Was there ever a better example of style over substance in gaming than Dragon’s Lair? That’s what I was wondering recently as I failed once again to get off the very first screen of the 1989 Atari ST port of the 1983 Cinematronics arcade game! There had, of course, been plenty of 8-bit home conversions before that, but they weren’t so much conversions as approximations, to the best of those machine’s capabilities. Of course, however approximate, they were also inevitable, given how absolutely breath-taking this interactive, Disney-quality cartoon by (ex-Disney animator) Don Bluth and Rick Dyer, built on laserdisc technology, was at the time and for years after, and I couldn’t wait to have a go on my friends Commodore 64 version when he said he’d got it… Which turned out to be an absolute stinker, both then and now!

As impressive as it was (and still is) to behold, even the original game wasn’t much better to actually play though! You are the classic medieval knight, Dirk the Daring, who’s trying to rescue Princess Daphne from the dragon Singe, who has her locked up in the evil wizard Mordroc’s castle. This involves reacting to on-screen prompts during the various predicaments you find yourself in, with direction and action button presses – think early quick-time events – leading to success or failure animations from a whopping 50,000 in total on the disc, which I think equates to about twenty-two minutes, although if you somehow manage to get to the end it will take you about half of that. It’s a lesson in frustration that would have cost you a fortune to try and learn in the arcades at the time, not just from trying to get to grips with the correct responses but waiting for all that disc searching to find next bit of animation too!

Back to the Atari ST version, the enormous leap in graphical prowess made possible by these new 16-bit machines made a “decent” home port a new reality again, and you probably couldn’t ask for much more than what we eventually got – it looks brilliant, with everything moving how it should, but you can only polish a turd so much and it still played like crap, as well as being a four disk swapping nightmare! At least you could learn which direction to press and when at your leisure though, and doing that for all eleven scenes would keep you busy for a while. Hell of a tech demo to show off to your friends too, and I’d still rate it above Dragon’s Lair 3D on the PlayStation 2, although that cutscene at the start where you’re emerging from the dark, thorny forest with the foreboding castle in the distance will always be a wonderful sight!

Anyway, to answer the original question – which I’ll remind you of as it came so long ago – I really don’t think anything matches Dragon’s Lair’s style over substance, but one other game did immediately spring to mind, and that was G-LOC. And almost as immediately I wondered where on earth that came from! The thing is, I remember seeing the crazy fancy arcade machine somewhere at the time but don’t think I ever actually played it, and while the Sega Ages release on the Nintendo Switch (the first time the original had ever appeared on a home console) was a no-brainer instant buy, I’ve barely ever touched that since either, so I don’t really have any opinion on it whatsoever, let alone any qualification to consign it to the Dragon’s Lair pile… Especially when I’m genuinely struggling to think of any other game that wasn’t one of its sequels or successors to go there with it!

All the same, there was something strangely instinctive about my response to this conundrum, so that’s what I hope to explore as we discover G-LOC: Air Battle here! It was released into the arcades by Sega in February 1990, and puts you into the cockpit of the experimental A8M5 fighter plane for a good old modern-day dogfight. And yes, to all intents and purposes it’s a spin-off of or even sequel to Sega’s 1987 After Burner, featuring the same high-speed aerial rail-shooting, this time set across thirty-eight stages within three selectable skill levels. Beginner offers a nine-stage training course, while intermediate introduces throttle and afterburner over thirteen faster-paced stages, then the third difficulty lets “Aces” loose on sixteen stages of fierce, high-speed dogfighting. G-LOC came as a regular upright cabinet, a sit-down cockpit one and a deluxe sit-down version using the R360 cabinet, which could spin 360 degrees in any direction on two axes, mimicking the game’s action exactly, including upside down! I only ever saw the normal sit-down, but I believe this one freed up the in-game motion from its fixed, mostly forwards direction too so it could take advantage of going anywhere.

That thing really looks nuts, and I think was mostly Sega waving its willy rather than any great commercial success – it cost about £70,000 a pop (and in 1991 money) and only ever worked with three games – this, Wings of War (think After Burner in the style of Virtua Racing) and Rad Mobile – famously Sonic the Hedgehog’s first appearance, as a rear view mirror decoration! Apart from the four-point seatbelt and safety bar, the rest of the controls were common to all cabinet types – flight stick, throttle with an afterburner button, guided missile launcher and a machine gun trigger. Oh yeah, before I forget again, G-LOC stands for G-force induced Loss Of Consciousness. And while I’m trying not to forget things, as mentioned earlier, I’m currently rocking M2’s Sega Ages version of the arcade original on Nintendo Switch. It’s a shame this range stopped where it did because despite definitive and often enhanced versions of stuff like this, Virtua Racing, Space Harrier and a bunch more, it was still only scratching the surface! In the case of G- LOC, you were getting online leaderboards, Ages Mode, adding more enemies, missiles and a more powerful lock-on system in a set series of missions, and also an option for a moving cabinet display to try and replicated the feeling of that hydraulic cabinet. Your mileage with that will vary but A for effort, and for about £6 you can’t go wrong!

Not that it’s particularly important, but while we’ve established we’re in a big dogfight in a fancy fighter jet, I’m struggling to provide much more backstory than that! Sega Ages games were always accompanied by a lovely online manual, and this one is no different, but it doesn’t actually tell you why, so what I’ll do is refer to the Mega Drive port’s instructions instead, and see what that can tell us… “The enemy forces have started an air battle as a prelude to a massive marine and ground assault. They believe that their air force is the best in the world and they’re determined to prove it! Their air force is already flying, and ground support has been set up in various areas along the attack route. Their plan is to set up a heavily protected corridor through which their assault troops will move forward into neutral territory, and then into your country. What the enemy hasn’t considered is an ace pilot, in the cockpit of the most technologically advanced jet fighter in existence. Your carrier has been called to the front because its pilots are the best in the fleet. The support crew is standing by, and the jet is fully fuelled. You’re on the ready line, Captain. Get your gear on and get ready!”

Feeling enlightened now? Well, whether you are or not, you’re definitely on the ready line, so shall we just have a game? I’ll skip all the Sega Ages menu stuff for now and stick with the arcade game, where the first order of business is to tear your eyes away from what is still a stunning attract mode and decide on your preferred course of action, which, as touched on before, was beginner with nine missions and no speed up or afterburner, medium with thirteen missions and full control, then expert with sixteen missions. There are some exceptions, like ground missions, but in the main you’re going to be defeating a set number of enemies within a certain time. The fewer of your limited stock of missiles you use in doing so, the more bonus time you’ll be awarded at the end of each mission, where missile count, fuel used and damage incurred is also reset before the next. Fail to hit your target in the time limit and it’s game over, and the same for taking too much damage, which mostly comes from enemy missiles. but you’ve got to be even more careful on those ground missions where rocks and other obstacles are also going to mean you’re toast.

Most of the time you’re going to be playing in cockpit view, like you’re supposed to in a flying game (just like you are in a racing game!) but sometimes the action will be forced into a pursuit view from behind the plane (think After Burner again). This happens when an enemy plane or a missile is on your tail, at which point you need to start using barrel rolls and your afterburner (if it’s available) to try and get rid of them, when it will switch back to cockpit. Should you get to the final mission in the beginner and medium modes, you’ll also switch to pursuit view where you need to follow the air traffic guidance back to your aircraft carrier and land on it, which you’d better do or it’s an instant game over, while the eighth mission in expert mode requires you to land too but this time there’s no penalty if you mess it up. It’s a nerdy thing to say, I know, but I think this is my favourite cockpit view in any flight sim (or otherwise), and I’ve been playing them since the early eighties so that’s pretty high praise! In reality what you’re seeing is half arcade-type stuff and the rest sim- style stuff that’s mainly there to look pretty, and that’s true whichever view you’re in – game difficulty, current mission, time left, fuel and missiles left, radar, damage, speed and banking angles and a lock-on status.

The middle of the cockpit view also contains your Head Up Display (HUD) targeting area, and as well as your regular gun sight, whenever an enemy enters that area you’ll get a green sight that starts to track it. Keep it in that area for a couple of seconds and it turns red as the target is locked-on, meaning you can then fire your missiles if you so choose, but make sure it’s a definite lock or it’s going to miss and that’s a precious missile wasted. You do have an unlimited Vulcan machine gun though, and that’s always the better option if time is on your side – actually, one of the things you can tweak in this Sega Ages version is having that auto-fire continuously but really what’s the point? You can also set it to auto-centre, invert the controls, reassign controls, turn on HD rumble, do normal DIP-switch stuff like set difficulty, and choose between the international version of the game and the Japanese original, though I can’t tell you if there’s any difference to gameplay in this case. I’ll come back to display and sound settings if I remember, but just to close on flying the plane, you can ascend and descend, and barrel roll, which takes a bit more effort to control in harder modes but does give way more freedom of movement (including going upside-down), then in medium and expert you can also speed up or fire the afterburner, which is where that fuel gauge comes in – get too low and you can’t use it again until the next mission.

Strangely though, that’s never been much of a problem to me because, while I might not have been playing this for thirty years, I have been playing a lot of After Burner for even longer, and those beginner flight settings feel most like that! As much as I enjoyed the (relative) variety and challenge of the higher levels – and the medium difficulty in particular – I was very rarely taking advantage of the additional speed controls. What you really do notice at these levels is the leap in enemy intelligence and manoeuvrability, and they are way harder as a result, and that’s before you get to the more challenging mission designs – there’s no coasting through levels like you can in After Burner here, but a real sense of panic as the timer drops to ten seconds, you’ve still got three planes to take down and there’s suddenly not a single one to be seen on your radar! While on the beginner mode you’ll regularly be taking down everything with your machine gun almost before you’re missiles have even had a chance to lock on, the opposite is true in the other modes, and you’ll find yourself throwing your plane all over the place just to try and keep them in that HUD area long enough to get a missile away.

Some of the missions are going to take place in far more confined spaces, such as canyons, and these certainly bring a new level of challenge to all difficulty levels, but especially with those twitchier controls at the higher ones, and you’ll regularly find yourself in a mountain long before you need to worry about enemy fire, which also becomes more of a factor here, although I found anything less than fatal to be more of an obstacle to visibility – as bullet holes and cracks appear on the glass – than any impediment to handling or having to worry about anything on the actual damage status display – in fact, I barely looked at that or any other instruments at all because there’s generally always higher priorities for your eyes! Throughout your travels you’ll be tasked with taking down a certain number of planes, or ground targets like tanks or ships or buildings – which I found to be the toughest missions – but despite changes in location there’s very little to distinguish one mission to another as you shoot down ten enemies, shoot down seven enemies, shoot down twenty enemies and so on up to thirty-eight times! And as a result, I reckon you’ll have had your fill long before you’ve got good enough to see most of them.

There’s also very little variety in those different locations, with only the rocky canyon areas having any significant impact on gameplay; they’re really low-res and jagged by modern standards too, built from identical repeating patterns, and the same for the odd pier or bridge or generic metal military structure you might pass by in these sections too. In the main, though, you’ll be flying over sea, clouds and pre-rendered, totally flat representations of deserts, forests and cities, or muted, slightly textured earthy colour patterns, almost none of which have any detail or life whatsoever. That said, sometimes you will suddenly notice Nazca Lines or a really cool river through a rainforest (I think!), but once again, after the nice surprise the first time, this does little more than make the rest even more disappointing, as you return to simply hoping for a nicely coloured sky as the time of day changes for the next mission! It all moves at a really good whack though, even if it struggles a bit with draw distance and pop-ins occasionally, with enough detail at play in the sprites (not polygons – thanks to Pete from MoeGamer for the correction!) to give the planes that will often totally fill the sky plenty of variety and character and realism. Some of the special effects are really awesome too, from simple things like the shimmering sea that draws your eye from the aircraft carrier you’re trying to land on, to the really cool transition from cockpit to chase view and back again or the mass of digitised explosions and smoke trails and bullet tracers that regularly fill the screen and do a remarkable job of being the main source of many moments of real exhileration in the game.

If you were to isolate the non-stop speech it would quickly drive you mad but in-game it actually heightens this exhileration, with constant instructions to “fire” as you lock-on, or the relentless “turn left, turn left, turn left, turn right” as you nervously try and line up a landing! Similarly, although I said I wasn’t fussed about using the afterburners, it’s worth it just for the deep, sampled “whoosh” as the non-stop ups and downs of the realistic jet engine suddenly go into overdrive, or where they go the opposite way as you’re just about to land. On top of that, there’s the sounds of missiles and machine guns and beeps of instruments that also never let up but there’s so many of them that it’s almost like having some mad jazz soundtrack playing on top of the actual soundtrack, which comes and goes as you play to great effect, although unfortunately none of it is anywhere near as memorable as Sega’s Out Run or Super Hang-On that it follows the kind of tropical, laid-back, mid-eighties action movie synth style of. And while I’m on another slight downer, here’s a bigger one – there’s thankfully only a couple of cut-scenes in the game but they’re absolutely dreadful! The one you’ll see most is your pilot on a parachute coming at you from just above, feet first and totally washed-out in a really miserable art-style, but even worse is when you beat the game, and there’s what can only be described as a criminal line-up of what I assume our hero pilots, with this sour-faced “chief” choppily walking down this bizarrely parallax scrolling, shades of orange parade. I’m just glad I’m so crap at the game and don’t need to see it very often!

Taito’s 1989 Night Striker is a not totally dissimilar 3D shoot ‘em up that didn’t get ported for years, until the Sega-CD (or Mega-CD if you prefer) and then the Saturn and PlayStation came along, because current home tech at the time wasn’t deemed up to the job, but G-LOC got the conversion treatment for all kinds of previous-gen Sega machines right off the bat! It also came to ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga under the guise of G-LOC R360, two of which machines I owned but I genuinely have no recollection of any of these ports! I’ve had a quick look and there’s not a lot to the 8-bit ones, especially the C64 one which is downright boring, and for a machine that was full of incredible flight-sims, often with jaw-dropping visuals, it’s incredibly bland on the Atari ST too. Which I guess is to be expected when you take away the spectacle from a game that’s all about the spectacle. The Sega console ports did try to compensate a bit though, with the Mega Drive (or Genesis) adding way better cut-scenes on top of an admirable job of the rest, and the Master System even adding bosses, while the Game Gear added upgrades to get for your plane, although the game itself is a bit of hard sell on there otherwise! Just to finish the story, as well as all the ports, G-LOC got a Japan-only arcade sequel, Strike Fighter, as soon as 1991, where it also got an FM-Towns home port, while everyone else had to wait another year for it to arrive on Sega-CD, where it was known as After Burner III, but maybe stick with the first two…

If you stitched all the flying bits in Top Gun together, you’d have a fantastic half an hour of blockbuster action but you’d be totally missing out on Kelly McGillis and the sexiest hairstyle of the eighties. And that’s kind of exactly what you get with G-LOC… Which also takes a lot less than half an hour for all that action to become less fantastic and just more of the same, like I imagine that special cut of Top Gun might also be! Unlike Top Gun though, I’m not sure this has stood the test of time quite as well, but maybe that’s a bit harsh because it was never supposed to. It was a 1990 arcade machine, designed for a moment in time where home systems were starting to catch up and arcade machines were no longer effortlessly spectacular in comparison; and it certainly wasn’t designed for extended play on one of those home systems (attached to a dirty great hi-res TV) three decades down the road! And while it might not be taking your 10p anymore (or £3, to be precise, for the deluxe all-spinning version), it’s still meant for those same short bursts and that’s where it still works perfectly well, even if to a lesser extent than its predecessor After Burner, or Space Harrier or Out Run, come to that. The three modes and mass of missions don’t stop it being shallow, and for a game so superficial, outside of your cockpit window it’s really showing its age, but aren’t we all, and every now and then it’s still a blast for a few minutes, and once you’re done it will still be just as spectacular and exhilarating as you remember it was in 1990, at least until the next time you fancy being Tom Cruise again!