Hard to put into words because it's mostly just radio chatter and flamenco guitars playing in harmony with the rumble of your flightstick and battle-instincts to produce some of the sickest rushes known to man. On paper, this is just the usual Ace Combat fare, and dogfighting games don't usually stir much in me - I'm an untrained pilot who normally spends his airtime banking wide to link up remote arrows in green circles, but something about this game sustains itself the whole way through. There's just... something about the novelty of its presentation that sits right within you and helps you believe your legend of the Demon Lord.
Despite being a short game, I ended up savouring The Belkan War over the course of a month, playing it in short bursts after work with my cat in my lap (he liked the afterburner feedback on his belly) and a wee glass of whisky to the side. Clad in my big wooly winter cardigan, my gf started affectionately referring to these private flights as my "grandpa time" and it got me thinking about how my own grandpa was sent through force of law to fruitlessly protect the Suez in the dying days of Britain's borders and how my great-grandpa barely surviving a rolling tank at the Battle of Monte Casino in World War II was all the difference between my own life and the lives of countless others existing now. How lucky I am, despite it all, to live in a time when I can just kick back in my office chair and simulate war rather than live through it. Better to be anti-war through ideas and fictions than be anti-war through lived experience.
It seems the grandchildren of those who survived the initial impact of the V2 project have a long-standing fascination with fictious, almost sensational versions of nuclear armaggedon. Inevitable that a Japanese PS2 war game based on a real-life conflict (and real-life weapons (did anyone at BAE Weapon Systems actually play/approve this?!)) would eventually give way to sci-fi lasers on spaceship bombers and a fucking Belarussian Death Star, but I'm unsure why it always ends this way - I'm no sociologist or historian, so I'd love someone articulate to explain why it's such a recurring trope, especially in this specific kind of 2000s art. Perhaps it's an intersection of Ultraman and Mazinger and Macross with The Dam Busters and Star Wars and The Bridges at Toki-Ri, a fantasy that our noble Arthurian heroes from childhood could avert atomic annihilation - and who can deny the pure passion of that ideal? F-15 Eagles soar in the romantic heart of every young boy... I will be thinking about Pixy's final introduction for a long time.
Speechless that Naoto Maeda went on to become a project middle-manager for mobile games after this, a game that rivals Metal Gear Solid 3 in the pantheon of alt-war/anti-war digital fiction. Hey buddy, you still alive? I hope to see you on the battlefield again one day...
Despite being a short game, I ended up savouring The Belkan War over the course of a month, playing it in short bursts after work with my cat in my lap (he liked the afterburner feedback on his belly) and a wee glass of whisky to the side. Clad in my big wooly winter cardigan, my gf started affectionately referring to these private flights as my "grandpa time" and it got me thinking about how my own grandpa was sent through force of law to fruitlessly protect the Suez in the dying days of Britain's borders and how my great-grandpa barely surviving a rolling tank at the Battle of Monte Casino in World War II was all the difference between my own life and the lives of countless others existing now. How lucky I am, despite it all, to live in a time when I can just kick back in my office chair and simulate war rather than live through it. Better to be anti-war through ideas and fictions than be anti-war through lived experience.
It seems the grandchildren of those who survived the initial impact of the V2 project have a long-standing fascination with fictious, almost sensational versions of nuclear armaggedon. Inevitable that a Japanese PS2 war game based on a real-life conflict (and real-life weapons (did anyone at BAE Weapon Systems actually play/approve this?!)) would eventually give way to sci-fi lasers on spaceship bombers and a fucking Belarussian Death Star, but I'm unsure why it always ends this way - I'm no sociologist or historian, so I'd love someone articulate to explain why it's such a recurring trope, especially in this specific kind of 2000s art. Perhaps it's an intersection of Ultraman and Mazinger and Macross with The Dam Busters and Star Wars and The Bridges at Toki-Ri, a fantasy that our noble Arthurian heroes from childhood could avert atomic annihilation - and who can deny the pure passion of that ideal? F-15 Eagles soar in the romantic heart of every young boy... I will be thinking about Pixy's final introduction for a long time.
Speechless that Naoto Maeda went on to become a project middle-manager for mobile games after this, a game that rivals Metal Gear Solid 3 in the pantheon of alt-war/anti-war digital fiction. Hey buddy, you still alive? I hope to see you on the battlefield again one day...