Description of Carrier Air Wing - MAME

To be frank, this might quite well be one of the—if not the single best side-scrolling shooter I’ve ever played (well, Duke Nukem MP might actually still be the winner here, but… you get the point, I’m hyped AF). You see, Carrier Air Wing has it all: it offers you three jets to choose from it features a loadout system not that much dissimilar to that from my beloved childhood pastime, Raptor its visuals are sweet it has a good level and enemy design (I mean, where else do you get to chase a fricking space-shuttle carrying an IR satellite weapon to orbit? Yeah, exactly…!) Still, if this doesn’t yet sound quite good enough to you, just wait ‘till you see the DIP switch settings tab. The difficulty settings, they basically make up for a whole set of games packed up into a single convenient package. Flip allow continue to on, and set both difficulty modifiers to the hardest setting to just go through the game and enjoy the graphically astounding mayhem. Then, once you beat the game with like a zillion virtual coins in the cabinet’s cash-basket, flip the switches to the exactly opposite setting, and see how far can you get with a single life on the easiest difficulty. And when you finally get bored, just take someone with you as your wingman, and engage in any gameplay-mode you want! Now, controls and gameplay-wise, Carrier Air Wing is pretty much your generic side-scrolling shooter. You control the jet with a joystick (arrow-keys, d-pad) and you have two buttons for firing your weapons: MAME button 1 for main armament and button 2 for ‘special’ weapon, which you get to chose on the loadout selection screen before each mission. Aside from that, you can buy some other goodies there as well. You can spend your money (yes, shooting down enemies brings you cash) on extended health bar or energy shield for you jet. Note that if you have enough credits on your account, you can buy several of the same item at once, which will increase the secondary weapon ammo count (in the case of buying secondary armament) or give you another shield (when you buy shields). And just like in any other side-scroller, even in Carrier Air Wing you also have health and weapon power-ups present, which randomly appear when you shoot down certain enemies. Health power-up kind of resembles the ‘fuel tank’ icon from the loadout selection screen, while the weapon power-up looks more like a flying color-changing barrel thingy, and from what I understand, the type of the weapon you get from picking it up depends on the color of the thing at the time you collected it. All and all, Carrier Air Wing is an amazing game, especially when you consider the release date (1990). Well done, CAPCOM, well done indeed! Come on, pilots! General quarters alert! All hands to their battlestations! Hop into those birds and kick some butt!