November 20, 2007 - When my editor handed me a nondescript brown packing box, it was pretty obvious there was some sort of video game waiting inside. Which one? Who could tell? The possibilities were endless. “Open it,” he said. Apparently he wasn’t sure either, and I obliged. What I first saw once I had fumbled enough with the packing tape was something that hit me like a twenty year old sack of potatoes.

SPACE ACE read the shiny gold title, with HD underneath, implying that this was no standard-definition title I’d be playing. The name took me back, way back, to when I was but a young lad staring into this newfangled thing I had begun messing around with, the family computer. Flashbacks of frustration and confusion hit me as I turned the box over and looked at it from all sides.

I was unsure how it would play out, initially. This was, after all, essentially a twenty year old title with gloss. But oh, I remembered it and memories of being unaware of why I was losing, or how to proceed further, and then stomping off from the computer in frustration. I was determined to beat it this time!

The plot itself is pretty much as cheesy as space plots can get, and if you’ve played Dragon’s Lair, the precursor to Space Ace, you’ll notice a lot of similarities. The evil Commander Borf attacks Ace, galactic hero, with a ray designed to turn creatures into babies. This turns Ace into a child version of himself (named Dexter) as Borf laughs deeply, announcing his plans to conquer the Earth with his ‘Infanto Ray.’ Then he kidnaps Kimberly, who can really only be described as the damsel in distress, and has no other role in the game. So, you’re off to save the damsel and the world. Cheesy.

It’s probably wrong to call Space Ace a game. The term for this kind of entertainment is more like ‘interactive movie’, since you don’t have a direct hand in what’s going on. You watch the actions of Dexter/Ace, and when appropriate, follow a prompt to press the correct button and save him from his utter demise. In Space Ace, at certain points, you’ll be given a prompt to “ENERGIZE”, which, if followed, changes Dexter back into Ace for a little while. Becoming Ace means being able to face the challenges with a laser gun, but if you decide not to change, Dexter’s challenges involve running and dodging.

The animation is done by the industry veteran Don Bluth, and his style looks immediately familiar. As such, it is top notch. Whether or not it has matured well over the years, despite being re-mastered into HD, is debatable. The video skips oddly at rare occasions, and peculiar artifacts can appear when this happens, but other than that, it plays well. Of course, if you just want to see the animation for yourself without actually playing the game, you can watch the entire thing from beginning to end by selecting the ‘Watch’ mode from the title screen. Convenient.

So there I sat, game finished, some legacy from my past. It’s times like this that I’m certain gamers in the day had some remarkable tenacity and patience; there are only so many times I can see the leering face of Borf while he delivers some one-liner after my death before I want to smash the screen, thus eliminating his glare forever. The game allows unlimited continues, but I’ll be darned if I can’t figure out how someone would pump quarters into the arcade box every time it appeared. It’s a very frustrating experience, to say the least.

The hardest part is assigning a score to a game that’s essentially a movie, and a twenty-year old one at that. Obviously, fans of the game are going to love this, as it keeps everything intact. The only replay value comes in the form of difficulty levels that restrict how many scenes you actually see in the game (in the easiest, for example, you only see about half the scenes in the game). Other gamers might have some fun due to the nostalgic factor of the title, but that’s stretching it. Comparing this to other games is like comparing apples to interactive oranges. It does what it sets out to do, re-master this title, and for that, it gets some credit. As an interactive movie, it’s top notch. As a game, it doesn’t quite measure up, but it’s still a classic done well.