(no subject)

Finished Ace Combat 4. Loved it, though it was a little easy; I think I got shot down only once, though I managed to slam into the terrain a lot. I appreciated the very Japanese melodramatic frame story, and the surprising way that it ties into the action. The final mission is kind of dumb (what, they couldn't just attack the thing with landing craft full of marines? bah) and didn't seem to thematically fit with the rest of the game, but the Namco designers had to get their giant-robot ya-yas out, I guess.

It also has nice game-over unlocks, which I always like to see. One of them lets you replay the whole game from the start, carrying over all the money and munitions you had from when you finished the first time. If you can bump up the difficulty level when doing so, I'll probably actually try this.

Doing a search for the game, I saw that it was among those bits of media whose US release was delayed due to 9/11, when most war-themed movies and games were voluntarily put on ice for a few months by their publishers. I learned this from archived weblog entries from that time, back when the day was still so near that people hadn't agreed on its proper name yet; it was still called "the WTC and Pentagon attacks" or the like. A strange feeling, coming across that.