#And Ace Combat

[judgeanon]

Plastic Skies - Prologue

Figured I should try to give this old place some new material, and since a friend suggested I start a journal of my latest obsessionhobby, what better place than tumblr? So here’s a needlessly long and overly indulgent history of how I got into model aircrafts, with a record of each project, their individual challenges and the tools I learned to use to overcome them.

Or at least, the prologue to that:

The year is 199X, and I say that not out of privacy but because I can’t remember the exact year I built my first model. My brother and I had gotten into war toys at a young age, ably aided and abetted by our ex-military dad, who made sure we were always well-stocked on little plastic soldiers and tanks and ships and, of course, planes. Our budding fascination with that last one received a big boost thanks to PC games like Jane’s US Navy Fighters ‘97 and F22 Raptor (the Novalogic one), with their digitized English voices we barely understood and their amazing two-dimensional trees dotting the barely textured landscapes. And at some point, model kits entered the scene.

My memory’s pretty hazy on how exactly that happened. It’s possible that we just saw a couple of boxes sitting at the toy aisle next to GI Joe Extreme and Spider-Man TAS toys, and dad or mom indulged us. Another alternative is this models catalogue we ran into at our dad’s one time, a thick full-color volume absolutely brimming with cars and tanks and, yes, planes of every year, model and size. I remember that catalogue fondly. My brother and I divided it up in our imaginations, each one picking and choosing which models were theirs, even if we never actually held them in our hands. Good times, but again, hard to say if that was the catalyst.

What I do remember are the models themselves. My brother built a Saab Draken, an F-16, a big fat F-15 and a few others. I remember building a Concorde, an F-18 (one of those glueless snap-tite models), a Spitfire and a P-51 Mustang. I think there may have been an F-4 Phantom in there as well. Point is, we were fiending. Our fingers glued together so many times, it’s a small miracle that I still have fingerprints. But there was a not small wrinkle in our approach to the hobby: for whatever reason, neither my brother nor I ever actually painted the models.

Memory fails me again on the whys of this decision. It’s possible that we just didn’t know where to buy paints, since we got all our models at toy shops or supermarkets. It’s also possible that we simply figured out paints were too expensive, and were more than willing to settle for just gluing the models and calling it a day instead of bugging mom or dad for a surefire mess-creator. It’s even possible that we were simply intimidated by the herculean task of painting. I know I tried doing decals once and swore to never do it again. But for whatever reason, our room was slowly littered with gray plastic airplanes haphazardly put together with cheap glue, treated more like puzzles than models, toyed with until tailfins snapped and Sidewinder missiles were lost.

Years passed. Interests shifted. We got a PlayStation 1 to replace our venerable Sega Genesis, and since this was at the peak of games piracy in our country, we could buy four or five games with the money of a single plane kit. So after I was done with that P-51 (which I remember was the first time I’d tried doing the landing gears, a massive feat of courage for the time), I quietly hung up my glues and never built a model again for over two decades. I’d still walk past the occasional hobby shop along the way to school and looked at the flawless shiny Sabres on display, but I never felt an urge to jump back in.

And then Ace Combat happened.

My first contact with long-running arcade dogfight series Ace Combat had been watching my brother play AC3 on the PS1 ages ago. Years later, I bought him Ace Combat: Assault Horizon on the PS3 for his birthday. Plane games, I’d decided, were one of His Things, and just like with the models on the shop windows, I never felt the desire to intrude on his territory.

That all changed dramatically in August of this year. I’d been living alone for a good couple of years now and managed to upgrade my PC far beyond anything either of us had ever owned. I was (and still am) living large, buying games on a whim with no fear of system requirements or even price. Having long gotten everything I wanted, now I was happy to just grab things on sale whenever they popped up, curious new gems or old classics I’d never given a chance before. Then, on August 8th, Steam took me to a sale on Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, the latest entry in the series. It’d come out back in 2019 but had recently received a Top Gun-themed DLC pack. And funny enough, I’d just seen Top Gun: Maverick that week and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I figured, sure, why not?

I enjoyed Ace Combat 7 a lot more than Top Gun: Maverick. In fact, I enjoyed it a lot more than pretty much any other game I’d played so far in 2022. Call it a happy surprise, a revelation, a blast, whatever word you can think of, I promise it’s understating how deeply I vibed with this game. Everything from the gameplay to the story to the cool ass missions (Stealth infiltration ON A JET FIGHTER!) to the characters to the music, I was feeling it. I finished that game twice, then a third time to get all the hidden Aces, then a fourth time using a bright red MiG-21 armed only with machineguns because I was having THAT much fun.

And while I was playing through the campaign over and over, gleefully splashing bandits and dog-fighting thirty drones at the same time, something happened. One at a time, I found myself back in the cockpit of all those old planes from our creaky PC games and unpainted model kits. Falcons, Hornets, Raptors, they were all there, like old buddies I’d lost contact with, each one filled with hazy yet warm memories of sticky fingers and clicky keyboards. It felt like a reunion of sorts.

As I machine-gunned my way through giant airships like a time-displaced WWII fighter, a thought reached my head all the way up in the clouds it now lived in. A sudden desire to complete the circle.

I wanted to build models again. But this time, I wanted to do it right.

[goldensunset]

when people refer to canon story-relevant kingdom hearts games as ‘spinoffs’ it makes me sad not only for the obvious reasons i always say but also bc like man i WISH this series had spinoffs. imagine what they could do if they had permission from nomura to truly go off the rails and ignore the greater canon for a second and just do some fun whimsical plotless thing in an alternate universe. imagine a fishing/boating game on destiny islands. kh fighting game. it is an injustice that we have been deprived of kingdom karts. can anyone hear me

[playstationpark]

Night Flying 'Ace Combat 3' PlayStation

[scooge]

Ace Combat jpeg dog is always in my heart

[hoodiedeer]

[frogblast-the-ventcore]

[afewofmyfavoritethingsblr]

An ace combat meme from Twitter, for your consideration.

And it's Project Wingman counterpart

[feybeasts]

My hot take right now is that Ace Combat isn’t and has never been a 1:1 representation of real-world politics or history (except for Assault Horizon, but it was bad so who cares,) but instead is an exploration of politics and philosophical questions on the nature of war mixed with a deep fascination on machines that often verge on and act in a way that is completely fantastical. It tries to convey its lessons and its themes not through the events of the greater war, but through the interplay of characters swept up in the greater conflict, who are inevitably characters surrounding the principle protagonists and antagonists, all ace pilots.

What I’m saying is, Ace Combat is and always has been deeply political- and antiwar- but also loves the Really Cool Machines that do the war. Ace Combat is a mecha anime.

Ace Combat is Jet Plane Gundam, and is subject to the same misrepresentations as the latter.

[quinnydoll]

the sheer number of games shortened to “AC” is staggering

[lutik327]

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ÈÇ/ÈËhow it’s always been.

Since forever.

<< cre?it >> << prev n?xt >> << s?art >>

[redteapanda]

YO BUDDY, STILL ALIVE?

My work crunch is over, I’m back and I have ANOTHER MUCHA ACE COMBAT PIECE.

Except I’m sorry Mucha I took multiple artistic liberties.

Anyways, wouldn’t it be great if we were jousting with our planes but then our cockpits kissed, jkjk…UNLESS…👀

Bonus points if you can see the Zero

[minimal-effort-name]

Dude ace combat 7 literally warned us about this

[playstationpark]

Flying By 'Ace Combat 3' PlayStation

[the-river-is-right-there-chopper]

just some of the similarities

[goat13]

Pixy / Ace Combat Zero