#time ace

THE PILE PRESENTS: X-Play - Ninja Gaiden Ligma

Time Ace (DS, 2007)

Published by Konami. Developed by Trainwreck Studios and The Farm 51.

So here's one that I got recently. Essentially a spiritual successor to Konami's own Time Pilot, this game sees you going through different time periods to stop your former assistant, Scythe, from taking over the world after stealing your time machine, so you hop on your biplane (which just so happened to have a backup time machine... plot doesn't make much sense, expectedly) and get to it. You later get the help from a Russian agent named Nadia, who you meet during one of the WWII missions. She mostly gives you your objectives as well as coordinates of where Scythe may be.

The game itself is a mostly on-rails affair, rather than something like an Ace Combat lite, so there is the issue of the game bouncing your craft back to the path if you try to go off of it, mostly when attempting to grab powerups, but it's still an enjoyable romp nonetheless. In terms of the eras you go through it's mostly similar to Time Pilot, you do go through the 1910s, 40s and 70s like on that game, but you also have 1950s North Africa, present-day (present-day = 2007) USA and the Middle East, post-apocalypse future Russia, and of course, SPAAAAAAACE, amongst a few others.

The planes you use are mostly off-brand versions of various famous planes like the P-38 Lightning, F14 (or F15, no idea) and the Su-27, as well as a spaceship near the end, and you can use whatever plane you want on each mission if you unlocked it, so if you wanna go through 1940s New York in a futuristic spaceship or take the P-38 lookalike to space, you can do it.

Game itself is rather short, it takes about 3 or so hours to beat, and in terms of replay value there's really nothing. Sure, there are a few bonus missions, but they're still part of the story, and they do help towards getting the unlockable planes, so they're not exactly bonus. There's also a multiplayer dogfight mode, but I haven't been able to try it, so I dunno how it fares.

Interesting tidbit about the devs: Trainwreck Studios, the "main" dev, was apparently a division of developer 2015, a company most famously known for making Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, as well as for the fact that some of their former employees would later found Infinity Ward. Now, apparently, Trainwreck was already dead by the time Time Ace saw release, so it seems that most of the work was done by Polish company The Farm 51 (most recently known for Painkiller: Hell & Damnation), albeit under the Trainwreck name, for some reason. The even more interesting part is that some of the development staff also worked for now-defunct developer InterActive Vision, responsible for such "gems" as Blades of Thunder and Top Gun DS, and in fact Time Ace does seem to have some similarities with the latter. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if it shares the same engine.