A playthrough of Konami’s 1987 license-based action game for the NES, Top Gun.

The first-person combat-oriented flight sim was not a genre that the NES was known for, but that’s not to say that it didn’t have a few gems in its library.

Top Gun was the first NES game of its type to hit it big in the United States. I’m sure it got a lot of recognition because of its license – Top Gun was as big-time as Hollywood movies get – but the game deserves its fair due as well. It wouldn’t have sold nearly two million copies if it hadn’t been worth playing.

You take on the role of “Lieutenant” (not Maverick, technically), a Navy fighter pilot who is training at the elite Top Gun school. When “the enemy” begins an invasion of oil fields that America depends on, you’re ordered to report to a carrier in order to lead a squadron of F-14s into battle. The game is based on the film only in the loosest sense, but it provides a pretext for jumping into a fighter jet and blowing people up with missiles. That’s all that matters.

The game is broken up into four different missions: the first is a training mission that’s meant to get you acclimated, the second sends you flying over the enemy’s naval forces, and the third has you destroying ground defenses. The final mission combines everything you dealt with in the previous missions, and tops it off with a battle against the enemy’s space shuttle. Don’t worry that it sounds ridiculous – just accept that it was a product of the 80s and embrace the absurdity.

The gameplay is pretty simple. The A-button fires your guns, the B-button handles missiles, and hitting Start will call in a plane to refuel your fighter and to replenish your stock of missiles mid-flight.

There’s a simple radar display at the bottom of the screen that gives you a vague idea of where the enemies are, but otherwise, you’re on your own. The enemy jets zoom in from every direction, and you need to either dodge them or wipe them out before they can hit you. The biggest threats are the enemy missiles: they’re difficult to shoot down and they kill you instantly on contact, but you can usually avoid them by pointing your plane’s nose toward the top corners of the screen.

When you call for a refuel, you’ll play a mini-game to line up your plane with the refueling boom, and once you’ve accomplished your mission objective, you’ll play a similar mini-game as you attempt to safely land on the flight deck of the carrier.

It sounds easy, but as anyone who has ever played it can tell you, Top Gun is anything but. It’s a stiff test of both reflexes and memorization, and there are no continues, so every life counts. If you savor your sanity, learn the enemy formations and attack patterns. The game becomes much more manageable once you have a good feel for those.

I’ve always loved Top Gun for its challenge. It’s a game that will make you want to throw your controller, but that sense of improvement that comes with practice will keep you coming back for more. At least, it did for me.

(And if you always wrecked your plane while trying to land, the trick to it is to match your speed and altitude to the figures it gives you at the bottom of the screen. If you’re close to 288mph at 200 feet as you approach the deck, you make the landing every time.)

If you find yourself getting frustrated, here’s a trick for you: as soon as the mission starts, hold down+right or down+left. As long as you’re flying directly into the corner, the only way an enemy will be able to hit you is by locking on to you from behind. If they try, jerk your plane back and forth from right-to-left and you’ll lose them. It’s not an exciting way to play the game, but so long as you can handle the boss fights and the landing sequences, this strategy turns all four missions into a cakewalk.

The game looks really nice for a 1987 release – the sprites do a great job of clearly representing a plane’s distance and heading, the framerate is high enough to give the action some sense of speed, and the planes look pretty cool as they go tearing past you. The sound is a bit weak, though. The theme song from the movie sounds good, but there’s no in-game music. You’ll be hearing a lot of white noise engine sounds and explosions, and not much else.

I much prefer the sequel ( ), but I still enjoy sitting down to play the original Top Gun on occasion. It doesn’t impress now the way it did 35 years ago, but there’s still a good bit of fun to be wrung from this one if you can summon the right mindset.

Now, if only they’d combined this with Kings of the Beach… just imagine having 80s beefcake beach volleyball breaks between the combat missions!
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete () punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!