AFTER BURNER II

For those of you who haven’t seen it in the arcade or missed the Mega Play review a couple of issues ago, After Burner goes like this: launch your F-14 Tomcat from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, fly through a canyon, shoot down enemy MiGs and missiles, avoid the terrain and bases on the ground and along the way, fight giant bosses like a dragon, and make it back to land safely. It’s a pretty simple formula that has been used in many different games.

In After Burner II for the Sega Saturn (Sega), you get to fly a Tomcat again, but this time it’s not just about flying forward. You start off at the bottom of an almost vertical tunnel that you must navigate right through to get to the other side. If you don’t reach the other side within a certain amount of time, you fall back down to where you started. Falling back down resets your timer and starts you off at the top of the tunnel again. This is one example of how they made this game more challenging than most previous renditions of this theme by adding more obstacles to avoid and different maneuvers to learn. Another example is that instead of just shooting missiles straight up into the air and hoping they’ll hit something

Launch your F-14 Tomcat from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Fly at supersonic speeds over the beautiful blue water of the ocean below and through strafing runs and bombing missions over a variety of terrain. Afterburner II, the sequel to a classic arcade game, is a perfect example of a “shooter”—in which you’re using your jet fighter as a gun rather than flying it, but you’re still shooting things. The F-14 has a twin-engine, variable-sweep wing with a maximum speed of Mach 2.34. It’s got 4 cannons and 7 hardpoints for dropping bombs or fuel tanks or what have you. Even though it never went into combat during its 20 years in service, this plane has been featured in numerous movies and TV shows including Top Gun and Air Force One.