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how come? delivery is too late.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 18
Date: October 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I placed order even before the game was released. It has been couple days since released day, but You haven't shipped out yet. why?

REAL BAD FOR FIVE REASONS!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 14
Date: January 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The reason this game is bad is because it has cuss words.And your jetfighter is REALY hard to control you just crash alot no matter which plane you have.Here are the pros and
cons.

pros-cool jet fighters
different weapons for different fighters

cons-Your wing mates barely give you any support
they just fly around and tell you what to do,maybe
shoot a missle once in a while.
2.There isn't any ground support to help you.
3.REALY sucky armor,two missiles and your
dead.
4.Your radar locks on for you.I don't really care for
radar.
5.Last but not least,THIS GAME HAS CUSS WORDS!!!
That's why this game is garbage!

Fun? Yes. Realistic? Not by very, very long shot.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: August 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I think there is a reason why accurate flight simulators are few and far between on the consoles. With only a few buttons, a d-pad, and thumb-sticks on a controller, there isn't a great deal of input choices that would make up for a keyboard and full-blown flight stick. Flight sim developers are plane nuts and they strive for accuracy, many gaining access to the real aircraft, even taking test flights in them. Ace Combat 4 is not such a game. It's a fun romp through a campaign across a fictional nation that much is certain, but it has all the depth of a wading pool. Combat is a simple matter of simply getting close enough to lock up an enemy plane and firing a missile while evading an incoming missile is as easy as turning and breaking. Also I know for a fact that real world aircraft do not carry upwards of 82 missiles.

Flight dynamics are a joke; there is little difference between piloting an A-10 Thunderbolt or a F-15, characteristically, both air craft handle pretty much the same, save that the F-15 is faster. Realism goes out the window as one can usually out-maneuver an F-16 in an F-4; whereas in reality an F-16 would fly circles around the venerable Phantom. Aside from carrying five or six times the missile load out, missiles themselves are equally good at shooting down aircraft as they are blowing up tanks and hardened targets like bunkers. Fire a Sidewinder or a Sparrow at a modern battle tank and even providing you could hit it, the missile might scratch the paint. There's a great difference between aircraft aluminum and layered and ablative chobham tank armor. Bombs are equally weird, Mk-82 500 lb GBs seem to shoot out of your aircraft as if launched from a cannon. When doing a bombing run you can actually see them fly on ahead of you towards their target.

What also got me was how useless the M-61 20mm gattling gun is on most aircraft. I did a little research a few years ago and found that the cannon is incredibly accurate. Its spread pattern of 1-3 meters, even at two or three thousand meters range, indicates a 60 to 90% hit ratio. In Ace Combat 4 however, it's a bullet hose with all the accuracy of Fox News. The real weapon is so accurate because its muzzle velocity is so high, and thus overcomes gravity and wind resistance to a greater degree. In other words, shooting down another aircraft is very difficult, because you have to hit it so many times and providing you can maintain a close target lock long enough to pump enough rounds into it. This includes the A-10s 30mm Avenger cannon, the depleted uranium slugs of which will chew up battleship hull armor.

These are pretty glaring faults for a game, but despite these, I found myself enjoying the game a great deal on my first play through. I liked the story as told by a young boy whose village is under enemy occupation. I generally like games that let you pick and choose what aircraft and weapons you wish to fly for each mission that is if you have earned enough money to buy such aircraft to give yourself that kind of choice. Each mission gives a series of objectives that must be met to earn cash, a little like anime `Area 88' where mercenaries on both sides battle in the skies over Africa, and use earned money to buy new planes or repair their existing aircraft. You also get a boatload of weapons; various bombs- guided and otherwise, laser guided Mavericks, and Phoenix missiles- which are actually really cool, because when armed, they lock up everything in front of you. And when you fire, you launch as many missiles as you have targeted aircraft.

So, from a realism aspect, Ace Combat 4 misses the carrier deck by such a wide margin that it's in a completely different ocean. I can accept that; because it's fun. And fun is the name of the game. Going after the massive guns of the Stonehenge base and racing down the Death Start II tunnel system to wipe out Monolith, is darn cool. The lack of mission outline, the fact that missions are timed, and the fact that mission's objectives are handled pell-mell; is not. The plane graphics are great, and the landscape images are good from a distance. The combat chatter is fun, but you don't get to hear enemy in your cockpit in real life. Ace Combat 4 is a fun game, but a long, long way from being a real flight simulator or even accurate.

Top Gun for NES Revisited...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: June 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game reminds me of "Top Gun" for the original Nintendo console.

Its a button masher, one button to fire your cannon and another to lock-on/fire your missiles. (And somehow, your aircraft is capable of carrying 50+ missiles.)

In short, its an arcade shoot 'em up game.

No functioning fire control computer, no true MDU's, no NAV aids, no ATC integration, no anything that one would expect to find in an aircraft. You simply just "fly" and fire your 50+ missiles.

The flight model? Well, the aircraft fly like Star Wars spacecraft. You can't even stall the aircraft if you try.

Doesn't belong on the

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is a decent fighter game but by no means is it at the PC level. Its very limited with such things like landings being optional and the ability to just fly off the map to reload.

Timed missions are annoying, sometimes you want to just fly around after the mission, and destroy more targets, but you can't because the times up and the mission is over.

Cut scenes are ultra-cheesy illustrations and a dumb story.

Different airplanes don't behave that differently. Flight physics model is not that great.

I beat the game on normal in a day and a half. I wish I rented it first.

tedious video game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 4
Date: March 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I used to play a game called Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. The graphics stunk compared to this game, but now I know that the gameplay is what matters, because although the graphics on this game can be very nice, the game is very boring. The cut scenes are unbearable to watch or even skip through. The missions are too easy and not interesting enough. Your wingmen are completely useless, which is too bad because some of the missions where you basically have to bomb dozens of targets would be more interesting if you didn't have to bomb each and every one yourself.

Swings for fence, hits wall.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 12
Date: January 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In Ace 4, the story is told from the point of view of a little kid in an occupied city that happens to be the home airbase for the Yellow Squadron, the best of the best. You never find out how the war started or what the war is about. You have no idea of any ideologies, even though the kids call one of the pilot's a fascist (and feel bad about it as the pilot stares at them disbelievingly, as if he's just been insulted).

You play the game as an anonymous pilot in the other air force and have no idea what you're fighting for, other than against the other side, which apparently shops at the same foreign airplane outlet stores as your side. Throughout the game, you get the subtle sensation that the war is all just a big mistake that must be fought to the bitter end because ... I don't know.

I'm guessing that since Namco is a Japanese gamemaker, and Japan is a sorta pacifistic state anymore, the game designers didn't want to or weren't able to come up with a plausible backstory to motivate the people who would be fighting in the virtual cockpits they were designing. This is lame. It's a video game, fercryinoutloud, and the countries at war are FAKE countries, so would it be too hard to have one of them be a real bad meanie who really wants to kill your country, and have all the characters on your side committed to victory?

But the whole telling of the war as seen through a kid's observations of what appear to be wholly honorable and noble enemy pilots takes a whole lot of oomph out of the game. Hell, how hard would it have been to have made Yellow Squadron the abstract super killers and given their story to the player's side? Not. Hard. It would've taken one writer about thirty minutes on a PC to change a couple of pieces of dialogue to make it work, too.

And in the end, the kid would have had heroes to admire, not enemies to ponder indeterminate thoughts of what it means to be an enemy hero. Sheesh. I pay money for this stuff, at least put some effort into it.

The flying was all fun and the missions were mostly well done, although the final mission is a corker of unbelievability, though fun. I have no idea if these airplanes in the game fly like this in real life, though, but it doesn't matter since the graphics are great and you're usually too busy shooting stuff down or dropping bombs on things to care.

dissapointed

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: November 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played this game half year ago, and I have to say for me, an ace combat 3 fan, this game comes as a bit of dissapointment. Not that it's not good or anything, it's just not as good as I expected it would be. For one thing, it does not has a fasinating storyline as ac3 had. The players cannot interact with the world like what we did in ac3, we merely see the story unravels from two points of view, and the story is really way too simple. And the result is the game is really short, you can beat it under 10 hours if you have played its predecessor or you are an experienced gamer

Not a bad game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: October 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I went out and bought the game the day it came out. It turns out that it is a great game but it also has a major short fall. It is way to EASY!!!! Even on the hardest setting I cleared it in a few hours. Take that away it a great game

Real fun but could have some improvements

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a killer flight simulator that you would have to be crazy to not like. The first time I played this I couldn't put the controller down it was so fun however there could be some minor improvements.

The plane selection is awesome and the levels are great except for the last level, here you have to fly into a missle silo and destroy a bomb; very unrealistic.

The graphics are not the best I have seen especially the ground. The explosions from the missles are not good and the plane you fly is huge. If you fly in third person and you are next to another plane, you look as if you are three times larger then the other planes which gives the game another unrealistic feel. Also, it is not fun having 50+ missles on your plane destorying most of the targets on your own. It is much better having the computer allies doing the same as you.

The things you can do in mid flight are awesome. The way you can go up to 1,000+mph, stall at 40,000ft and fall down while looking at the ground is too cool. This game looks so real in first person that it might make you queasy while rotating the plane around and around.

This is a very fun game to play yet it could use some improvments. Hopefully Ace Combat 5 will be better.

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