If there is one good thing about UA-cam, it's the fact that I can watch the entire game play of games that I had never beaten back in the day. It's exciting to see those higher levels and the ending of those games. Never thought I'd ever see the end of Space Ace back when I was feeding it quarters during my childhood.
I would never admit to how many quarters I sunk into an arcade machine for hours on end, several days running until I finally beat this game. The arcade game did NOT have the visual clues. It was not only a matter of timing but you also had to learn the correct direction by trial and error. The problem was if you lost your life, you started all the way back at the beginning and by the time you got to the part where you failed, you could forget which way you went the last time.
LOL. The arcade DID have visual cues. The only problem was that your operator at your local arcade was a dick and disabled them in the dip switch menu. Making it extremely harder... Making you dump more quarters in the machine.....
Thanks for posting this. I worked at a video arcade in the late 80s and this was my game. Spent forever mastering it and had the high score. Frustrating if you didn't know what to do though. So many kids came up to me saying "Space Ace is broken", so I would trip a game to "test" it and play it all the way through while they watched. Fun times.
Dexter was shot with the infanto ray enough to make him younger and nerdy. He energizes but for a short time to his grown-up self. I guess one the infanto ray is destroyed at the end, he no longer reverts to his younger, dorky self.
Although these were interactive movie games, they were light-years ahead of prior attempts at interactive movies. They also resulted in many later attempts at adding cinematics to conventional games. It took almost 20 years for the technology to catch up to the vision of Dyer and Bluth. I'm so glad this was a part of my childhood
You couldn't have said it better. There's something wonderful and beautiful, yet awkward or... I just don't know. It's like describing a rainy day where the sun is blasting through the droplets, and there's '20s music playing in the distance, or, I don't know.
At 50 cents a pop, my friends and I certainly put a lot of money into it. Even after the game would skip around because the machine was not working properly we still played it who knows how many times. Awesome. @@donwald3436
@@CustodianHadrian that was not Disney style... That was Don Bluth. Bluth worked for and heavily influenced Disney animation... But that animation art style was not Disney's work.
I can't believe this is only 7 minutes long! So many hours were spent watching or playing this game in my local arcade. The animation was so awesome and it's hard to watch it now without feeling like I have to move up/down/left/right or shoot at the appropriate time. I never had much money to play the game myself, but one day I arrived at the arcade and discovered it was set to FREE PLAY. That was like the most exciting day of my youth. I wondered later, if it was a mistake, or if the lady who ran the arcade set it to free play because she knew I was always broke and almost nobody else ever played the game anyway.
Space Ace and Dragon's layer were a games ahead of their time. What I can't figure out is why hasn't there been a franchise started by one of the top game producers. I mean the animation and graphics are incredible for an 80's arcade game.
They are making Dragon's Lair movie so i will watch that in 2021 or whenever its made or done. But it is good movie entertainment despite being an arcade FMV game.
@@LunaP1 the woman will be made into a black fat transvestite.. the main character a non binary black lesbian trans woman that has only two facial expressions, both of wich look smug. All villains will be huwite straight men etc.. They can not remake games without pandering and censorshit See what they did to diablo
well, it WAS a cartoon, laser disk work with jumping to sequences according to certain input at a certain time; you can see it more in certain games where this is not fully implemented, while on Space Ace i suppose they did their homework and is mostly seamless
Think it as a game that plays bits of a cartoon when you press the right button (or the stock death scene when you don't). The characters and background aren't distinct programmable objects, though the technology exists to do that now.
Dragon’s Lair 2 had objects you needed to collect to get the true ending. I recall the operator could have the helper guide turned on or off. It’s on here telling you which direction to push and when to hit fire. With it off you had to use context clues in the animation and sometimes just guess. Some scenes would just flip so that you had to push the opposite direction. The concept is really neat. This is basically “quick time events” before they commonly existed. Imagine games like this sitting next to Pac-Man and Dig-Dug. Play was limited but it was very flashy.
Lorna Cook voiced Kimberly, and Vera Lanpher voiced Daphne (Dragon's Lair). Both were company employees so they didn't have to hire outside voice talent (but if you ask me, I think Vera's squealing performance was better).
This saved me the HUNDREDS fools in arcades spent playing this back in the day. And imagine THAT is the ending you got after all those tense, twitch filled hours!
that very short time where you realized it was over with was so when you were celebrating that you actually beat the game... You didn't miss anything. LOL It would just be you jumping in front of a cabinet yelling yes yes yes.
I was a teenager when Space Ace was new and I can tell you it was super impressive. Space invaders then Frogger and Pacman were the first stars of the video game era but when you look at the graphics and sound of these games, they looked primitive compared to games like Dragons Liar and Space Ace. Long queues of people lined up often out the door of amusement centers waiting play try these 2 games and at 60 cents per game which was triple the price per play of Frogger and Pacman etc. Dragons Liar and then Space Ace were both absolute cutting edge games in 1983-84 running at the very limits of technology at the time annnnd they were both enormously fun games to play, they really were and they still are.
I still think a (SPACE ACE) cartoon show series should get made. But I imagine the first part of it starts out with the hero’s origin, and then the first villain he has to deal with. I also imagine him trying to deal with different types of problems, and the many different types of evil villains he has to try to defeat.
There were at least three creative teams working on this and none of them were in any kind of communication with the others. It's basically amazing, is what I'm saying.
@@Nuka-Lucas Have you seen the cartoons of today? Most of them can barely be classified, in my opinion, as animation, let alone _real_ animation, with as severely limited as it all is. Of course, I'd expect a comment of that sort from somebody with a profile pic like yours.
Wow no wonder most people hate quick time events today. It's a cheap game mechanic that could have been used in an interactive story instead of an action game.
So how did people beat this games in the 80s? I'm assuming those on screen prompts weren't on the arcade machines, so it was pretty much just a matter of guessing more or less when to press which buttons? Sounds like a supreme scam to be honest, because the only real way to get to the end would be through trial and error. I guess it could be fun though -- have your friend record the sequence of buttons you press each time you playthrough, so you can have a guide when you inevitably fail and have to start over. I suppose that would be pretty satisfying.
From what I remember of 80s arcades the whole system was designed around trial an error. You’d had kids spending their entire allowance on those machines learning the strategy while they played. It was part of the fun. Having your name show up on the leadership board of the machine for others to see was a big deal. With regard to this game I’m pretty sure the prompts popped up on be screen just like Dragon’s Lair? Or a light illuminated around the actual joystick indicating a direction.
I played both Dragon's Liar and Space Ace when I was a kid (I was around the same age as those kids in Stranger Things), and was terrible at each game due to its near impossible gaming controls. You still get cues in the game, but you have to be very quick to respond to them. I also played an old Arcade game called "Cliff Hangers" which was based on the popular anime show Lupin the 3rd. Again, I had a terrible time playing that game. On the plus side, the animation was always wonderful.
Harry Flashman The flashing prompts on the screen were always there telling you which way to go. That was only half the battle, though. In so many instances, if your timing wasn't *exactly* on, even a move in the right direction could still lead to your death. Frustrating as hell, but immensely satisfying when you finished it. As an aside, you have to admit.... Kimberly had a *great* can.
Trial and error, and on-screen flashes (you can see them briefly in the video). There were no "help icons" as you see in this video. Plus, there were occasional onscreen "character hints" (such as when they would look one way). As an animation fan, I loved this game in the arcades! (As well as Dragon's Lair.) It had come out when I was 16. I finished all three difficulty levels (the higher levels had more scenes, which are not shown in this video, which shows the lowest difficulty level). It was a great memory exercise! It was also a wallet drain. ;)
Harry - I am guessing you didn't grow up in the 80's? All arcade cabs were essentially scams to rid kids of their quarters! It was pretty fun though. Kids today have no real interest in arcades though, being as they grew up with xbox live and such. It was always a thrill when I would enter my initials and someone watching would recognize them, and say "you're JUJ?" Ok, the didn't really happen often, really just once. I had the high score on a couple of cabs he was playing. In any case, it's not the social environment it once was.
The roller skates sequence, which is not in this video, was by far the hardest to conquer. Can't tell you how many damn quarters it cost me to finally beat the thing.😂
There are multiple sequences that aren't on here. Some because things are different in some areas if you don't Energize, and some only occur on medium/hard difficulty. This was an "easy" mode playthrough.
It's amazing to how this and Dragon's Lair eventually spawned "Quick-time events" many years later, and that's still around today. The sheer amount of ways you could die in these games was wild, and honestly it was so fast-paced and random that it was very difficult to keep up and not die constantly. They could have really used better pacing, maybe some slow areas to enjoy the view before rushing through again, but still these games are very memorable decades later...
For some reason, with the music and animation, this reminded me of Inspector Gadget with the slow Laserdisc back in the arcade. While better than Dragon's Lair, and the cartoon graphics by Don Bluth's company was fantastic, it was not enough to overcome the slow response time and the company went bankrupt soon after Dragon Lair's II launched.
I remember anyone who could play this game well always had a crowd watching. I was always to busy watching the cartoons to get very far on the game. I also remember a hologram game with a cowboy who just jumped and shot his gun. But it was cool. Hell arcade's were the shit back in the day. Where's a time machine when ya need one?
a Movie for / in recent Times would be Good, ive been thinking about it for YEARS, Gonna have to do a Review for this Many people are thinking & wanting what ive thought of many times.
I remember playing Dragons Lair and not knowing how to play it and wasted like $10, which was $100 for a kid, I never beat it or got past the first 15 seconds.
I don't think I ever played Space Ace myself. Instead I watched other people play it in the arcades. I could never understand the dialog or music because of the noise and the acoustics, but wow, Space Ace was dazzling. And looked REAL difficult. After Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, so many of us believed laserdisc technology was the gaming future.
I wasted so much of 1984 playing this game in the arcade at the Aviation Mall. When I learned to finally finish it (based only on memory patterns), people would ask me to play just to watch. But, I was addicted to finishing it. The worst part of getting through this game wasn't the memorazation of the patterns (that was easy). The worst part was the timing of each move required with the joystick and the "gun button." I remember the "space surf board" being particularly stressful!
started awesome at 5:36, but it all fell flat at 5:41. Seriously, developers! You could have added an epic Final Boss music, but NO! You just had to stick with the Energize theme again! Killjoys!
It's too bad these older games weren't more versatile with directional/path options (Maybe sort of like choose your own adventure) and not just wrong choice and you're done. Not just the couple cartoons Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, but live action stuff Digital Leisure made as well.
why the fuck did they keep the baby version of their enemy? "awww, dexter isn't he adorable?" "FUCK no he tried to kill us, chuck em into the void of space" "good point dexter." "call me ace, huh?"
If there is one good thing about UA-cam, it's the fact that I can watch the entire game play of games that I had never beaten back in the day. It's exciting to see those higher levels and the ending of those games. Never thought I'd ever see the end of Space Ace back when I was feeding it quarters during my childhood.
Same here. Got to finish it when it was on my computer. Kimberly was hot.
Same. And the ending was well worth the wait. Absolutely hysterical.
I second that. Thought it was a little anticlimactic though.....
Watching it, I was happy to see the arrows and saw what I should have done when playing.
Some of the hints are hard to see or late.
@@DLJohnsonHonourofKings as most female characters Don Bluth animated are 😁
I would never admit to how many quarters I sunk into an arcade machine for hours on end, several days running until I finally beat this game. The arcade game did NOT have the visual clues. It was not only a matter of timing but you also had to learn the correct direction by trial and error. The problem was if you lost your life, you started all the way back at the beginning and by the time you got to the part where you failed, you could forget which way you went the last time.
#SoulDestroying
LOL. The arcade DID have visual cues. The only problem was that your operator at your local arcade was a dick and disabled them in the dip switch menu. Making it extremely harder... Making you dump more quarters in the machine.....
@@nexusofice9135 interesting....
it did have the visual clues but they werent arrows like this it was just a flash in the right direction.
@@TheOriginalSycHolic that's a lot better than nothing though
*Rescues girl*
Her, "Can we keep him?"
Well that escalated quickly.
Afterthought you earned a Trophy :
Impotence imminent
That's a "game over" if I ever saw one...
what does he say in reply? i've played it like 10 times, can't understand
@@yeahiagree1070 "Call me Ace huh/hun."
"No." Tosses the trash into a pit.
Thanks for posting this. I worked at a video arcade in the late 80s and this was my game. Spent forever mastering it and had the high score. Frustrating if you didn't know what to do though. So many kids came up to me saying "Space Ace is broken", so I would trip a game to "test" it and play it all the way through while they watched. Fun times.
Fun to be the badass at an arcade
Jim Rowell More like "awesome".
Not fair you mastered it with test runs. Oh man the quarters I blew threw especially cause it was .50 a game.
@@TMcD3 what
I'll never understand why he needs to grow muscles, just to shoot things
Recoil is strong?
Enhanced reflexes?
confidence
You didn't see him do things like push giant glass pipes up like they were nothing?
Dexter was shot with the infanto ray enough to make him younger and nerdy. He energizes but for a short time to his grown-up self. I guess one the infanto ray is destroyed at the end, he no longer reverts to his younger, dorky self.
Present day: "Why do you love redheads so much?"
Me back in the 80's: *Breathes heavily at the arcade*
Fire in the hole!
*man who kidnaps her gets turned into a baby*
"He’s so cute! Can’t we keep him?"
"I have several questions"
He's a baby 👶🏻! They can raise him right! They know he going to be physically huge and smart!😁🤷🏿♂️
Then legal adoption issues ensued….
This game has the speed of a methhead
its a game from 1984....
Try Kaboom from Activision
@@conangreenfield2978 there was a pattern to kaboom.
generally you die in like 30 seconds when you don't know the right responses.
Even doomguy would say "slow down, bud"
Space Ace switches from Chad to Virgin seemingly at random.
This was the incell workaround, the Chad-watch
Probably to make the nerds at the video acade feel like they can become real men.
Thomas Engermann lol
Dexter is such a chad that the weapon that turns people into babies just turns him into a smaller man
From Tom Holland to Captain America
You've gotta give Don Bluth credit, he's made this game look absolutely incredible.
Indeed.
You won't use the name he wants, you don't want a date, you constantly berate him for not saving you fast enough, but you want a baby.
Seems legit.
Doesnt it though?
Does that sum up a thing or two?
She said she's "think about it."
Pfffffff!!!! women!!!!!!
Even worst..she wants a baby..but not his.
Although these were interactive movie games, they were light-years ahead of prior attempts at interactive movies. They also resulted in many later attempts at adding cinematics to conventional games. It took almost 20 years for the technology to catch up to the vision of Dyer and Bluth. I'm so glad this was a part of my childhood
This is probably the most awkward, fast-paced, and beautiful game of all time. I wonder what Don Bluth was thinking when making this.
I feel like he handled the visuals and some sadist took care of the rest.
He was thinking a lot about teenage ass, that's for sure
You couldn't have said it better. There's something wonderful and beautiful, yet awkward or... I just don't know. It's like describing a rainy day where the sun is blasting through the droplets, and there's '20s music playing in the distance, or, I don't know.
I think he wanted you to insert more quarters.
At 50 cents a pop, my friends and I certainly put a lot of money into it. Even after the game would skip around because the machine was not working properly we still played it who knows how many times. Awesome. @@donwald3436
I'd sit and watch paint dry if Don Bluth animated it.
Before quick time events was a thing
Daryl Caruthers This entire game is a QTE.
still better than NFS the run and tomb raider 2013
But they were a thing
Where do you think QTE came from my dude?
The old QTE were a lot quicker than the Slow Mo QTE in some modern Triple A games.
6:04 "Dexter the Infanta Ray is *AHHH!!!* "
Mood
I would’ve loved a Space Ace movie
We did get Titan AE at least, that's Don Bluth!
Don Bluth is making a dragonslair movie he crowd funded a trailer in 2016
I think there was a Space Ace cartoon series. Here is a scene from such series: ua-cam.com/video/bGmhzcOANGQ/v-deo.html
There was a space ace cartoon, but the art style was more like Scooby Doo than Disney's style like we see in the arcade game.
@@CustodianHadrian that was not Disney style... That was Don Bluth. Bluth worked for and heavily influenced Disney animation... But that animation art style was not Disney's work.
6:03 "Dexter, the infant-o-ray is-- AUEGH--"
I can't believe this is only 7 minutes long! So many hours were spent watching or playing this game in my local arcade. The animation was so awesome and it's hard to watch it now without feeling like I have to move up/down/left/right or shoot at the appropriate time.
I never had much money to play the game myself, but one day I arrived at the arcade and discovered it was set to FREE PLAY. That was like the most exciting day of my youth. I wondered later, if it was a mistake, or if the lady who ran the arcade set it to free play because she knew I was always broke and almost nobody else ever played the game anyway.
That's a lovely story! - I hope the lady who run the arcade really did that for you.
Dexter: hey I’m here, hop on
Her: no thanks, I’ll walk
??? Then what were you waiting on him for???
Women
@@bearjuncture 🍷🗿
Dexter is incredibly more dorky than I have ever imagined he was....
"I'll save you Kimmy!"
He's, what TV Tropes describes to other nerdy heroes, really "Adorkable".
If you think this is bad, you should see Dexter in the Cartoon series.
He sounds more like Mandark, though
I guess some hot looking babes like Kimberly actually like nerds like Dexter.
Her: (Kidnapped, tied to a deadly mechanism) Dexter!
Him: *CALL ME ACE*
Space Ace and Dragon's layer were a games ahead of their time. What I can't figure out is why hasn't there been a franchise started by one of the top game producers. I mean the animation and graphics are incredible for an 80's arcade game.
The art style is awesome
Can we appreciate how much of a thicc boi energized Dexter is, and acknowledge the porn-level voice acting?
..
*GAE!🤦🏿♂️🙄😁*
@@rhuttrho88 and?
uh what
Fr tho. Like what is this dialog and voice acting. It’s glorious. Also thick Ace.
4:21 I see what they did
Dear god
And in 6:15 you can see what they forgot to draw.
(Or just a glitch in the video)
@@RMOB Nah it’s just the lighting. You can still see it.
This is like movie material on how they animated this
1:50 This should be a meme.
Animation was so much better in the 1980s. Absolutely gorgeous.
You said it.
Just keeping up with the animation and edits is hectic, I couldn't imagine actually trying to PLAY this!
This game deserves its own movie
I think this would deserve both a movie _and_ its own proper game.
It also deserves a remake. Hopefully not a shitty remake.
I think there was a cartoon series for space Ace. Here is a link to a scene: ua-cam.com/video/bGmhzcOANGQ/v-deo.html
They are making Dragon's Lair movie so i will watch that in 2021 or whenever its made or done. But it is good movie entertainment despite being an arcade FMV game.
@@LunaP1 the woman will be made into a black fat transvestite..
the main character a non binary black lesbian trans woman that has only two facial expressions, both of wich look smug.
All villains will be huwite straight men etc..
They can not remake games without pandering and censorshit
See what they did to diablo
jesus this sound design is killing me
Houston Helicopter Tours Inc. not so classic voice acting
Now in 2018 still fantastic. .but who have heard that from Coin-op was stunned ....
Beep.
R.I.P
Get my out of hereeee
Only if you call me Ace
Samurai Jack creators apparently dug this game.
Theres a fork in the road
This was actually a game, and not just a cartoon? Seems awfully sophisticated to have a game configured like this back in 1984.
well, it WAS a cartoon, laser disk work with jumping to sequences according to certain input at a certain time; you can see it more in certain games where this is not fully implemented, while on Space Ace i suppose they did their homework and is mostly seamless
Think it as a game that plays bits of a cartoon when you press the right button (or the stock death scene when you don't). The characters and background aren't distinct programmable objects, though the technology exists to do that now.
It's literally just chapter select made into a game. Even VCRs had tracking functions.
Even if this is just glorified chapter select, it is still impressive I would say
Dragon’s Lair 2 had objects you needed to collect to get the true ending.
I recall the operator could have the helper guide turned on or off. It’s on here telling you which direction to push and when to hit fire. With it off you had to use context clues in the animation and sometimes just guess.
Some scenes would just flip so that you had to push the opposite direction.
The concept is really neat. This is basically “quick time events” before they commonly existed. Imagine games like this sitting next to Pac-Man and Dig-Dug. Play was limited but it was very flashy.
'Oh far out!' 'WOAH!' Anyone else love the delivery of that?
Kimberly sounds like Leela from Futurama
She is peg from the TV show married with children the actress looks like her too and she is also in Futurama
PhoeniksoftheStorm who would rather get a Bj or an Sj from? Kimberly or Daphne?
NO she sounds like Jessica Rabbit!
@@wii1245 Daphne
Lorna Cook voiced Kimberly, and Vera Lanpher voiced Daphne (Dragon's Lair). Both were company employees so they didn't have to hire outside voice talent (but if you ask me, I think Vera's squealing performance was better).
I'd forgotten just how utterly insane this game was
1:05 Do I sense a little sarcasm in Kimmy's voice?
This saved me the HUNDREDS fools in arcades spent playing this back in the day.
And imagine THAT is the ending you got after all those tense, twitch filled hours!
Words can’t express how much I would never want to actually play this.
The animation may be top notch but the voice acting sucks
what sucks more is that this game started the QTE, which we all love to hate.
The animation isn't top notch.
@@SarSaraneth For 80's standards it was :)
@@Benjamillion
By Eighties standards, the voice acting's exceptional. We're not judging it by Eighties standards.
Yes, and I wouldn't want it any other way.
I forgot how beautifully animated and absolutely hectic this game was!
I really wish I was a 70s baby instead of a 90s baby so I would have been a kid in the 80s to play something awesome as this in an arcade!
Amazing how this animation still holds up!
that was... anti-climactic
that very short time where you realized it was over with was so when you were celebrating that you actually beat the game... You didn't miss anything. LOL
It would just be you jumping in front of a cabinet yelling yes yes yes.
I was a teenager when Space Ace was new and I can tell you it was super impressive. Space invaders then Frogger and Pacman were the first stars of the video game era but when you look at the graphics and sound of these games, they looked primitive compared to games like Dragons Liar and Space Ace. Long queues of people lined up often out the door of amusement centers waiting play try these 2 games and at 60 cents per game which was triple the price per play of Frogger and Pacman etc. Dragons Liar and then Space Ace were both absolute cutting edge games in 1983-84 running at the very limits of technology at the time annnnd they were both enormously fun games to play, they really were and they still are.
Don Bluth is such a great artist
Indeed.
Watch this at half speed and enjoy.
I feel like .75 is a better fit
0.5 is amazing. Total stoner sounding experience 🤣
It's odd how Kimberly sounds a lot like Leela
I still think a (SPACE ACE) cartoon show series should get made.
But I imagine the first part of it starts out with the hero’s origin, and then the first villain he has to deal with.
I also imagine him trying to deal with different types of problems, and the many different types of evil villains he has to try to defeat.
I literally tried playing this at an 80s arcade, and holy crap it's hard
There were at least three creative teams working on this and none of them were in any kind of communication with the others. It's basically amazing, is what I'm saying.
Why does the Space Princess want to keep the baby version of the Evil Overlord that’s been trying to kill them?
I didn't know she was a Princess
maybe to Raise him Right so he doesn't become Bad, that's my guess
I remember I beat Dragons Lair so when this came out I thought it was going to be easier. I was wrong... Space Ace was faster and harder lol!
The voice actors sounds like they read the script all the time without emotions on what is going on in their situation.
Hey it was 1984
@@JuanMartinez-hj6fi ok but this game is pretty good
People call it hard-boiled (for example: Philip Marlowe).
Friend: so what’s your best achievement
Me: I beat space ace without dying
Call me Ace
Mr. Lijah K the 1st huh?
*Call me Ace*
Man, so much real animation at any given moment!
As opposed to fake animation?
@@Nuka-Lucas Have you seen the cartoons of today? Most of them can barely be classified, in my opinion, as animation, let alone _real_ animation, with as severely limited as it all is. Of course, I'd expect a comment of that sort from somebody with a profile pic like yours.
Wow no wonder most people hate quick time events today. It's a cheap game mechanic that could have been used in an interactive story instead of an action game.
For the 80s though this was ahead of its time.
..and many would say the 80's were a BETTER time in some ways, so that's not always a good thing.
@@Benjamillion He did said “used in a interactive story” meaning that for a interactive one its okay but not for action games like RE4 and so on
So how did people beat this games in the 80s? I'm assuming those on screen prompts weren't on the arcade machines, so it was pretty much just a matter of guessing more or less when to press which buttons? Sounds like a supreme scam to be honest, because the only real way to get to the end would be through trial and error. I guess it could be fun though -- have your friend record the sequence of buttons you press each time you playthrough, so you can have a guide when you inevitably fail and have to start over. I suppose that would be pretty satisfying.
From what I remember of 80s arcades the whole system was designed around trial an error. You’d had kids spending their entire allowance on those machines learning the strategy while they played. It was part of the fun. Having your name show up on the leadership board of the machine for others to see was a big deal. With regard to this game I’m pretty sure the prompts popped up on be screen just like Dragon’s Lair? Or a light illuminated around the actual joystick indicating a direction.
I played both Dragon's Liar and Space Ace when I was a kid (I was around the same age as those kids in Stranger Things), and was terrible at each game due to its near impossible gaming controls. You still get cues in the game, but you have to be very quick to respond to them. I also played an old Arcade game called "Cliff Hangers" which was based on the popular anime show Lupin the 3rd. Again, I had a terrible time playing that game. On the plus side, the animation was always wonderful.
Harry Flashman The flashing prompts on the screen were always there telling you which way to go.
That was only half the battle, though. In so many instances, if your timing wasn't *exactly* on, even a move in the right direction could still lead to your death.
Frustrating as hell, but immensely satisfying when you finished it.
As an aside, you have to admit.... Kimberly had a *great* can.
Trial and error, and on-screen flashes (you can see them briefly in the video). There were no "help icons" as you see in this video. Plus, there were occasional onscreen "character hints" (such as when they would look one way). As an animation fan, I loved this game in the arcades! (As well as Dragon's Lair.) It had come out when I was 16. I finished all three difficulty levels (the higher levels had more scenes, which are not shown in this video, which shows the lowest difficulty level). It was a great memory exercise! It was also a wallet drain. ;)
Harry - I am guessing you didn't grow up in the 80's? All arcade cabs were essentially scams to rid kids of their quarters! It was pretty fun though. Kids today have no real interest in arcades though, being as they grew up with xbox live and such. It was always a thrill when I would enter my initials and someone watching would recognize them, and say "you're JUJ?" Ok, the didn't really happen often, really just once. I had the high score on a couple of cabs he was playing. In any case, it's not the social environment it once was.
The roller skates sequence, which is not in this video, was by far the hardest to conquer. Can't tell you how many damn quarters it cost me to finally beat the thing.😂
There are multiple sequences that aren't on here. Some because things are different in some areas if you don't Energize, and some only occur on medium/hard difficulty. This was an "easy" mode playthrough.
Remember going to the mall arcade every chance I got just to play this game.😁 Not many arcades around anymore. those where the days.
Don't you hate it when you suddenly lose all your muscles when fighting off aliens
I've never seen a game this crazy before!
For some reason, Adult Ace strikes me as a Harrison Ford kinda guy, while Dark Ace strikes me as Steve Martin.
It's amazing to how this and Dragon's Lair eventually spawned "Quick-time events" many years later, and that's still around today. The sheer amount of ways you could die in these games was wild, and honestly it was so fast-paced and random that it was very difficult to keep up and not die constantly. They could have really used better pacing, maybe some slow areas to enjoy the view before rushing through again, but still these games are very memorable decades later...
I wish this was a movie animated in this style I would watch it everyday
Oh boy do I have news for you
Search for "Don Bluth" on Google.
For some reason, with the music and animation, this reminded me of Inspector Gadget with the slow Laserdisc back in the arcade. While better than Dragon's Lair, and the cartoon graphics by Don Bluth's company was fantastic, it was not enough to overcome the slow response time and the company went bankrupt soon after Dragon Lair's II launched.
I remember anyone who could play this game well always had a crowd watching. I was always to busy watching the cartoons to get very far on the game. I also remember a hologram game with a cowboy who just jumped and shot his gun. But it was cool. Hell arcade's were the shit back in the day. Where's a time machine when ya need one?
WAAAY BEFORE BUZZ LIGHTYEAR, THERE WAS SPACE ACE😉
Watching this game is like when someone plays scenes out of order to avoid copyright.
Running gag in Don Bluth games. The grounf's always breaking.
Man, it makes the characters in these games look like experts when you actually succeed XD
Imagine this being adapted into a tv show back in the 80s, could've been a blast
It was. Space Ace was part of the second season of Saturday Supercade cartoon show on CBS Saturday mornings in the mid 1980s.
a Movie for / in recent Times would be Good, ive been thinking about it for YEARS,
Gonna have to do a Review for this Many people are thinking & wanting what ive thought of many times.
I remember playing Dragons Lair and not knowing how to play it and wasted like $10, which was $100 for a kid, I never beat it or got past the first 15 seconds.
Should have waited around the arcade all day until someone who knew how to play showed up
Ohh the quarters I spend learning that sequence. Good Times man. Good Times. 🤗
2:02 far out.
This game moves at the pace that D&D battles are described.
This was a year earlier than Super Mario Bros.
Also the same year Stranger things takes place
I’m happy I was a kid when this gorgeous animation was done. Much better than today’s cartoons
thanks for this gem of an upload
Boy, this brings back memories. Haunted Trails video arcade in Burbank, Illinois. I never paid any attention to my score.
5:57 Minecraft Death Sound
I don't think I ever played Space Ace myself. Instead I watched other people play it in the arcades. I could never understand the dialog or music because of the noise and the acoustics, but wow, Space Ace was dazzling. And looked REAL difficult.
After Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, so many of us believed laserdisc technology was the gaming future.
_In the production room._
So, what will be the next scene....
_Deeply inhale from a bong._
Ah... I got it.
Thanks for posting! I never knew this game even existed but you can tell it was animated by Don Bluth.
I feel like this is movie worthy anyone else think that
I wasted so much of 1984 playing this game in the arcade at the Aviation Mall. When I learned to finally finish it (based only on memory patterns), people would ask me to play just to watch. But, I was addicted to finishing it.
The worst part of getting through this game wasn't the memorazation of the patterns (that was easy). The worst part was the timing of each move required with the joystick and the "gun button." I remember the "space surf board" being particularly stressful!
SHAZAM!!!: 0:27, 0:43, 1:45, 2:02, 2:16, 2:38, 2:49, 3:08, 3:20, 3:28, 3:40, 3:58, 4:13, 4:50, 5:17, 5:40
Seeing this and Dragon's Lair reminded me of how these games got cartoons in the day :)
started awesome at 5:36, but it all fell flat at 5:41. Seriously, developers! You could have added an epic Final Boss music, but NO! You just had to stick with the Energize theme again! Killjoys!
When this game came out, it was very epic. You have no idea.
It's too bad these older games weren't more versatile with directional/path options (Maybe sort of like choose your own adventure) and not just wrong choice and you're done. Not just the couple cartoons Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, but live action stuff Digital Leisure made as well.
4:21 That's all I have to say.
And 5:29
Loved Space Ace back in the day, in the arcade.
me too & will do a review on it, sometime. on my other channel.
Dat muscle transformation tho
Weirdos like me and OP 😉
So you're a man of culture as well I see.
I used to play the sega cd version , never saw this game in such good quality .
why the fuck did they keep the baby version of their enemy?
"awww, dexter isn't he adorable?"
"FUCK no he tried to kill us, chuck em into the void of space"
"good point dexter."
"call me ace, huh?"
Although I got totally in to Dragon's Lair, I never played Space Ace. It's great to finally be able to see what it was like.
Me: "Looks like a script from George Lucas."
Kimberley: "Beware your dark side."
Me: !?!?!?
I got the reference.
My favorite game for its time. Thanks for posting it.