how to say that.

13:53 It's named after a snake. Yeah. The point I was trying to make is that the whole, like, there's two consonants between the I and the E, so I wasn't sure if the I would be long, but here we are. We're having this conversation. Live on the air! We should do an alphabet. We should do an alphabet, buddy. One day. Yeah, and that, you know, you get the idea. It's just like, is that enough? Should the missiles have provided more features, or should they even bother? Like, should it just be, like, the Phoenix is the one to go to? Like, yeah, you only get 20, but at least, you know, you're getting good coverage?

14:22 Yeah, the thing I want to clarify here is that it's sort of, it's a wider reticle, so it will lock on in a wider field of view, not so much range. Like, there are different, like, sprites for a plane being far away and up close. This has nothing to do with that. It's just, what land, sorry, what square footage of the screen are you able to lock on to an opponent? So I think what this is really doing is just, it's just another difficulty modifier, and the missile doesn't really have any extra or worse capabilities.

15:05 But it is giving you more of the missile, so at least in that case, you can, if you, you know, if you, if you think you're within range, but you're not, you can fire the missile and then find out, like, oh, it didn't, it didn't lock on, but now at least I have another 20 that I had. Yeah, I actually went for that every time.

15:22 I guess I didn't really test out the other, the other missiles, because I was just like, you know what, I'll take my chance on missing and get, you know, 40 more than the, than the lower one, 40 more chances. I always just went with the middle one, because I just figure, you know, that's probably the default. And that was the experience. Yeah, honestly, probably the, the, probably the low one is probably best, because I never went through 20 missiles.

15:47 And so, did they change anything about the way that the dogfights go down, the, the way that you have the aircrafts, uh, the enemy aircrafts around you, the, the way that the information between the horizon split and the land and sky, like, did any of that change enough? Or is this, is this, this game, but now with some nicer graphics and, uh, missile options? Well, that's, that's one of the things that I think playing this now as a, you know, it's a, an upgraded version of the first one. I think it is a different game, but I, it is, it, it has more qualities of a late, mid to late NES game than the first one did.

16:32 I think playing this, uh, now gave me a, uh, it opened my eyes to the, the problems that the first one had that I just didn't see as problems because I was just so impressed. And that is a problem with all of these NES games that, will give you like a pseudo 3d experience.

16:53 Um, and that is like, you're moving and there, there is a, a correlation between where things are in quote unquote space and where they are on your screen. But it just seems like sometimes like the, the computer is cheating because as an example, like you can kind of get an idea of where the enemies are by looking at your radar and like the, the moat, the object of a dog fight is to try and get behind the plane that you're firing at. So it can't shoot at you, but you can shoot at it.

17:29 And then you just, you, you did the thing you, you, you, you shot him down, but it seemed like no matter what kind of maneuvers I was doing, that the opponent would always have like an edge, like it's turning radius would be sharper.

17:46 The, uh, it would always do something to sort of move in counter to what I'm trying to do. And that really is only possible when what is being shown to is not real 3d space, but like some pantomime of it, uh, which I think is kind of given me a, just a negative, uh, first impression on these 3d games now, because knowing that they're not really simulating a coordinate space and just like giving you an idea of what's happening.

18:19 Uh, I always feel a little cheated. I don't know if I'm making sense, but I don't know how you guys feel about that. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me. Granted, I, I didn't really notice it until like a little, until like a little further in the game. It wasn't like an initial thing for me, but definitely like second or third mission.

18:37 When you get into those one-on-one dogfights, there were times where the guy is behind me and I am just turning and turning and turning and he is just locked behind me. Like I can see him like maybe swaying back and forth, but like I have almost no control. It feels like of where I am relative to him. Like he can't shake him. You, you can try and like, oh, okay. He thinks I'm going to continue to do this arc. I will do a barrel roll and then go up instead of to the left or right. Like all these little things to try and shake a pursuer don't seem to work or they work very

19:12 infrequently. You ever try to just pull the brakes and let them just fly right by you? The brakes? No, you can't do that. I'm joking. I'm saying like, just stop. You can, you can stop all forward momentum and just let them blow right back. I thought you were like, I thought you were actually serious and there was a button. No, no, no, no, but that is something you can do in Star Fox 64. So maybe, you know, that's a kudos for Star Fox 64. They have brakes. Well, technology was more advanced by then. And actually that game takes place in the past.

19:41 Oh, well then. They, they improved some other things though in this game rather, you know, if the dogfighting, uh, graphical improvements weren't enough for you there, those boss fights weren't in the first game. Uh, it's a little strange. I don't really think they're boss fights, but they kind, they kind of are right. Like they, they bleed that line between that end of level shmup boss fight where now all of a sudden the big ship comes out and it's always directly in

20:04 front of you and you just have to shoot it more times than it shoots you and then you win. And, but it's also still in the, it's in the 3d space and still under the same controls and everything. So it's really just a more powerful, uh, enemy aircraft that you're going up against. Right. I don't know. Do you, do you think it's in a 3d space? I, I feel like as soon as that,

20:26 that boss aircraft shows up, you are locked and it's just, yeah, you're sitting there and it's in front of you. It's kind of like when you switch between, uh, the sort of free form areas and then go into these boss fights, it's definitely a separate instance. Like I don't think, I didn't try this, but the fact that there was a, like a cut and then you're moved back into the, like the boss fight, it felt like now this is, this is running on slightly different scripting.

20:57 Yeah. I mean, I definitely, you definitely can't like turn around and face the opposite. Right. Right. And I, and I, I know that too. I guess what I was saying is that it's still in the same view. Like it's, it's not like, uh, the boss fight changes the way that the gameplay is handled. Right. Right. You're still on the same screen. You're still, you know, you still have the same weapons available to you. Yeah.

21:17 It's sort of kind of like in an action game that it's like in resident evil two remake where it's sort of the same controls to move around. But when you end up fighting the giant crocodile, it turns into like you just running towards the camera. It's, it's turning into a set piece where the controls that you're used to don't one to one correlate, but they still kind of do.

21:45 Right. No, no, that makes sense. But would you, would you prefer to instead have like, say it's the helicopter boss fight. Would you have rather that not been in a locked position and instead you have to hunt them down and they are hunting you down or hunter becomes hunted kind of situation? I mean, it, it's kind of, I guess it's hard to do when you think about a helicopter and like a, a, a jet, a fighter jet and how you would, how you would actually make that work within the same systems. But I think when you have bosses that work within the same systems, it becomes more of a simulator and less of like an arcade experience. And I guess I just don't know which one it wants to be here.

22:27 Yeah. I mean, I'll say, I think that the, um, the dog fights in some cases later in the game felt more like boss battles that belong in this game than the boss battles did, especially because I don't know if you guys noticed this, but I mean, there's three boss battles in this game. There's three major missions. The first one, that's a decent little challenge. You take out all the engines, you take out the wings and you got to shoot down the plane. It takes a minute. Second one, you shoot it like four times. The whole thing blows up.

22:55 And the third one you got to take out. It's like, it's like they get progressively easier or like the first one's hard. Second one is really, really easy. And the third one is like in between. Well, I don't know. Very weird. I don't know if NASA ever advised to shoot down a space shuttle. You know, I imagine it would be pretty easy to take that thing down. Yeah, but I'm talking for gameplay. Right. No, no, of course. A gameplay standpoint.

23:17 I do think it's funny just that it got that extreme, but I don't know. It just felt like they did. They put all of their design thought into the first one. And then they're like, oh, we don't have time. We got to get this out. So let's just put two more boss battles in. I do have a quick little aside about the Star Wars space plane. Yeah, go for it. So apparently there was very briefly in the late 80s, a competitor to NASA space shuttle. They call it the Buran.

23:49 And it was basically just a ripoff of the space shuttle's design. And it never did a manned flight. It went into space for a few hours once without anybody in it. And then it was retired. And then the Soviet Union fell. So I just think it's funny because I thought that like, oh, why are they just putting the space shuttle as an enemy? And I didn't know until I played this game and looked up stuff about it that that was a real thing.

24:24 They also improved the landing sequence, or so I'm told. The only thing I could really tell about it is that it's much shorter. So if you fail, you fail faster. But I guess you could argue that the information of what you need to do to land is given to you more clearly than in Top Gun 1. Granted, it's still the same information. You still have to make sure you match the speed and the altitude. It's just that in Top Gun 1, it was just text being displayed. Whereas in Top Gun 2, there's a, you know, it's all conveyed on one screen telling you up, down, speed, 288. Yeah, your target speed. So this is basically taking a boss battle and turning it into a quick time event.

25:15 In the first one, you kind of had to get a feel for landing. And I'm not saying that that's a good thing. Like, it's a pretty routine thing that they made unnecessarily hard and it took us a while to get the gist of it. But now it's just like, you follow the instructions on the screen and it feels like you're not landing. You're just saying, uh-huh, yeah, down. Yeah, slow. You're just doing what it says to do. So it feels like you aren't really learning anything. You're just copying.

25:48 Like, my biggest takeaway from it is that it's just this, it's pretty much the same thing. It's just a lot more broad, a lot less touchy. You know, you don't have to be as exact. It's just like up, down, you know. I did replay a landing sequence from the original and, yeah, I mean, this isn't, uh, I don't think this is in any way, I think this is, if anything, supporting your argument, Sean.

26:09 But, um, but I played the first one and it was a lot more, like, up, left, right, down. Like, I was, like, every second I had to be pressing a button to, like, just to really stay lined up that whole time. Whereas this, it was just kind of, like, I felt more like I was just kind of, like, in the background sort of managing the plane rather than flying it. I was also surprised that just how, you know, maybe this is what you guys are saying, but, like, how literally you have to tweak things to the point where even they were saying that you have to, like, straighten out with the carrier to land on it.

26:41 I felt like even that was kind of forgiving. It's not like you need to be head-on with the runway to land. You just have to make sure you're lined up with the carrier at all. But the speed also isn't, like, dramatically different than what you start the landing sequence at. I think you started around, like, 320 and you have to get down to 288. It's like, okay, you know, just slow, you know, point the aircraft up to slow down a little bit and then bring it down to get the altitude right.

27:08 It didn't feel like it was asking a lot of the player, and I don't know if this is what you meant to say, Sean, but, yeah, this was the boss fight in the first game was the landing sequence. And now they've replaced that with this on-rails boss fight where it shoots at you and you shoot at it and you just kind of hope that you take it down before it takes you down. I guess my point was more so, like, if you're going to dumb down something that was probably complained about, that being the landing sequences, you're just going to dumb it down to just, like, follow the instructions on the screen, then maybe just remove it. Because right now it's kind of dumb.

27:49 But, yeah, the new boss... See, it didn't bother me as much, though. Like, now that you mention it, you're right. It's, like, not... It is pretty dumbed down. Obviously, I wasn't a huge fan of that first version either where it was, like, really difficult to get on there. But it's just... Now, as is, if I wasn't thinking about the existence of the first game, to me, this would just be, like, oh, it's a fun little immersion exercise.

28:11 I would like it to be a little... Have a little more challenge, but I would rather have this in than not have it in. Yeah, like, the third mission should have had, like, an engine failure on top of it, so it makes the landing even harder to do.

28:24 And then the other modes in the game, the one-verse computer or two-player dogfighting, I'm just going to say it. Like, the two-player dogfighting, I am very impressed that they're able to basically take the entire screen information of the one-player screen and then just split it down the middle. Yes, it also makes it a little... Like, everything's so much more impossibly small, so it is a little harder to see. And yes, the information for both you and your opponent are on the screen at the same time, so it's very easy to screen look if that's a thing you even consider doing.

28:57 Like, it's not really going to help you in this game, but... I feel like it'll be hard to, like, interpret what you're looking at that quickly, though. Right, right, and the radars still exist, but, like, weren't you guys, like, surprised to see that they fit everything, that there was no compromises? I mean, there's some compromises in performance, too. I think, like, the frame rate kind of takes a dip, but, I mean, everything functionally is still there, so I was impressed. I didn't play it, but I didn't watch it be played. I did neither, so, yes, I'm impressed in my imagination of how I imagine this game. I'm trying to find a video. Where did you even find a video of this? You can find a video of it.

29:36 Just type in Top Gun Second Mission 2 player. That's what I'm on. Oh, that's interesting. Here we go. Don't type in official soundtrack. That will only give you music. Yeah, it's just that's all I'm getting, but now I found one. I've only did one. No, but really, that is all I was getting, was, like, not even soundtrack. It was, like, the win screen and the lose screen.

29:58 Like, why do I care about a whole six-second video of the win screen? Well, those would be the sounds you would hear. Those would be the sounds you would hear in the two-player mode. Also, we've been lumping together the 1vs.com and the two-player, but they are different modes. It's not like the 1vs.com also does a split screen where, like, you see the computers and where they are and stuff like that.

30:15 It's just that you're facing off waves of computer enemy aircrafts without the whole takeoff and landing and boss fights. Instead, it's just waves of computer enemies that just get harder and harder. You do still land, but at least in the, like, the one-player versus, it kind of gives you, like, a bracket. Like, you're going up against harder and harder opponents, and it's always a dogfight. There's no other, like, just mobs to mop up.

30:48 And I kind of like this version of the game better where it, I mean, it is harder, and it's where a lot of, like, where I thought the game was cheating kind of came into play. But I at least like the format better in this sort of secondary mode. Yeah. Everyone knows that all the college air forces do, like, a March Madness-style dogfighting competition. Yeah. I mean, who wouldn't? One thing, though, going back to that initial mode that I think we, I didn't want to gloss over, is that in both the second and third mission, there's, like, a different mode of play that pops up. Where in the second mission, you go near the ground because you've got to take out some tanks, and there's this whole section where you have to dodge trees.

31:33 And these trees, they come up pretty quickly on you, so it does take, like, some good reflexes to, like, decide, like, okay, this tree is going to hit me, I have to turn left. Oh, now there's a tree over here, I've got to turn right to get between them. Like, it is a little tough to find, but in the third mission, where you're dodging bolts of lightning and later lasers from the spacecraft, I guess, some of that, I mean, that is, like, a real test of Twitch reflexes where I feel like it's not even, like, for casual gamers anymore.

32:01 Like, you really have to be dead on. Granted, I did learn that if I just constantly hit left, right, left, right, left, right, I usually luck my way through it. But if I try to legitimately dodge those lightning bolts, I mean, it's possible, but it is very, I don't think I could do it without a lot of practice. On that note, how often did you start a mission and then within several seconds of taking off, be greeted with a missile in your face and a game over? That happened to me a lot at first until I realized that my strategy to that is not even to barrel roll, but to, like, horizontally spin.

32:39 Whenever a missile's coming, I would just spin horizontally, it would go by me. So after a while, I was able to avoid that most of the time, but it was at the expense of me ever being able to fly straight. Okay. Game over.

32:56 On the sequels and spinoff side, I think last Top Gun episode we covered a bunch of these. I just wanted to highlight some of the other Nintendo entries that we won't get to, but, or maybe we will if, you know, people demand it enough. Top Gun Guts and Glory.

33:14 That sounded strange. Should Guts and Glory. I guess it's fine. Game Boy game that attempts to do the whole flight simulation thing that the NES games are doing. It's a pretty crazy task. And you'll see from, like, if you just look up Top Gun Guts and Glory, it's almost funny what the aircrafts look like from a distance. And the fact that they also decide to include, like, now it's just a vertical line that is the horizontal for you. There's no, there's not even any sense of land. It's just the green is the land and the white is the sky. But just incredible that they were even able to include something that looked like a cockpit, a score, and try to convey 3D space inside a Game Boy game.

34:02 Yeah, it almost looks closer to your radar screen. Like, it's like if the whole game was the radar screen. Right, right. I don't have a visual in front of me, but I like what I'm hearing. The aircraft looks like a little heartbeat. Oh. You know, like a boom-boom. It just looks like a heartbeat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, heartbeat. I think you said a harpy. No, that'd be cute too, though. Yeah, like a, like it's a, Top Gun is now like an antiquity mythological thing.

34:30 But Top Gun wouldn't always just be 3D dogfighting flight simulators. It would eventually move on to Top Gun Firestorm, which is an isometric flight combat game for first the Game Boy Color and then eventually the Game Boy Advance. Not what I was expecting, but also just kind of crazy that Top Gun, a movie from 1987 with no planned sequels at this point, could still be getting video games in 2001.

34:58 Like just that the brand was strong enough. That would be like, I don't know, did they release a Rocky game in 2001? They probably did. Well, you know what? I mean, I guess it's different because there's still this like universe going on. But even like Lord of the Rings came out in 2001 and they're still making like Gollum games and stuff. Yeah, but that's a bigger franchise, right? I don't think we're putting it on the same. We've got Hobbit stuff coming out. I mean, I don't think it's unprecedented.

35:23 I'm pretty sure that these posthumous, I use posthumous, I guess, semi-jokingly, but franchises aren't really out of nowhere. Like there was that 2008 like Ghostbusters game or something. Maybe it was 2008. Right. Before any of these Ghostbuster remakes were planned or shot or anything. Like I'm thinking it's not out of the blue. It's not crazy. There was a Rocky video game in 2002 and then a follow-up sequel in 2004 called Rocky Legends. And hell, there was a Warriors game and there hasn't been a Warriors since the Warriors. Yeah, we need Rockstar to go back to making stuff like that. Make the Warriors again. You know what we're going to do again? Play the Warriors? Nope. Same thing we do every week, Sean. The Essential Games List.

36:15 I think Top Gun 2 is a reasonable improvement over Top Gun 1 if you just play them back to back. I'm surprised at how short the game theoretically is. I think it's, you know, it is a tough game. I didn't get to the final mission. It is a tough game to beat or whatever. But the actual experience is kind of what you make of it. It's how much you want to play Top Gun is what you'll get out of it is what I'm trying to say. And it's not that I didn't have a good time or that I haven't, you know, like, well, what's a better 3D flight simulator game on the NES? That's not really the issue at hand. I think the issue for me with Top Gun 2, the second mission, is that they could have taken a lot more risks than what they did.

36:58 It does feel weird that we got mostly the first game with some improved graphics and a two-player mode. There are other differences, but I think they could have really expanded that whole adventure mode. They're the ones calling it adventure mode, not me. I think they really could have expanded that to feel more like an adventure and tell the next tale in Maverick's Journey than what we got in this game. So I feel like this would have been, for me, back in that day, if I would have picked up Top Gun 2, it would have been like picking up Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan and being like, oh, it's just the first game, but now you made it crazy hard. In this one, it's almost like, oh, it's just the first game, but now you made it a little bit easier.

37:40 So, no, it's not on the essential games list for me, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game. Sean? Yeah, I agree that this is an improvement over the first one, and I've already gone over how my reaction to this game is colored mostly by the interstitial period between playing Top Gun 1 and Top Gun 2.

38:00 I wasn't quite as hot on this game as I was the first one. But I think what that's taught me is I think that a game like this, at least on the NES, cannot really be essential just because everything it's trying to do has been iterated upon to such an extent that Top Gun 2, sorry, Top Gun 2 mission is just going to kind of blur into every other game that we've played, I think. I'm not going to remember this game, and if I can already tell you that as we're recording the episode, it's not essential.

38:38 Joe? I definitely really enjoyed my time with this game. I think, though, when I really consider it, a lot of what I'm enjoying about it is the novelty of it on the NES.

38:51 It is fast and fun in that way, but yeah, I kind of agree with what both of you have said, and I think that if you are playing NES games to see what kind of cool things the NES could do, or just to see something that's impressive on the NES, this is a game to definitely play. And I think that it's maybe even a play it for anyone, but essential, I couldn't say that. I think that it's very, very short, and I don't even know how to say it without echoing exactly what Sean said. I mean, I think I just agree that it kind of will blur into the collection of other games that are doing a similar thing that get better over time. So I'm going to say not essential, but pretty cool.

39:39 And then I'm going to drop something, so we can edit that out. Or we can keep it in. We'll see how we feel. Or we can keep it in. Keep it in. Next week, we are keeping the top games in mind with top players' tennis. Just an odd coincidence, because obviously, like, the top... It's not a coincidence. No, but it is, because think about it. They would have to be released in the same month to be back-to-back. No, no, no. I'm not saying... I'm saying that it is not a coincidence that it was actually...

40:09 A conspiracy. Oh. Well, that I agree with. Yeah. I mean, any tennis organization of any kind is really just a conspiracy. What are they really doing? Because they know... Come on. They're on national TV and no one's watching? Racket Sports on ESPN? Are you kidding me? And no one's watching? What's the deal? Who even are Alfredo and Lazarus? I'll see you next time.