I am sad to say that this is quite possibly the worst Ace Combat I've ever played. I hope I am speaking too soon, but I only have a few stages left.

First, I am amazed at how boring and stupid every single stage is, barring the first and Aigion. Apparently, someone on the Aces Team went Looney Tunes and decided that the best way to take advantage of the 360 was to put as many enemies as possible in one stage. It's like Desert Arrow from AC5 or Bastion from ACZ, over, and over, and over. While past AC games had a nice mix of genuine dog-fighting and crafty super-structure stuff, Ace Combat 6's idea of fun is to send wave after wave of enemies at you and force you to fly miles and miles back and forth to aid your other battalions.

Also, the story and cutscenes are terrible. Horrible voice acting with characters you couldn't care less about. I can see what they were trying to do, but it fails really bad because most scenes aren't fleshed out, and some are flat out trivial.

Hopefully my brain is just fried from playing it for so long, but I am just not impressed. Even the music hasn't stirred me; most feel very mellow and lack the energy of stuff like Excalibur.

Japanese POV differs from yours
Ace Combat 6 (Xbox 360, Bandai Namco): 9 / 9 / 9 / 9 - (36/40)-famitsu:D

Has anyone heard anything about a shipping error or something? None of the stores in a 10 mile radius of my house have gotten the game in yet, and it's Thursday! :(

My main complaint with the game is that there are so many air-to-ground missions. I thought Zero had a lot, but I guess I was wrong. Also I have to agree with Lith here. The cutscenes are pretty bad.

Still I'm enjoying being able to finally fly a plane (into things) with a flight stick.

Oh my god. The final choral piece is absolutely weaksauce. I have beat the game and unlocked the music player, and none of the music really stands out, other than Liberation of Gracemeria. I think that Tetsukazu Nakanishi must have done most of the music, since most of it is significantly less orchestral and more techno and mellow-ish.

Ace Combat 6 is a huge rush job. I love it when a series adopts an online mode, and suddenly the single player modes turn to complete rubbish.

LoL, ok. No X-02, no FALKEN. What is this. Thank god I only paid $5.

There are some insane latency issues here. After my eighth straight "Connection to host lost" in the middle of a match, not to mention a weird issue where I just couldn't connect to Tube, even right after playing a match with him, I'm start to wonder if the online portion was play tested at all. Add to that little nitpicky things like not being able to change a map without totally disbanding the room kinda makes you scratch your head a bit.

Shame too, since the game itself is a lot of fun, but yowza.

The whole thing about having to close a room just to change maps is just plain silly. I mean, assuming someone working for the development team actually attempted a multiplayer match during the development process, did no one see that this was a problem. You know, the very first time they tried it? If Bungie can make Halo where you can switch between campaign mode and versus playlists and forge and the theatre on the fly, then certainly these guys could figure out how to swap maps on the fly.

I'd also like to point out that in the first versus match that I was involved in with GELB-1, I pretty much dominated the entire room, thanks to whatever weird way the scoring works. Probably never happen again, but that is not the point.

That didn't make sense. We both shot down two people, the scores in the corner during the match were the same, but at the end, you ended up with an additional 10000 point bonus. What. Also you got smashed the next round, but Tube was the worst team mate ever. >_>

The score difference was possibly due to shooting down different plane types. Then again, I don't know how many people were playing in that match, so there might not have been a lot of choice in what to shoot down. I just remember reading in the instructions that different planes have different point values is all.

Everyone was in F-22s and SU-47s, plus although some point differences exist, it's not 10 kills worth of point differences in there. (Each kill gives you an average of 1000 points, so a 10000 boost is kinda, uh, large).

Oh. Well I still haven't played online yet, so I really wouldn't know.

I played team deathmatch and I had no problems. Maybe y'all just need a real ISP.

Too bad everyone is a pussy and just sit in the corner firing off XLAAs.

I actually finished the round with 2100 and then got the 10000 tacked on at the end. The next guy finished with 2000 and got 5000 tacked on.

I probably had some assists or something, so I got some extra points, which is why I ended up with a weird total of 2100.

or shot one of the flak cannons, which were worth a little bit of points. I really don't know. We'll have to experiment to see.

I have to agree with you on that, that shit is gay.

I played two matches and score some kills yesterday, fun shit. Too bad all of my kills were with QAAMs off the SU-47. Long range is simply for faggots. Dogfight or go home.

Truth. Skills chased me forever in our first match at one point and I ended up getting shot down by a flak cannon. He was sad.

I just got the game today. I'm having fun with it so far. But I have not tried the online mode yet though.

I do have to agree with the horrid voice acting and cut scenes. What the hell happened? The scenes in AC5 and Zero were not as bad as this. They were pretty decent. Did the AC team just not try so they could get this out the door faster?

I guess it doesn't help I'm more fond of the cut scenes you got during AC4 and AC X. Those seemed much more fitting than the cut scenes of AC 5 / Zero.

Oh yeah, what is with the insane amount of missiles? Im not playing Easy mode, I shouldn't have so many damn weapons on my plane.

Just picked the game up today from FutureShop. The controller bundle that is. MY GOD! so many buttons. Anyway, I didn't think it was going to be sold in Canada so I picked it up right when I saw it (they only got 2 in). So yeah... SWEET!

Pssh, n00bs do that shit? Fuck that, i'm gonna be on everyone's asses. Are the XLAAs hard to avoid btw? I doubt but, but just wondering.

http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/4904/cimg0641id1.jpg

Got the Nosferatu so bad. Can someone tell me why its special weapons are dual railguns and twelve simultaneously-targeting warheads.

I also take back everything negative I said about the game, other than the stuff about the story and cutscenes. Obviously I was too dumb to realize that the reason why there are so many targets is to make allied attack and coverage nearly mandatory. It's awesome sending out your allies and seeing them actually blow a bunch of planes away, especially on the stage where you're alone in a dog fight with like forty other planes, and the Emmerian squadrons show up.

But without a doubt, the biggest screw up in the game was the decision to remove the manual targeting from ACZ. Many times, it is just way too difficult and time consuming to hit Y again and again until the target you want to hit is highlighted, since there a billion and one enemies on screen simultaneously. There are also many times where you descend to take out a ground target and it keeps highlighting enemies that are miles out of range instead.

...and about the online play, I couldn't really care less about it, since winning seems less about skill and more about lucky maneuvering. There's just nothing you can do when everyone and their mom is firing a QAAM at one another, and a couple of queers are firing XLAAs outside of the fight. I mean, there are certainly people who flat out suck and can't even manage a lock on, but I'm not sure what exactly seperates a good player from another with this kind of gameplay. You're pretty much screwed the second you get hit by a missile, since it puts you into a minor stall, and then all other missiles will hit you.

I guess it would be kind of sweet if they put a Gunman Mode, where you are restricted to guns, but that wouldn't change the fact that everyone I've encountered is a Top Gun watching faggot who screams Goose every two seconds.

Campaign is also ten times better when you default all the sound effects to 15, and bump the music up to 18.

::Liberation of Gracemeria::

Looks like the XFA-36 GAME


Manual Targeting? Im having a blonde moment, you dont mean the 3D button which allows you to track enemies in chase mode.

I am pretty sure it was the L3 button in ACZ. It changed your reticle so you could target something by hovering over it.

Got the game yesterday, and all I can say is... my god was mission 13 hard. I must have gotten shot down by those missiles at least five times, at the end of it; though, that's likely the fault of me leaning on the overburners constantly. At least I'm not crashing into the floor every five minutes like I used to.

Also, is everyone here playing on an HD set? I have an old 19" tube TV, and sometimes the HUD can be a total pain in the rear to read (if not impossible, from blending into the sky). Is that normal, or is it the fault of a crappy TV I need to replace? Megalith's screenshot looked so much crisper than I've ever gotten, quality-wise.

How is it, anyway?

The flightstick? Exactly like the last one, so pretty fucking awesome.

It's a hori product, so you more than most should know what that means for quality. It's responsive and after 5 minutes you'll be flying like a pro.

I don't have a chatpad, but it looks like it's got the full integration plug there, so I dunno if you could use or attach peripherals outside of just the mic.

Edit: I swear to God why can't you save multiplayer replays. They'd be the only ones worth saving, too. >=(