Tomcat Alley (Sega CD) Playthrough
200A playthrough of Sega's 1994 FMV flight combat game for the Sega CD, Tomcat Alley.
By 1994, the Sega CD was beginning to lose some of its luster. It was still capable of feats well beyond what the cartridge-based machines could pull off, but its line-up of slightly enhanced Genesis ports and horribly grainy interactive movies were impressing gamers less and less as time wore on.
Enter Tomcat Alley, a game set to kick off the "next generation" of FMV titles for a couple of big reasons. It was the first of Sega's "TruVideo" games to feature full-screen video, and it did so with better color and clarity than had been seen in earlier games thanks to the improvements made to their custom Cinepak encoder. It was also one of the most ambitious concepts yet seen for an FMV game. It sought to provide the excitement of Top Gun in playable form, and in its time, it was praised for its production values and the attempts to create meaningful gameplay from prerecorded snippets of video.
The plot is the best kind of Cold War-era cheese: a crazed Russian ex-pat has taken possession of a fleet of Migs, some bombers, and a cache of chemical weapons, and has set up a base of operations in the Mexican desert.
The American government begins a military campaign to combat this threat, and you step into the shoes of Goose... I mean, a nameless RIO, to do your duty for Uncle Sam. But unlike in Top Gun, if you do your job well, you might just live long enough to see the mission through to its successful conclusion.
Each mission begins with a briefing on some new development, and once you're in the air, you'll have to coordinate with your wingmen, select waypoints, and take out an assortment of air and ground targets.
This is all done through an interface laid over top a video stream that quickly cuts between clips to convey what's going on. It's a simple shooting gallery-style affair - you click on a waypoint, select your target, establish missile lock, and blast them out of the sky - and if you find yourself in the enemy's sights, you can fire off a flare or some chaff to scramble their radar long enough to move into position to take them. You'll also have to occasionally switch to your ground camera to take out an important enemy asset, like a refinery or a rail bridge.
To avoid becoming too repetitive over the course of multiple playthroughs, the game randomly selects from a pool of pre-defined sequences to play for each mission, so while the clips may look familiar after awhile, the experience does change from one attempt to the next.
The game doesn’t reinvent the interactive movie wheel, but it does offer substantial improvements over the likes of earlier games like Night Trap and Sewer Shark. The gameplay feels like actual gameplay, the content of the video is well-produced and engaging, and though the quality of the footage is still hobbled by the Sega CD's hardware, it's much cleaner than anything we'd seen in previous attempts.
Though it has to be said that if you want to see Tomcat Alley at its best, the difference between a Sega CD console and a Pentium PC with an SVGA graphics card is like night and day: https://youtu.be/9tOnxG2-kFQ.
Tomcat Alley is a lot of fun. Stupid, simple fun. It's easy to pick up and play (but read the manual first!), the FMV is pretty entertaining, and the ability to save between missions keeps it from ever becoming too frustrating. If you're a fan of Top Gun or of FMV games, it's worth a look.
Let's kick the tires and light the fires!
On a related note, if you like Tomcat Alley, I'd recommend also checking out the excellent Wing Nuts: Battle in the Sky (https://youtu.be/-DXAfowA8bI).
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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