Or: How I inserted myself

Air Fortress is a old-style game in every sense of the word. You might almost say it's an old game. Bad graphics, bad music, bad translation, hard gameplay, and no homoerotisism. Sometimes you don't realize how much you miss something until it's gone.

Air Fortress is two games in one, really. In one game you fly along on a sled and shoot circles inside boxes and what appear to be primitive mechanical hot dogs.

(The first person to e-mail me and tell me where "My hot dog is having a seizure!" is from will win absolutely dick.)

While flying along in this mode, you have to pick up B and E circles, which don't come into play until the second mode. This first mode is one of the most generic I have ever seen in my entire life. Seriously. Just touching anything blows you up and you just keep pushing the shoot button. Can you feel the joy yet, fatboy?

After you guide your PVC piped sled to the end of the level, your guy gets off and you insert yourself into the air fortress. I will skip the obvious jokes here - I have standards, okay?

After you get into the air fortress - working hard not to make jokes like 'was it as good for you as it was for me!?' - you enter another horribly generic mode. In this mode, you walk around and shoot. Whoooo. You can also fly. Back in Nintendo days this was a huge deal. Yeah, you can fly. Look out, world- I have a shitty jetpack.

Anyway, there's other stuff about this game that you don't care about like how you shoot bombs and they knock you back. Also you can get smushed in some gears or something.

So, I should also mention that this game, in best Nintendo style, gets really fucking hard really fucking fast. The first Air Fortress is pretty easy for a platform game queen like myself, but the second and third Air Fortresses almost reach Battletoads levels. Since there are a ton of Air Fortresses, I don't even want to think about what the last one is like. My guess would be fucking impossible. Yeah, aren't I psychic?

Anyway - what was my point? Oh yeah. Air Fortress.

Before the screenshots, you should know:

WrexSoul 2/19/99 8:14 PM (drops his pants, does the vertical wall-sexer dance)

• Dosn't this scream quality?
• Someone had dust in their cartridge, methinks.
• See? It's a circle. In a box. Collect it.
• Winged hot dogs. I think.
• One pixel lower and I'd crash. Did you see my mad skillz?!
• Sadly, these butterflies are the most annoying enemies in the game.
• Skipping the obvious Metriod comparison.
• Run, run, or you'll be well done!
• This looks like on of the Dr. Wily stages.

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Written by Evk and posted on 07-16-00.
This article is ©2000 Nick Hammer.
evk_d@hotmail.com