The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXII

[Angst]

I know. And you fight a giant. And everyone's mad at you for destroying something.

*Drink wine*

*Desecrate temple*

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

I'm interested in watching a YouTube playthrough of an Ace Combat game. Which installment of the series should I watch? Is there an overarching storyline that needs to be known from the start or else you'll be lost? Also, any recommendations for which channel to seek out?

Nobody has heard of the Ace Combat series?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well I not heard but tvtropes might be a good place to look.

Sometimes you can find playthroughs/let's plays under "fanfic recs" if theres one.

This site is also good for let's plays but i dont see that there
http://lparchive.org/

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Wait, TVTropes Fanfic Recs have LP recommendations? That is news to me. Thanks.

 

[Dachs]

Nobody has heard of the Ace Combat series?

I have, and I'm a very avid fan and player. (Example: the Skype account I used to use, razgriz.two, was a reference to a major NPC in Ace Combat 5.)

Prepare for an avalanche.

There is an overarching story. The games take place on a strangereal Earth that, while employing many Earth-familiar things (like specific bits of military hardware, and sometimes the same songs), doesn't have the same geography and all of the countries are made up.

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Spoiler Game Basics :

The actual basic mechanics of the games are pretty simple. You got your plane and its controls - rudder, ailerons, thrust vectoring, and throttle. Each plane has three kinds of weapons: the machine gun; relatively short-range "missiles", which can target and damage both air and ground enemies and have limited seeking ability after they lock on; and a tertiary weapon. These tertiary weapons differ by plane, and in most games you can select one of several tertiary weapons for a given plane (which are unlocked with in-game cash, earned by destroying enemy targets). These include unguided "dumb" bombs, precision-guided bombs, AGMs, antiship missiles, longer-range AAMs, AAMs with heavily enhanced tracking/seeking/maneuver capabilities, and so on; later games even add more gimmicky weapons like an aircraft-mounted laser, missiles that break up into several smaller seeking missiles, and an ECM jamming burst. These tertiary weapons are never referred to by real-world designations, unlike the planes, instead employing more generic nomenclature ("XAGM" for "Advanced Air-to-Ground Missile", "QAAM" for "Quick-Maneuvering Air-to-Air Missile", and so on). However, these weapons show up in-game much like real-world weapons. An F-14A Tomcat with a load of XLAAs (Advanced Long-Range Air-to-Air Missiles) will appear with a brace of AIM-54 Phoenix missiles slung under its wings, while an Su-35 Super Flanker with its own XLAAs will be depicted as bearing AA-9 Amoses. Finally, all of this ammunition is massively increased over real-world ammo. To allow the player to fight more enemies in a given mission, each plane replaces its ammunition after use from an invisible, much larger stock. There's a delay involved before the player can actually use these other missiles, usually of a few seconds, and there's still a limit on the total number of missiles a player can use (Ace Combat 04 had 50-70 missiles per plane before forcing the player to refuel/rearm during combat, while Ace Combat 6, featuring much larger, longer missions, had 150-250). But overall, the stocks of ammo, along with the much greater damage the player's weapons are capable of (the same sorts of missiles will damage airplanes and tanks and buildings), make the player pilot into a sort of superhuman. It's arcadey enough to be fun, without being so arcadey that it's ridiculous and you lose any sense of immersion.

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Spoiler Background Overarching Plot, and Plots of Individual Games :

In the early 1990s, the Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid was identified as being on a collision course with this Earth, to impact in the early 2000s. Many states built weapons designed to destroy this asteroid or redirect its course. However, these weapons were built to deal with a more or less solid asteroid. In 1998, a probe returned information that the asteroid was, in fact, hollow, which would alter the characteristics of its breakup when it reached the Roche limit. This information was developed too late to alter most of the weapons to compensate for it. As a result, on 3 July 1999, when the Ulysses asteroid broke up in Earth's outer atmosphere, some fragments were not destroyed. Most of these impacted in unpopulated areas, although even these did significant damage and threw up a tremendous amount of debris. A few fragments even hit major cities. Millions of people died as a direct result of the asteroid impacts.

Large portions of the world were effectively in chaos, both economic and political; this led to civil wars, military coups, and the establishment of nationalist juntas in several states. At their disposal were the weapons designed to destroy Ulysses fragments - weapons now turned against other countries. The Ace Combat games take place against a backdrop of these superweapons and their use against other world powers in various wars. The player takes control of an aircraft in the air force of one country or other, which is generally placed on the defensive at the beginning of a war as one of these military dictatorships invades the player's homeland. Over the course of the games, the player fights back, securing air supremacy and laying waste to the enemy's armed forces, helping to lead the campaign to win the war and destroy the enemy's superweapon.

Ace Combat 04 and its ancillary materials provided much of the early framework for this story. In 2002, the fascist state of Erusea, impelled by a diplomatic crisis over Ulysses refugees, invaded the other countries of the continent of Usea and seized control of the Stonehenge Turret Network, giving them air supremacy over the Usean mainland. The opposing Usean nations banded together to form the military alliance ISAF, for which the player character - callsign Mobius One - flies. After resisting a series of invasion attempts against the offshore islands to which ISAF's battered military retreats, the allies launch an amphibious assault, Operation Bunker Shot, that succeeds in establishing a lodgment on the mainland. Mobius One eventually leads ISAF in destroying Stonehenge, and protects the allied armored spearheads as they race through the desert and capture Farbanti, the Erusean capital. In the process, Mobius One also defeats the elite Yellow Squadron, a pack of enemy aces regarded as the best-trained formation in the world, personally dueling their commander, Yellow 13 (fanon has his name as either David Jordan or Erich Klinsmann, depending on which you like better).

The other key event driving Ace Combat game stories was the Belkan War, a conflict that erupted in 1995. It was broadly similar to the Second World War and the First Gulf War. Belka, a formerly powerful state, found itself politically and economically marginalized, and in considerable chaos leading to the secession of several regions of the country. In response, the ultra-right-wing Rald Party was elected into power, and soon began a military buildup. Under Rald leadership, Belka invaded several neighboring enemy states at once, spearheaded by its elite air force. To defeat this threat, the Federal Republic of Yuktobania and the Osean Federation - loose analogs to the USSR and the USA - formed a coalition and launched a counteroffensive that eventually broke the Belkan military and resulted in the occupation of southern Belka. Radical elements of the Rald Party seized control of the country's nuclear arsenal and employed it on battlefields where the allied forces were locked in combat with the remnant of the Belkan Army, determined to prevent the violation of the 'holy soil' of North Belka. General horror and confusion in the aftermath of these attacks led to an internal coup and the deraldification of Belka, which submitted to the allied powers and ultimately lost much of its territory.

Ace Combat Zero (which came out after Ace Combat 5) is the story of the Belkan War, more or less. As a mercenary pilot - "Cipher", or "Galm One" - for the military of the tiny Republic of Ustio, you first help blunt the initial Belkan drive, then assist in taking the offensive to Belka. As the coalition occupies Belka to hash out the ultimate peace terms, it is discovered that many of the mercenaries employed by both sides in the war, along with large segments of the former Belkan military, have formed an apocalyptic radical anarchist organization dedicated to the destruction of statist societies by force, employing Belkan weapons designed for use against that country's enemies, and also a superweapon built to destroy Ulysses. After defeating the Belkan military, Cipher flies in combat against this group, "A World With No Boundaries", to stop their threat and prevent the use of the superweapon ("V2").

Ace Combat 5 broke with the formula in many ways. In terms of high politics, its war story is considerably more ambiguous (and the antiwar moralizing by non-player characters considerably less subtle); Yuktobania and Osea, former allies against Belka, go to war in 2010 after what appears to be an accidental frontier incident. Efforts by both sides to reach conciliation by negotiation mysteriously fail, and eventually Osea invades Yuktobania. As it happens, the whole war was cooked up by a secret organization of Belkan nationalists, who wanted to embroil Osea and Yuktobania in a devastating conflict to punish them for the excesses of the Belkan War and to allow Belka itself to reclaim its lost territories. The player's story is also unique, in that it's much more character-driven. As one member of a four-plane element that ascends to prominence on the Osean side of the war, much of the story is devoted to the relationship between the player and his wingmen, and what eventually happens to them, and their travails as they uncover the Belkan conspiracy and defeat it. It's much more emotional. While this was a plus in some ways, there was something of a sentiment that they overdid it. (The pathos was, in fact, heavily lampshaded in the considerably more amoral Ace Combat Zero; one character claims that he is "fighting for peace", and another derides the idea as nonsensical, hypocritical, and contradictory idealism that has no place in the cockpit.) The player also gets yes/no dialogue options, sometimes in the middle of combat, to add a sense of immersion; sometimes these resulted in major changes to gameplay, and sometimes they only ended up changing a few lines said by the player's teammates.

Ace Combat 6 was in many ways a loose copy of Ace Combat 04 in terms of the overarching story. This time it is Emmeria being invaded by Estovakia in 2015-16, but the general tenor of the war - initial heavy defeats due to surprise attack, flight offshore, and then a successful amphibious assault and reconquest of the mainland - is largely the same. The part of Stonehenge is taken by an Estovakian airborne aircraft carrier (that launches cruise missiles), Yellow Squadron becomes the Strigon Team, and the local anti-Ulysses superweapon in this case is the Chandelier. In terms of story, there's not much new, then, but the actual mechanics of the game were considerably refined and improved to the greatest extent since Ace Combat 04. It gets an A+ for implementation and maybe a C or D+ for creativity.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon didn't actually happen. Like Jordan's tenure with the Washington Wizards.

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Spoiler Superweapon Mechanics :

These superweapons are much different from the rest of the game in that they require difficult - unrealistically difficult - flying. In Ace Combat 04, Stonehenge can target aircraft flying above 2,000 feet, so in missions flown within Stonehenge's range, the player must hug the surface to avoid instant death whenever AWACS gives warning of Stonehenge attacks. The other Erusean superweapon, Megalith, requires the player to fly into ventilation tunnels to destroy missiles housed inside the superstructure of the weapon. Ace Combat 5 had several superweapons: the Scinfaxi-class submersible aircraft carriers, which launched burst missiles forcing the player to fly above 5,000 feet or be destroyed; the Arkbird, a sort of space plane with an asteroid-killing laser on it, requiring combat in the upper reaches of the atmosphere (and all the attendant problems of flying that high); a V-2-class missile housed in a facility, the destruction of which required supersonic flight through a twisting railroad tunnel with enemy planes flying in behind you; and the SOLG, a massive orbital weapons platform deorbiting onto the capital of Osea which must be destroyed by shooting off armor plates before damaging the actual weapon (these armor plates fly off and can very easily crash into the player). Ace Combat Zero's superweapons were the Excalibur, which was basically a huge laser you had to dodge by looking at predicted firing zones uploaded by AWACS to your radar; the XB-0 Hresvelgr, a massive flying fortress, and V-2 itself, which must be destroyed by making a trench run through a canyon underneath massive amounts of flak, then flying into the structure of the dam housing the missiles and destroying them personally. Ace Combat 6's superweapons were the P-1112 Aigaion, a Hresvelgr-esque floating fortress, except more massive and equipped with insane amounts of flak, a runway for Strigon Team to take off of, and ridiculous amounts of cruise missiles to b avoided much like the Excalibur must be; and Chandelier, a huge mass driver cannon protected with even more flak, which also has a complicated mechanic that sort of works like an enrage timer you can interrupt by blowing up rounds being loaded into the cannon (and you can only blow these up by flying partway into the gun's superstructure, natch).

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Spoiler Ace Pilots :

Another trope that the games rely on is "Aces". In each mission, enemy aircraft are usually tagged only by alphanumeric type: a MiG-21bis will show up as a MiG-21bis, a B-2A will show up as a B-2A, and so on. But certain planes are also tagged with the enemy pilot's callsign, indicating that that enemy plane is flown by an Ace, which is significantly harder to kill (buffs to maneuverability, speed, weapon accuracy, and survivability). Defeating an Ace in aerial combat allows the player to purchase the ability to use that Ace's paint job on a given plane. Ace Combat 04 had one Ace per mission, as did Ace Combat 5 and Ace Combat 6. Zero had zillions of Aces (a total of 168), part and parcel of the game's overall high difficulty and representative of the skill of the enemy Belkan pilots compared to most other countries' riffraff. Zero and 6 also introduced Ace Records, which give basic information about the pilots of each aircraft the player shoots down; 6 also does Ace Records for members of the Emmerian military that assist the player in the various missions.

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Spoiler Enemy Boss Planes :

In addition to the superweapons, which are kind of environmental bosses, Ace Combat Zero and Ace Combat 6 have sort of super-boss ace pilots you have to defeat before you can progress in later missions. Ace Combat 6's, Ilya Pasternak (Strigon Lead), flies a superplane called the CFA-44 Nosferatu, which appears near the end of the 13th mission (of 15), "Liberation of Gracemeria". It is stealthed, and so undetectable on radar, except when it launches its UAVs (extremely fast, well-armed, very numerous, and ridiculously maneuverable); only then can you actually shoot at it, and it soaks a lot of damage (when you hit it, which is rare).

The Pasternak fight is annoyingly difficult and unfun IMO, but Ace Combat Zero's final boss fight is just epic. The entire last mission, "Zero", is solely devoted to a duel between you and your former wingman, Larry "Pixy" Foulke, the leader of "A World With No Boundaries". No wingmen, no allied pilots, no ground forces, nothing: just you against him. He flies the ADFX-02 Morgan, a superplane with: extensive electronic countermeasures; an aimable, omnidirectional laser that does massive damage; and a brace of multiple-burst missiles that explode for large amounts of damage over a wide area. To defeat Pixy, the player must first damage the plane enough to destroy the laser, then survive his use of the multiple-burst missiles while wearing down his plane's health even further, and finally he activates his ECM that prevents the player from damaging the Morgan unless the player successfully hits him with a missile from the front (only the front air intakes are unshielded) several times - while exposing herself to Pixy's own air-to-air missiles, which can do more damage to her plane than hers can to his. And this is all timed. Ace Combat Zero had an Arthurian theme, so it's particularly epic that the last boss fight forces the player to basically joust. With planes. As an apocalypse hangs in the balance. And ridiculously epic music plays in the background. (And that epic music features the same Latin chant about the demons of Razgriz that featured as the epic final mission music in Ace Combat 5.)

Yeah. Best boss fight ever.

There are other boss planes in missions, but these are generally not as difficult. Ace Combat 04 treats Yellow Squadron as bosses, and the penultimate mission, providing air support for ISAF in the Siege of Farbanti, climaxes with a duel between Mobius One and five Yellows, including Yellow Thirteen. The Belkan Grabacr and Ofnir Squadrons play this role in Ace Combat 5, culminating in a duel over Oured, the Osean capital, as the Belkans try to block Razgriz Flight's efforts to destroy the deorbiting SOLG before it smashes into the city. Several squadrons act like this in various Zero missions, and they change depending on player actions in the game (more on this later). And Strigon Team plays this role in Ace Combat 6, particularly in the Emmerian assault on the Aigaion about halfway through the game.

Each of these boss squadrons generally flies a fairly advanced aircraft. The Yellows and Strigon Team fly Super Flankers (Su-37s and Su-33s respectively). Grabacr and Ofnir employ F-15 ACTIVEs (thrust-vectoring variants) and Su-47 Berkuts. This is inverted slightly in Ace Combat Zero - while one flight of enemies, for example, flies Berkuts, another is made up of F-16Cs led by an aging "Old Master" type in a venerable F-4E Phantom.

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Spoiler Storylines and Cutscenes :

In addition to the superweapon and invincible ace tropes, the games add a story told through cutscenes interspersed between the missions. Usually, the cutscenes don't have immediate relevance to the mission storyline, but eventually they'll pop up in some way, usually towards the end. Ace Combat 04 told an effective, minimalistic tale of a young boy in the city of San Salvacion, occupied by Erusea, that became the base of operations for Yellow Squadron; he came to know Yellow 13 and his squadmates, eventually became a sort of 'camp follower' for them, and witnessed Thirteen's final duel with Mobius One over Farbanti. Ace Combat 5 revolved its storyline around the player ("Blaze", who goes by the callsigns Wardog Four, Wardog One, and eventually Razgriz One throughout the story) and his teammates (Kei Nagase/"Edge", Alvin Davenport/"Chopper", Hans Grimm/"Archer", and a gaggle of supporting cast) and their effort to stop the Circum-Pacific War. Ace Combat Zero's story was a sort of encomium to the player character, Cipher, who became known as the "Demon of the Round Table" (a plateau in contested territory between Belka and Ustio that saw several major air battles during the war). Cipher, as a mercenary, also has a sort of roleplaying score that changes based on the player's actions in game: there are enemy targets, and then there are "yellow" targets, which are technically protected by the laws of war. If you shoot up yellow targets, you get more points (and therefore more cash with which to unlock new planes) but you also become more "mercenary". Depending on how mercenary you are, you get different enemies during missions, and enemies and allies respond to you differently during the game itself. The cutscenes are taken from a documentary about Cipher and the Belkan War, including live-action interviews of pilots that the player defeats in combat (interviews that change based on how mercenary the player is). Finally, Ace Combat 6's story is sort of a combination of 04 and 5: a lot of pathos and antiwar/liberation themes, but the story is mostly about people that don't show up in the missions until the very end, when they collide during the liberation of the Emmerian capital city, Gracemeria, and provide the Emmerian military with the weapon specs of the Chandelier superweapon.

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tl;dr:
-more arcadey than a simulation vis-a-vis enemies and ammo, but still realistic enough to be pretty fun
-different world, different countries, same languages, same planes
-player clears a colossal amount of trash mobs (planes and ground enemies) along with difficult to defeat ace pilots that serve as bosses, most of which are optional
-mission storyline tells the story of the war, cutscene storyline tells a more personal story, and they eventually intersect
-enemies get superweapons that the player has to destroy, usually with a sort of Death Star Trench Run type of flying (or more difficult)

My favorite is Ace Combat Zero, which has the highest difficulty, while containing a fair amount of options as far as plane choice goes, along with the morality mechanic. The documentary cutscenes, which are basically a massive ego-stroke made up of enemy ace pilots talking about how amazing you are, certainly don't hurt either. And the final boss fight is simply epic and one of my favorite video gaming moments ever.

If you can't manage that, Ace Combat 04 is also an excellent game to watch. It was fairly seminal in that it was the big success story for the franchise and codified a lot of the gameplay elements that they would continue to use until Assault Horizon (which didn't happen) - watching it won't be completely different from watching any of the other games. The mission storyline is well-fleshed-out, and the cutscene story is probably the best one in the series. It had a fair number of iconic moments and in terms of difficulty might have the best balance of the games.

I'm sorry to say that I never really watched AC LPs myself so I'm short on recommendations for you as far as channels to watch. I just play the games, I don't watch them. (I wish I had a way to record them off of my old PS2, that way I could make my own. )

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Wow, I can feel your enthusiasm in that post. That made for a great infodump. Will take some time to digest. Thanks a lot!

The superweapons make a whole lot more sense now. I'd heard of them before, and thought it was crazy that they'd be military projects. Based on your post, I think I'll watch Ace Combat 04 first. Seems like a good introductory point.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Wait, TVTropes Fanfic Recs have LP recommendations? That is news to me. Thanks.

Yup, take for instance, towards the bottom --
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanficRecs/Portal

 

[Chukchi Husky]

And I'm not sure Nintendo has made any proper RPG since Paper Mario 2. Or did they make that Nintendo DS marioluigi rpg after that? Or both of them? Dunrecall.

I think the games they bring up as being good RPGs are Xenoblade Chronicles, Skies of Arcadia, the Pokémon series, the Mario RPGs, and they are always saying that there should be more games like the modern Final Fantasy games.

 

[Angst]

Final Fantasy? Ugh dunno man.

 

[Arakhor]

I think the games they bring up as being good RPGs are Xenoblade Chronicles, Skies of Arcadia, the Pokémon series, the Mario RPGs, and they are always saying that there should be more games like the modern Final Fantasy games.

So they're JRPG fanatics, therefore their opinions on Western RPGs are virtually redundant.

 

[shadowplay]

Ace Combat 6 was in many ways a loose copy of Ace Combat 04 in terms of the overarching story. This time it is Emmeria being invaded by Estovakia in 2015-16, but the general tenor of the war - initial heavy defeats due to surprise attack, flight offshore, and then a successful amphibious assault and reconquest of the mainland - is largely the same. The part of Stonehenge is taken by an Estovakian airborne aircraft carrier (that launches cruise missiles), Yellow Squadron becomes the Strigon Team, and the local anti-Ulysses superweapon in this case is the Chandelier. In terms of story, there's not much new, then, but the actual mechanics of the game were considerably refined and improved to the greatest extent since Ace Combat 04. It gets an A+ for implementation and maybe a C or D+ for creativity.

Sounds pretty cool. I've had this game sitting around for a while but haven't played it yet. Didn't realize it had fictional nations, though.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I have a guest pass thing to Counter-Strike Source in Steam. Does anybody here want it?

It's "not tradable" so i have to put an email or steam id in.

Anyone?

 

[Farm Boy]

Anyone?

I appreciate the offer but I played myself out on Counter Strike a while back. I wouldn't play it enough to justify.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Yeah anyways I think its for someone who doesnt have the game and would like to try it.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well then come on young'uns. Go play the FPS that revolutionized FPs's-es-es.

 

[ace99]

I despise FPS's. Particularly online ones. I can't compete with twitchy tweenagers.

 

[Arakhor]

My stock answer as to why I never play FPSs is if I wanted to hear a load of teenagers swearing at me for being incompetent, I'd get on my local school bus and ride it home.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well thats not entirely true as you're not taking into account single-player FPSes

Though having scientists constantly ask you who ate all the donuts isn't much better

 

[Angst]

I think you're really nice to offer, but I don't want to play it myself.

 

[Dachs]

Sounds pretty cool. I've had this game sitting around for a while but haven't played it yet. Didn't realize it had fictional nations, though.

It's pretty fun. Until recently I was going back through and making sure to collect all the achievements; was only missing one or two when I got hooked on The Old Republic.