Game:

A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol (1994)

Duration: 18:59

22,344 views

137

This video was captured using the actual game on an actual Super Nintendo.

What you see here is a first. This is the first upload of this game that is not being played on an emulator. This is evident due to all the other videos on You Tube having glitches from not being able to read mission objectives to "Good Luck" being displayed twice at the beginning of a sortie. I believe some versions of SNES9X can emulate most of this game ok except for the scrolling "Good Luck" glitch which is not even close to game breaking. However this is one of the few videos where this game is played properly. All the people who have videos of this game on You Tube play this game like it's Jungle or Desert Strike and just go bombing everything with no regard for how many bombs they are wasting on missed targets and wrong targets. This is typical of people who record gameplay using emulators that upload games just to get views and provide no reference to the game at all. This game may look similar to those games and have the word "strike" in it's title, but it plays nothing like those games.

I first found out about this game when reading an article by the creator of the excellent Super Nintendo emulator, BSNES. He goes by the name of Byuu, and it is his mission to accurately emulate the SNES in every way. In his article about why accuracy is so important to properly emulating a console, this game comes up. He makes a big deal about the fact that SNES9X cannot emulate the shadow that your plane casts. Truthfully this shadow is not important as it is just barely visible. However BSNES is the only emulator that can run this game perfectly under the accuracy profile which is highly resource intensive and requires a 64-bit OS along with a fast CPU to run it at full speed. Since I don't have either of those I decided to just hunt the game down. I ended up finding it at one of my regular stops for a great price and I could not be happier that I did so.

As I said before this game may look somewhat like the other strike games on this console, but is far from it. It's not the kind of game you just start shooting everything that moves with no regard for the targets your hitting or how much ammo you're wasting. You have both enemy and friendly targets. You also have primary enemy targets that must be taken out to complete your mission. Your ammunition is limited to what you have at the beginning of the sortie. THAT'S IT. There are no bomb or missile pickups like there are in Desert or Jungle Strike. You'll also notice that your fuel is also limited. You must strike your targets strategically and with precision to maximize fuel, munitions, and preserve your air craft. On top of that you must destroy a certain percentage of your primary targets in order to complete your mission. You have a limited amount of time to get this done or it's game over. You also have a limited amount of sorties, so you must make each one count. When you're out of ammo you must fly back home and get more. If you're wasteful with your bombs and missiles use your entire stock on one target, you will not progress.

This game may have been overlooked back in the day because the back of the box looks like just another strike clone. I can only speculate that people had either had enough of those style of games at that time, or were perhaps turned off by the fact that this is not the run n' gun action game as it appears to be. That's why this video is so long, because I wanted to show how it's actually played so you can make a much more informed decision should you so choose to seek this game out. In this video I complete the first mission. I did make a mistake by accidentally flying out of the war zone prematurely with over 20 bombs in my arsenal, but I still managed. I won't say that this game should be on everyone's list because it is very different. It's more like a action/strategy game than just a straight up action game. Hopefully this video has given you a better idea of what this game is about. I do however highly recommend it.

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