Game music of the day: Air Combat

Game: Air Combat

Song: Level Three

Composer: Kazutaka Fujimoto, Keiichi Okabe, Kazuhiro Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kawada

Above: Level Three from Air Combat

To celebrate theearlier announcementof Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, I thought it'd be nice to dip way back into the PlayStation launch library and drum up a couple of tracks from the very first game in the series. First, because it's home to some extra cheesy guitar wailing that goes great with multicolored jets screaming through the air, and two because those first-gen PS1 games look so hilariously bad.

This song plays during the game's third level, which as you can see is a very exciting pile of rocks in an unmoving ocean blanketed by fog. Ah, barely capable 32-bit hardware - how did we ever think this looked good? Unlike the graphics, however, the music can last forever, provided you never tire of this specific type of guitar noodling.

Here's the game's intro and ending cinematics, which both have equally fun/ridiculously cheesy music backing them up. The movies themselves are a great throwback too - whenI took Air Combat home on 9-9-95, I probably watched that intro a dozen times. At the time it was so very cool. Today, well, it's easy to poke fun at.

If you're even 1% interested in the series, be sure to check outthis cool featurefrom 2007 where I interviewed the teams behind all the Ace Combat games up to that point. There are some fun nuggets of info on there, plus shots of each game so you can see the visual progression. And if you couldn't care less... well I hope the goofy music did it for you.

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