![]() Your goal is to destroy as many of those as you can, while avoiding their shots and sometimes their missiles as well, until the "grand-poobah" master craft of the given time-period in which you are fighting comes out of hiding. The battle-front is composed with a top-down look upon your vessel as you wage war with flying craft coming at you from all angles. All but one stage is set up at some time during the 20th Century, usually during or approximating a war time battle. You fly an "ultra-modern" jet which has the capability to fly through time from battle to battle. You will have to maneuver around helicopters and heat-seeking missiles in the Vietnam era, avoid fighter-planes during World War II, and outwit the sleek and speedy jets flown by figurative peacetime top guns from 1982. ![]() You will play all of the stages, from a pre-World War I environment in 1910, all the way up to the fancifully unrealistic 2001 flying saucer battle, with the exact same goals and level of challenge that classic gamers will remember from their glory days. This means that no one decided to mess with the gameplay that made this title so much fun. The developers took a very wise approach of mapping the activity for their new presentation to the old presentation almost exactly, leaving the same basic engine controlling both, regardless of which one you choose to play with. For those who, like me, prefer the old arcade look and feel, a little investigation will turn up options to play with the original graphics and sound, with no change to gameplay logic. At the same time, gamers who are experiencing it for the first time will be given an opportunity to see what all the fuss is about with graphics and sound that is up to their more modern standards. Upon download and playing through the first few stages, any familiar gamer will realize that while this version of "Time Pilot" was given a very well-designed face lift, it is still the same great game underneath, with all of the charm and fun that made it so attractive in pay-per-play. If it was great, it would be a refreshing visit to the past, present, and sci-fi future all for the same few measly bucks. If it was garbage, well then it was a loss of a few bucks and no hard feelings. If developers can screw with classics like "Galaga" and "Pac-Man", then what *can't* they destroy? In the end, I decided to take a chance because, while I have played many worthwhile ports of both "Galaga" and "Pac-Man" over the years, I had up to now seen no offering of "Time Pilot" on the various arcade compilations classic companies released over the years (though I have since found out that it was ported to the GBA in the "Konami's Arcade Advance" compilation), and the downloadable demo didn't give me enough of an experience to know just how much the game resembled its former self. "Galaga" seemed harder than it was originally, and "Pac-Man" was in my estimation a terrible port of an otherwise great game. I had already seen from the various demos I've downloaded that many games I liked in the arcades had less-than-stellar representations in their XBLA counterparts. That was definitely my concern as I stewed on whether to make my first real XBOX Live Arcade purchase. And whenever you recover a memory as sweet as "Time Pilot", there is always the immediate concern that some bad experience will attempt to ruin those memories. Without even the hinting screen shot, I immediately recovered from years of arcade amnesia. As I perused the list of new XBOX Live titles less than a week ago, I saw a title that finally made me want to drop moolah into Microsoft's cash cow portal. Like most long forgotten pleasures, it only takes a subtle reminder of what once was to get the neurons pulsing again. ![]() "Time Pilot" rivaled even "Galaga" in my heart of hearts, and yet to my shame, I forgot it almost entirely. As I went through lists of arcade games I had played in my joystick-junkie youth in order to gather my thoughts for future reviews, I completely overlooked what was literally my favorite arcade shooter in even the consideration for a retrospective. The irony is killing me - this most memorable of experiences was almost forgotten. For all of the time I spent on this game in the arcades, the pure pleasure of the experience made it stress-free enough to virtually escape my memory banks. "Time Pilot" is one of those titles that has fittingly burned itself into my memory despite the ravaging attempts of passing time to obliterate all trace of it. ""Time Pilot" is one of those titles that has fittingly burned itself into my memory despite the ravaging attempts of passing time to obliterate all trace of it."
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