The information to properly land the plane is in the manual. The required air speed and altitude have never been a secret, if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).
The real difficulty, not explored in this disassembly, is that the game has semi-realistic physics! My older brother was in flight school at the time and was able to easily land the plane and taught me how to do it.
As the article states, "Altitude and speed are both controlled by throttle input and pitch angle". So you can't just hit the engines or air brakes button to change your speed. If you lower the nose of the plane, you'll speed up and vice versa! So you have to carefully juggle your speed and altitude by altering both your pitch and your engines/air brakes.
My brother taught me that my speed wouldn't reduce if I'm nosediving, so raise the nose a little while opening my air brakes for a quick reduction in speed and then level out to maintain altitude. The game actually models this somewhat accurately!
> if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).
Most kids did't read the manual? I would rtfm for every game I got my hands on during the car ride home from toysrus or blockbuster. If Mom had several errands to run, I may rtfm a dozen times before I finally got home with the game.
Ahhh, nostalgia: Some games like Super Mario and Duck Hunt were quite doable without a manual, but I specifically remember Legacy of the Wizard [0]. With no manual and almost zero in-game text to work from, our progress was limited to stumbling around a giant labyrinth, never realizing certain obstacles required switching characters to use unique abilities, and then finding special items that unlock abilities for other characters...
I would read the manual too on the ride home. But I think that was only for new games? I seem to remember that rentals didn't come with manuals. The best memory was my grandma picking me up to spend the summer at her house. We stopped by wal-mart and I grabbed the first release of Gran Turismo for psx. It came with a fairly giant manual. Had a three hour drive to her house. I read it over and over!
The people working hint hotlines apparently memorized some information from manuals, as so many kids without access to the manuals called with the same questions. The famous code from Star Tropics, for example.
I've been on a bit of a retro bender and have intentionally limited myself to nothing but the manuals and games and it's been so fun to rediscover how much thought people used to put into the manuals including the presentation and art. Extreme shame half of the time now even if you go and grab a physical copy you basically just get a key in a box.
> The information to properly land the plane is in the manual. The required air speed and altitude have never been a secret, if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).
It's also on-screen. What's missing is the acceptable ranges -- +/- 100 for altitude, +/- 50 for speed, per the post. Knowing that the slop for altitude is much higher is definitely helpful information.
I don't specifically remember it, but I had the manual, and I was a voracious manual reader as a kid. I also remember the carrier landings being the hardest thing in any game I ever played. Felt like about a 1% success rate, and I never quite knew what separated a successful landing from an unsuccessful one that looked identical on approach.
if you rented it or borrowed from a friend it was very very unlikely you had the manual. I don't remember how I eventually figured it out, but it's the landing instructions that I think are misleading.
I miss being able to play a game and have things be somewhat apparent within the game. Nowadays it seems like you have to have a second monitor with the wiki open.
Speaking of the soundtrack, before Virt (Jake Kaufman) made it big (composer behind Shantae, Shovel Knight, Ducktales Remastered, a few others), he made this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uEUImofSms
"Bogey at your 6", the combat theme from the game, but remixed as if Konami had made it for the VRC6, the NES mapper chip that added 3 additional oscillators that made the Japanese release of Castlevania III what it was; he made this using Scream Tracker (or possibly a newer tracker, but its saved in S3M format), because tracker-like chip emulators didn't exist yet (Furnace, et al).
The Japanese release of the game flips around the "soundless" sections with the music section, suggesting that listening to that rocking track for most of your flight is the intended experience.
I knew there was a version out there that flipped the music around... but I don't remember the "painted line" aircraft carrier... I wonder if someone made a rom hack like 20 years ago that kept the graphics but flipped the music...
I never got that far in the game... but that song gave me a visceral body memory of "difficult things in games that trigger intense 8 bit music" memories.
ugh i had forgotten all about this game until I clicked your link and then promptly closed the tab. Carrier landing was frustrating enough but the re-fueling was another level. I played this at my friend's house whenever I would go there and spend the night.
That was an actual thing back in the day, you'd get your parents to let you stay the night at a friend's house and then you'd stay up all night playing NES, eating pizza and watching movies.
Same way your F-14 was able to carry up to 40 air-to-air missiles, unlimited cannon rounds, and the space shuttle at the end of the game is tougher and takes more fire to destroy than the aircraft carrier you destroy in mission 2.
I never played Top Gun, but I did grow up playing "Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone" for the SNES. All these years later, it's still amazing to me how much the graphics improved from one console generation to the next. I don't remember any other console transition being so consequential from a graphics perspective.
Super Mario 64 was an N64 launch title. Resident Evil 4 was a late Gamecube title. In my mind that's probably the biggest gap in graphical fidelity between generations of console. But I can see how going from NES games like Super Mario Bros to SNES games like Star Fox would be a close contender.
PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 or Xbox -> 360 feel more iterative because they started after the 3D era had already begun. We haven't had a new dominant paradigm for gaming since then (besides mobile gaming).
I love sim hijinks. It's possible to reliably land a 737 on the carrier in X-plane: just take off with 30min of fuel, drag it in with full flaps and high power, and set the parking brake before you touch down.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible in real life. The Navy tested a C-130 on the USS Forrestal and accomplished 21 landings. I'm sure a C-130 has better short-field performance than a 737, but they were also testing it with substantial cargo on board. Official figures for required runway distance for a 737 are far in excess of a carrier's deck length, of course, but those figures include weird things like "safety" that are not strictly required, and tend not to fully account for the 40+kt headwind you can get from a carrier steaming into the wind.
> The Navy tested a C-130 on the USS Forrestal and accomplished 21 landings.
my son plays DCS and that game just got a C-130 module and he showed me youtube vids of people landing on carriers. I had to think hard if that was an actual thing or not. Seems like a C-130 can land/take-off pretty much anywhere so why not a carrier?
Also, of course, the 73 would have to have a hook, which shortens the landing quite some (as well as the lifespan of the fuselage, I assume), as long as you catch the wire, that is. Wingspan-wise, this could also work. @RedBull, how bout it?!
Not necessarily. The C-130 didn't use one. That doesn't mean the 737 could get away with it, but with the carrier going max speed, a decent wind, the plane at min weight and speed, and touching down as early as possible, I wouldn't be surprised if the landing roll was shorter than the length of the deck.
Landing in Top Gun is easy and I'd like to see everyone whining about it dock with the satellite in Captain Skyhawk while all of RARE's best demoscene tricks go off all around you.
As long as you delivered the proper ordinance on the designated target, then the mission was accomplished whether you live or not. They have more planes and more pilots for the next mission.
Brought back memories! This was so frustrating, felt like a huge amount of randomness added to the controls. And each time you failed, you had to re-do the whole level. The other frustrating part of the game was mid-air refueling.
Seriously, I'm glad everyone else is young enough not to have been scarred by games that either were designed to eat quarters or designed to keep you at it for a couple of months so you got your money's worth.
Why not show the last race from Decathlon by Activision to see if my forearm muscles cramp up instinctively.
And then the Speeder Bike level in Battletoads Battlemaniacs.
I don't mind instant death scenarios, as long as there is a quick restart and no game over mechanic (Celeste got this perfect, IMO). It is wild to me just how many of these kinds of scenarios there are in memorable games from the 8/16 bit (and before) era.
This was the game with the DOS port that had a jump you literally couldnt make. And someone somehow worked out you could proceed by going to a totally different area and glitching through a wall.
That video was deeply cathartic, I only got that far once at a friend's house and it was great to finally have confirmed that it wasn't me, the physics were completely broken.
Thank you! I was looking for this comment amongst the "this was easy" ones. I was pretty young when this game came out. I rarely got past this landing.
I think I still have the Top Gun NES cartridge in a box somewhere. Maybe this is a good excuse to fire up the NES and try it.
My friends owned it (I was never allowed to have a NES myself). Not once did ANY of us ever manage to land the plane. We tried MANY times. This blog makes it seem so easy I want to be angry at it :-)
Your code is returning TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW for the case when the heading is too far right. The disassembly in the op looks like it correctly jumps to too_far_right.
I'm 50 and got my NES in Xmas '86. It's funny how the difficulty has changed. I remember having no problem with carrier landings as a kid, beat Metroid(with the bikini ending) without reading Nintendo Power or calling the help line, figured out turtle trapping on my own...
Going back and trying to do all this via emulation is now a lot harder. I don't know if it's the timing or the fact that I'm just old and crappy now, but if I didn't have the save states of an emulator I would have given up on gaming ages ago due to frustration.
Then again I don't have the hyperfocus and 12 hour marathon gaming sessions like I did for much of my youth.
Man you just unlocked a memory. I'm about the same age...I had forgot about when we lucked our way into "turtle trapping" (didn't know until I read your post it was even called that). When the lives counter goes crazy (we called it "infinity men") we genuinely had no idea what was going on at first and thought we broke the game.
It happened when a buddy and I were completely bored messing around with the game and I remember calling my friends and explaining it but no one "got it" until we showed them.
Also likely you don't have as much time. I'd be more keen to discover things on my own a few decades ago. Now I'm limited by work/family life to an hour of play here and there. That means if something looks annoying or long without a good reason, I'm going to look it up and not feel bad at all.
Reminds me a bit of the game Retaliator, when I was 12 a class mate earned himself a night of "pick your own time to go to bed at camp" because he could show the teacher how to land. [0, the landing is at the very end]. I think at the time nobody knew what key to hit to deploy the landing gear (and flaps, though I think you could land without flaps). And since it was all copied stuff there was no book, no internet...
Gosh, I miss the aesthetics of vector games of this era. My absolute favourite was Armour-Geddon (on the Amiga), which because I'd pirated it I barely had any clue what to do but.. it was still fun, and so beautiful. And fast!
I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
I loved them too. During that era I got to try some kind of flight simulator on a Silicon Graphics. Smoooth shapes, extremely high resolution, must have been lots of tiny triangles, and nice shading. I remember thinking, this is the future, can’t wait to get this in personal computers!
Nah, instead almost two decades of muddy lores textures on lopoly models.
I guess now we are finally there, with raytracing in games. But I would still like to see the nontextured aesthetic make a comeback.
Most NES games had "cheat" methodologies for game testing purposes, which made it into production cartridges. For Top Gun, you could bypass fighting anything on EVERY level, by flying up and to the left for the duration of the combat. I only knew a few of these tricks. In Parappa the Rappa, there were various patterns that would essentially complete every level with various outcomes, regardless of the actual songs.
Depends on the level, some are better flying up, others are flying down... you don't need to move left/right except to avoid being locked on from behind, unless you need to dodge missiles from the front.
I was pretty smol when I played this game last. I don't think I've ever managed to actually land on that hangar ship. That was what my older brothers were for!
Granted, I wasn't good at video games in general. And this one infuriated me, because I loved it. I could easily beat the first level, but then I crashed on carrier landing. This happened for years. I only ever saw the first level of this game.
Then one day, while staying at my elementary afterschool sitter's house, one of the kids there told me he played Top Gun as well. He could land, but wasn't very good at the rest of the game.
A plan was formed.
The next day, I brought the cartridge over, and we settled in. I'd play the level, then hand him the controller at which point he'd plant it on the deck. Rinse and Repeat. Top Gun and Top Gun: The Second Mission didn't have too many levels, (6 maybe?) and I don't think it took us too long to beat. Neither one of us had seen much of the game. But working together, we beat both in a matter of hours.
I still look back on that as one of the few NES games I finished without codes or a Game Genie, just the help of a friend. =D
The blog says that failing to land on the carrier didn't actually fail the mission. Maybe you're misremembering? I just remember this game being so frustrating that I never replayed it.
I also clearly recall it failing the mission, could there possibly have been different versions of the game? I've heard before of Nintendo distributing slight variations of the same game based on region back in those days, perhaps that's what's going on?
Most people? Am I one of the few who grew up with video games from the beginning and mostly missed Nintendo? My equivalent for the time period was Falcon, in my case played on an Amiga 1000.
If you could afford an amiga around this time, you most likely weren't impressed with any of the consoles. Even if you had a commodore 64, you may not have been interested with the NES, my experience was that the games on the commodore was that many of the games were closer to the arcade than what you got with the early NES cartridges could do. Later cartridges outstripped the commodore since they added extra processing in the cartridges themselves. By the end of the NES life, the games had gotten really good, some games could almost compete with the early SNES titles.
I had a similar feeling towards the N64 some years later. I had a 486 that could do much better 3D and with more interesting games, and there was nothing in the nintendo catalogue that could compete with what I basically had free access to due to the internet.
The first mission is to start and land on a carrier.
Video games were never even a question: You couldn't copy games and had to pay ridiculous prices for each!
> After about a minute of flying the game checks your state and plays a little cutscene showing either a textbook landing or an expensive fireball. Either way, you get a “Mission Accomplished!” and go to the next level (after all, you don’t own that plane, the taxpayers do):
For realism's (and comedy's) sake, they could have shown a pixel ejecting from the five (I think) pixels that form the jet before it explodes into a fireball, then floating down on a tiny parachute and being rescued by a tiny boat.
...but seriously, you didn't even get your score reduced for crashing the plane on landing?
In the "bad ending" to Rocket Knight Adventures (complete the game on Easy or lower), you actually see Sparkster leave the Pig Star's crashing escape pod as a pixel, then there's a little sneezing sound as a tiny parachute deploys. It's kind of disappointing, but then to see a real ending you're supposed to beat the game on a higher difficulty.
Sometime ago I bought a USB NES controller to use with an emulator. I took it on work trips to kill time mainly playing Zeldas. This bit of nostalgia makes me want to knock the dust off of it and load this up.
My grandpa’s greatest gaming achievement was beating Top Gun: The Second Mission on the NES, in the ‘90s. Perhaps his training as a B-17 tail gunner gave him an advantage, lol (he never fought, war ended after he finished training but before he saw a combat sortie). He was better at the game than any of his grandkids, hahaha.
(I’m pretty sure it was the second mission, it was the one with the space shuttle launch or whatever at the end)
The landing was a piece of cake compared to the inflight refuling mission! I played Top Gun until the casette broke but could only pass that mission a handful of times.
This is one of those cultural memes ("The Top Gun landing was ImPoSsIbLe") that tells on the person saying it for not having read the manual. If you don't read the manual, the landing sequence is pretty much impossible to figure out. If you do, you pretty much get it the first and every time after that.
The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions.
I had the game and the manual, but I can’t recall if I ever read the manual. I played the game a ton and was maybe 50/50 at the landings, but just followed the on-screen instructions. I could probably have puzzled out the target numbers, but never did (was it in the manual?). Now you can just google the correct values and nail it every time (paying no attention to the on-screen directions).
[edit] incidentally, my “it’s not actually hard” thing from the NES is the dam level in TMNT. It’s a challenge like the first two times you play it, then never again. It’s just not that hard. I think it’s easier than tons of Mario game levels, for instance.
> The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions.
Interestingly, the instructions are actually all correct. If it says, "Left! Left!" for instance you will crash if you don't fix it.
I think the disconnect might be that altitude and speed somewhat feedback on each other and it takes time for your inputs to settle, so it always feels like you're chasing the instructions.
I think people focused too much on the speed too early on, which put them in a stall condition without any feedback they were stalling. For most of the run, you want to be losing altitude so you don't notice, but near the end you're probably too low with not enough speed to climb, so even though you're pulling up, you're still losing altitude, and that's where people got the idea that their inputs didn't "matter."
My recollection, now quite fuzzy but deeply entrenched, is the key is to never touch the throttle. The LSO would yell at you but I noticed your speed slowly drifts down from drag until it's just inside the acceptable range at touchdown. Managing heading and altitude is not all that hard, so my brother and I had a pretty solid success rate to the amazement of our friends.
A good chunk of the difficulty in the TMNT dam level comes from the fact that it has a lot of poorly implemented mechanics. Displaced Gamers has a really good video breaking all of it down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI
Also, we're talking about the 8-bit era: 1) technical limits prevented a lot of in-game exposition that you could do now and 2) before the internet, people had fewer options for reading material. I read every manual for every NES and SNES game I ever had, multiple times. If I was into a game my options were limited to 1) play it, 2) read the manual if I couldn't play it (e.g. if I wasn't at home or not allowed to take over the TV to play).
Manuals in those days were often essential for background story, gameplay, and anti-piracy.
Your statement applies today; game design back then was different, manuals were not frowned upon and often exciting to read through. They were part of the game.
This was at the beginning of game design. Everyone was still learning what good game design was and it kept changing as the technical constraints changed.
This was back in the era when manuals (and companion documents) were needed by many, if not most games.
There was a lord of the rings PC RPG I played around 1990, I believe, where many of the NPC interactions said to refer to page N, paragraph M. They didn't have the space to store all the text in the game.
There's nothing bad about a game that needs a manual. It's not going to be everyone's preference, but that's true of everything. Some people like games that you can learn by playing. Some people like deep games that require external material. There's nothing wrong with either one.
I actually learned how to do this by playing the aircraft carrier landing simulator game that was at the USS Intrepid. It's a little more fleshed out but the speed range and altitude is roughly the same. The simulator gave you a light indicator to assist with your approach.
So it was pretty much an arcade port of the NES game? The procedure and numbers are so different IRL that I find it hard to believe someone else would have come up with an almost identical minigame.
Docking computer was like the very first thing I would buy. That or a mining laser so I could more quickly get the cash to buy the computer. On the C64 version, it would play Blue Danube in a shout out to 2001, and I still remember the horribly flat note in it (it had to be deliberate, the same note is fine in the rest of the piece). Sometimes it would try to dock with the wrong side of the station, but that usually only happened if you turned it on when on the wrong side already.
Before then, just approach the bay straight on and if you go slow enough, you'll dock fine even if it's perpendicular. Probably differs with whatever version you're playing though.
