- Air Combat 22 (1995) is an in place upgrade from the original arcade Air Combat cabinet. This game was named after the Super System 22 board which explains the "22" in the title. Air Combat 22 was a predecessor to the Ace Combat series.
- This TAS uses the Beginner Mode Without Explanations aka 初級 説明なし. There is a mode with explanations that pop up that cause time loss. There is an Advanced mode and also a Dogfight mode.
Gameplay
Air Combat 22 is a 3d arcade flight shooter with game play most similar to the Ace Combat series. The plane starts in flight and there are several waves of enemies that need to be shot down. The plane has a near unlimited amount of guns along with more than enough missiles. The plane has a very simplified movement system compared with more modern flight games where movement is very controlled. There is no yaw, and roll is very limited, and no engine stalling. Acceleration and decelerating is done by holding a direction for a time. The image of the plane on the bottom right will have the wings fold back when the plane reaches a speed threshold. There is no plane to plane collision either.
The modes only consist of a handful of missions. Each mission contains about 9 enemies. In the Beginner Mode there is an refueling mission which is more of break and cannot be failed.
Guns
The guns can do 4 or 10 damage per shot which is determined by how close the shot is to the center of the plane. There can only be so many shots on screen and they also need to be within a short range of the view otherwise the game will erase them. Individual shots seem to have near unlimited range, but trying to hit very distant targets for max damage takes a lot of re-records and patience.
Missiles
Missiles can be fired once a missile lock is achieved. This requires that there is a decent distance between the plane and the target. Missiles on Beginner down every plane in a single hit. The second missile on the way to the missile locked target can hit and down a plane that "got in the way' as it streaks towards the original target.
There is a trick where you can get an extra missile or two off immediately after it hits a target. This seems to be only a frame perfect trick. This is used whenever there is an additional third target nearby. The "extra missile" trick requires the original target plane to be in the view otherwise the extra missile just explodes within frames of being fired. If it does get destroyed that way there is a chance to be to fire an additional fourth one sometimes for some reason if the an additional missile can get loaded in time. It might be possible to get a fourth downed plane using this.
Additional Resources
- Air Combat 22 Arcade
- [TAS] Air Combat 22 - Any% in 02:27 by Mad Punkerz
- Wiki Article with overview of arcade game
- Information about Ace Combat and Air Combat 22 History From A Developer Interview
Mission 1
Starting mission that exemplifies how the game works. There are several waves of enemies that need to be downed. Here the objective is to destroy them...but not too fast otherwise the game changes Mission 2 which increases the distance planes appear at, has more high hp planes, and has them at differing altitudes. Here the first wave has four large planes that are easy to take down. The next wave has five planes in a wing formation with a high hp plane at the center. Taking out the large hp plane at the center too soon causes problems since then the planes all break to the left and right. The best way is to rapidly move from right to left starting with the plane the game starts to missile lock for you. Unfortunately this game does not have a way of changing the missile lock target. There is away of changing it, but it requires changing the view to almost completely hide the plane the game normally wants to missile lock.
Mission 2
Mission starts with two planes that can be taken care of in two missiles. The second missile is fired at a specific angle to hit it. The way the game cleans up missiles and bullets aggressively offscreen, means I need to not move too rapidly away. The next two waves of enemies are a high hp plane along with two small ones. Maneuver the two missiles in the same way to hit a small one and the large plane. Then after firing cleanup the remaining small plane with guns.
Mission 3 - Refueling
The objective is to get the refueling line to hit into the net. Normally if you move the plane wildly away there is some time loss, however oddly enough if you move wildly away but not too much to force the game to show the auto pilot warning, there is a nearly 20 frame decrease in refueling time. Very lenient mission otherwise.
Mission 4 - Ocean Dogfight
This mission consists of small fighters in groups of two with an additional high hp recon plane. At the start 4 of the fighters zoom past towards the right and there is just enough time to get a missile lock. I use the trick where you can fire once then another shortly after with one missile getting the original target and another getting a trailing fighter. Then there is that trailing missile trick where on the last frame or so you can fire an additional missile and with some maneuvering cause a third plane to get downed. On the last two planes that are targeting another plane those can be destroyed with two missiles with the second missile fired with some downward movement to hit the trailing plane as well.
Mission 5 - Carrier
The way this mission works is that there are two rows of stationary planes on a carrier a long distance away. Once you destroy those the command center of the ship becomes damageable. Ultra long range gun targeting here is the way to go since trying to use missiles takes several times as long. Accelerating the plane towards the carrier decreases the time it takes to destroy the planes as well. Getting the max 10 damage for all necessary shots takes some very careful angle adjustment. There is an interesting issue with this section where if you fire too much the game starts to remove bullets that were fired before. So at a couple points there are brief pauses in firing to prevent the game from removing bullets. An interesting fact is that it takes about 5 seconds for the first shot to actually hit a target.
Noticed an oddity here where one target actually takes 20 damage in a single frame which I saw no where else. This may be due to some odd damage calculation with the ultra long gunning being done early in the mission.
Possible Improvements
- Mission 1 can probably have a lower time, but this is the best I could get without getting the different Mission 2 which causes lots of time loss due to planes appearing at long distances away and at different heights. Redid Mission 1 several times and once I included faster tricks like the extra missile or hitting multiple planes when targeting one it would result in the slower Mission 2.
- The gun may actually have near unlimited range as long as the bullets do not get removed from too many bullets on screen. The bullets have to be kept nearby the view screen as well otherwise the game cleans them up. At super long ranges though it becomes an exercise in racking up massive amount of re-records to hit anything. Even if you hit getting the full 10 damage becomes very difficult instead of getting the 4 damage. I think what I have here is reasonable, but botting some brute force solution would probably be the way to improve damage to a couple planes.
- Might be possible to use the extra missile trick to down a fourth plane as explained in the missile section. Was unable to get this here.