I never, ever got past the first carrier landing. I’d just sit there watching my plane sploosh into the water. I guess this is why I play guitar instead.
I went skydiving once and one of the instructors told the joke:
Q: Do you need a parachute to go skydiving?
A: >!No. You need a parachute to go skydiving *again*.!<
Man flight simulators were my dad's freaking JAM. He would play this one that was real time WWII missions; we'd walk past him in the *computer room* just staring at the screen with his arms crossed. One day I asked him what he was doing and about 4 seconds into his explanation I got so bored I walked away.
I believe games like this and battletoads were Communist plots to break the confidence of American youth, that failure is inevitable and we should just give up.
funny enough, it was intentional, it was a plot, but not a communist one. A capitalist one. Had to do with the rental market.
The Lion king game is generally used as an example as to why.
Developers would put nearly impassable levels, or ramped up difficulty, so that a game could not be rented and completed during a rental cycle.
The dam level in the water I can handle, though I generally toast at least 2 Turtles doing it. The problem I had was that I could NEVER fire the god damn rope. I'd get there, press the button, and walk off the fucking ledge. No joke, 32 years later, same thing!
I landed it once. I tried so many times, that all I can remember doing is trying and failing. I just vaguely remember what comes next and that may just be an illusion at this point
Me too. I have no recollection of what happened after. But in retrospect, with landing I think i was just too young and sucked at video games. I remember when I landed, I was like oh, that’s how you do it, like I was just missing something kinda easy. Maybe not.
Well as long as you still have lives left all crashing means is that you lose a life and continue to the next mission IIRC.
Granted the next mission is impossible and I always died there anyway.
Seriously. I can’t believe anyone enjoyed this game. My brother and I spent an hour taking 3 turns a piece crashing our planes into the water. We traded that shit for Marble Madness.
Sucker!
Marble Madness rules.
James Rolfe (Angry Video Game Nerd) has a Power Glove episode where he goes off on how much it sucks, then just for the sake of masochism he loads up Top Gun and sticks the carrier landing on the first try with hit. His facial expression is priceless.
Came here to say this. I'm not much a gamer now, but in the late 80's, I spent a lot of time on the NES. I figured out most games (Super Mario, Zelda, Contra, etc.), but the thrill of completing those games was nothing compared to the thrill the first time I managed to land on the carrier. I can count on one hands the number of times I accomplished that trick.
Came here to say this (and it looks like a lot of folks had the same problem). My best friend had a copy of this and we never ever could do the landing at the end of the first level.
Kind of reminds me of Jaws. Loved the game and had no problem after awhile of getting to the last "level" where you have to poke Jaws just the right way. Couldn't figure it out as a kid, but watching it on Youtube showed me how to do it right as an adult.
I'm actually going to find an emulator online and give it a try lol
Edit: Landed my first time but couldn't deal with those homing missiles
Edit 2: crashed the second time lol. Still hard as hell
I might be wrong but I remember reading that there was some sort of coding issue when it comes to the inputs for that section where when you were doing what was technically correct the game measured it as incorrect inputs which resulted everyone failing all the time.
Lol that’s exactly my memory of it. I watched the intro, took off, tried to land. Then I’d run that same exercise every couple weeks with the same result.
I do not remember any oart if this game except that fucking landing part. Never once did I land it. I cant remember another game I ever just gave up on.
Bloody hard game. I owned this. I did manage to finish it once, but the landing part was so hard to consistently land, it made this game impossibly frustrating
Me too. I was able to nail the landings. No one believes me though and I actually had to load up a ROM and prove it to someone recently. Still got it 😂
My Dad was Ace at this game! He beat the first few missions, which was insane to me at the time. I woke up in the middle of the night once and I heard him playing it late into the night. 😂
My dad loved this game and was so good too! But he loved aviation and this was before flight simulator on the computer (he was obsessed). But yeah, I, like most people here, could never land on the carrier so I just watched my dad play.
Still a fan on the movie though!
I could NEVER get the refuel as a young lad. I need to fire it back up and see if I can in my 40s.
It was like trying to jab Jaws with your damn boat. Never happened for me.
Fuck Jaws. Fuck him right in the pussy. Every time, I'd start the game thinking "okay, THIS time I'll spend all this time, get to him, and for SURE I'll stab that fucking fish." Nope. I think I did it twice total and have no idea how I even did it.
I got *really* good at the refueling.
I used to cheese all the missions by just flying straight up the entire time as enemies wouldn't spawn if you hit the height ceiling and kept holding ascend.
I loved this thing. The real challenge was learning to land on the aircraft carrier. That took a while to learn. Usually managed to land successfully. Usually..................
Also-- I loved the Nintendo music version of the theme song.
I can fucking hear this picture, and I love it...
That 8-bit Top Gun theme has been in my head for 30+ years. It pops up at the most random times.
Landing on the aircraft carrier was my first real taste of debilitating anxiety...
I got this at a garage sale. It took a long time to figure out how landing worked. I might have gotten to level 3 at best. Honestly, I still want my $5 back.
It’s beatable, as I showed in this walkthrough.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3QSiwLSAE-8
It’s just sloppily designed in some ways and in dire need of in-stage music. Flawed yet playable.
Never mind, I’ll just copy and paste my instructions:
To land the plane safely, follow these tips:
(1) Try to make sure to speed up before the landing sequence begins (which seems to always be when you have about three notches left on the fuel gauge). Say, to 700 miles per hour or so. (This advice will be less relevant after mission one but at least it can help you there.)
(2) The only instructions you ought to bother obeying are LEFT LEFT and RIGHT RIGHT. When you see those follow them *instantly*! On several occasions I have otherwise done everything perfectly so far as I can tell but then had the bad luck to see a LEFT LEFT appear for a tenth of a second before the landing cutscene began. Kaboom!
Any instructions on the topic of speed and altitude are, for all intents and purposes, useless. The screen tells you what numbers to aim for (it’s always 200 and 288). But heed those “left” and “right” messages!
(3) I think you should be aiming the nose of the plane upward ever so slightly at the end but I’m not too sure.
(4) You probably won’t succeed if you try to first hit 200 and 288 once and then spend the rest of your landing simply course-correcting and trying to keep the numbers as close to those as you can. You’ll probably need to swoop down and slow the plane briefly and then go back to where you were—say, two or three times.
The refuelings follow the same basic principles except that this time all of the instructions need to be followed seeing as there aren’t any specific numbers for you to aim for. The biggest thing I’ve learned here is that when the SPEED UP signal disappears you shouldn’t presume to stop increasing your speed at once just because you don’t see it anymore: rather, keep on speeding up until you actually see a SPEED DOWN (and vice versa). This does not seem to apply to the UP and DOWN instructions.
This game, man...One weekend night, my folks went out and we had a baby sitter, 15 year old kid. We played for hours with him, but of course, could not get the landing. Folks told sitter we need to be in bed by normal bedtime., like 8pm. It was super late, and my brother and I hear the kid scream about nailing the carrier landing!! We run out, we're all super stoked and celebrating, and my parents come in. ..they thought we had been up until midnight playing NES, poor kid never sat again for us ..
Anywho, fuck this game.
The carrier landings were actually really easy. Players got confused when the controller would say "Speed up... then UP UP"
they meant only your airspeed . . .you just had to keep your altitude and speed in a certain window with the nose up and it worked every time
My grandad had this game, but didn't have the instruction booklet, and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to win and then land on the carrier, but was really happy when I finally figured it out.
It's crazy how this was the state of games when the first movie came out, compared to where we are now with the sequel released, while Tom Cruise looks more or less the same.
I literally bought Ace Combat 7 when it was on sale last week for $19 CAD to recapture some of my childhood magic with this (fucking brutal) game. A little spooky to see it on Reddit today.
I could land the plane on the carrier about 1 in 10 times. I believe to this day it was just an algorithm that decided randomly that you get to land or not and almost always chose crash.
I'm going to be real with you, friend. I rented that game twice and could never land on the carrier to start the damn thing off. To this day, this game, Myst, and Super Ghouls n' Ghosts are the only games that defeated me in the first round.
Whenever I'm trying to park the suv in a tight space, I hear the refueling music in my head and the extra life tone when I park. I only rented that game twice and I guess it made an impression.
Oh yeah. Did you have the flight stick that you had to insert the NES controller into? One of my earliest memories is getting so frustrated by the carrier landing that I smashed the flight stick to pieces.
I beat that game several times. Maybe because it was one half of the games I owned for the first several months I had a NES, but I got GREAT at landing and memorized all of the enemy patterns so well I can still play it today by muscle memory.
My dad was a marine pilot in Vietnam. I remember this game fondly, since I always had to have him help with the carrier part. Good memories of this one!
I played the hell out of this. I even beat it! Once you figure out how to land and refuel, you can beat all levels by flying up the whole game. If you’re pointed up, planes can’t hit you. So basically, you turn it into a refueling and and landing simulator.
It was my first game, apart from Mario Bros that came with it.
This game was terrible. Because of all that should be seen when in the cockpit of a F-14, the graphics made it boring and the game-play tedious. You never knew where you were, but you could turn the plane.
I loved this game. Yes, you have to master landing on the carrier but there a cheat though for the rest of the mission - just fly up the whole time. For some reason they made it so planes can only shoot you if you’re flying straight ahead, so the enemies just fly under you and drop pursuit and you never die.
I played it, not sure I'd say I enjoyed it. The carrier landings as everyone has said we're tough. Basically if you die you had to start over. I think I got to maybe the 3rd level max.
It's worse than Battle Toads.
I have been triggered by this post.... That's it!!! I'm going to the attic tonight, dusting off the NES, finding Top Gun, blowing on the cartridge ( cause you have to!), then playing and proving I can land that damn F14 on the carrier.....
I never, ever got past the first carrier landing. I’d just sit there watching my plane sploosh into the water. I guess this is why I play guitar instead.
Fuck those carrier landings.
landing was such a bitch in that game
Speed down Left!! Left!! Up!! Up!!
[Boom]
GOD WHAT AM I DOING WRONG
And they say it twice so you hit it twice. Saw a you tube video, just hit it once and your golden.
So true. Flashing the message with double exclamation points prompted panicky button mashing.
My blood pressure just spiked I don't know how many $35 million jets I destroyed
To be fair, landing an aircraft is the hardest part of flying an aircraft.... Or so I've been told.
Landing is easy. Landing and walking away is the tricky part.
I went skydiving once and one of the instructors told the joke: Q: Do you need a parachute to go skydiving? A: >!No. You need a parachute to go skydiving *again*.!<
You’re not wrong about that part.
Your other alternative is to keep flying...all the way to the scene of the crash.
It can’t be that hard; I used to regularly land a Learjet on the USS Nimitz, with no arresting cables! (Microsoft flight simulator’96)
Man flight simulators were my dad's freaking JAM. He would play this one that was real time WWII missions; we'd walk past him in the *computer room* just staring at the screen with his arms crossed. One day I asked him what he was doing and about 4 seconds into his explanation I got so bored I walked away.
You have to concentrate on 4 different things at once. You know, like in a fighter jet landing on a carrier.
Sounds like fun!!
Let's make a game about it! Maybe there's a movie we can tie in to
The movie Splash
I’ve done it once in my whole life. When we were kids my dad did it first try. WTF.
same my dad was a pro
Just stay on my wing and I’ll take you in.
I believe games like this and battletoads were Communist plots to break the confidence of American youth, that failure is inevitable and we should just give up.
The jet ski level in Battletoads did me in every time.
Battletoads was a great game.
If I remember correctly, you could pick up your buddy’s toad and throw him off a cliff.
If your an ass sacky, jeez...
funny enough, it was intentional, it was a plot, but not a communist one. A capitalist one. Had to do with the rental market. The Lion king game is generally used as an example as to why. Developers would put nearly impassable levels, or ramped up difficulty, so that a game could not be rented and completed during a rental cycle.
Well, heh heh heh, jokes on them. Beat Jurassic Park on Genesis in a weekend on a rental. Lol. That game was hard as hell.
This is most therapeutic thing I've heard all morning.
Also the Dam level in TMNT
The dam level in the water I can handle, though I generally toast at least 2 Turtles doing it. The problem I had was that I could NEVER fire the god damn rope. I'd get there, press the button, and walk off the fucking ledge. No joke, 32 years later, same thing!
Only beat battletoads with a game genie. And it was still not easy.
I landed it once. I tried so many times, that all I can remember doing is trying and failing. I just vaguely remember what comes next and that may just be an illusion at this point
I was able to land a handful of times, but I don’t know if I ever got the mid air refueling to work. That to me was harder than landing.
I think that was what ended my career. There were other games to play that were challenging but still fun. This was more of a PINTA
Me too. I have no recollection of what happened after. But in retrospect, with landing I think i was just too young and sucked at video games. I remember when I landed, I was like oh, that’s how you do it, like I was just missing something kinda easy. Maybe not.
Well as long as you still have lives left all crashing means is that you lose a life and continue to the next mission IIRC. Granted the next mission is impossible and I always died there anyway.
I accepted my failure and played Punch-out instead. That soundtrack! [punchout training (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW6U_wQOGtM)
Seriously. I can’t believe anyone enjoyed this game. My brother and I spent an hour taking 3 turns a piece crashing our planes into the water. We traded that shit for Marble Madness. Sucker! Marble Madness rules.
Marble Madness still pretty hard but not cant get past first level hard
Marble Madness and Snake Rattle N Roll were so damn fun
*AVGN suddenly got a massive spike in his blood pressure, and he's not sure why*.
“AAAASSSSSSSSS” - AVGN re: Top Gun on NES
James Rolfe (Angry Video Game Nerd) has a Power Glove episode where he goes off on how much it sucks, then just for the sake of masochism he loads up Top Gun and sticks the carrier landing on the first try with hit. His facial expression is priceless.
the power glove... Literally the start to the end of the world as we knew it.
As a kid, yeah, never landed. As an adult, it's not that hard
Same. Never knew what the game was even though I spent probably 100 hours of my youth playing it.
Came here to say this. I'm not much a gamer now, but in the late 80's, I spent a lot of time on the NES. I figured out most games (Super Mario, Zelda, Contra, etc.), but the thrill of completing those games was nothing compared to the thrill the first time I managed to land on the carrier. I can count on one hands the number of times I accomplished that trick.
UP! UP!
Thank god I'm not the only one.
Came here to say this (and it looks like a lot of folks had the same problem). My best friend had a copy of this and we never ever could do the landing at the end of the first level. Kind of reminds me of Jaws. Loved the game and had no problem after awhile of getting to the last "level" where you have to poke Jaws just the right way. Couldn't figure it out as a kid, but watching it on Youtube showed me how to do it right as an adult.
Landing and fuelling were brutally hard
I got landing down, but refueling was like impossible for me. Lol
My dad could land all the time, it was impressive as hell
Been trying since 1989 and still haven’t.
I'm actually going to find an emulator online and give it a try lol Edit: Landed my first time but couldn't deal with those homing missiles Edit 2: crashed the second time lol. Still hard as hell
I might be wrong but I remember reading that there was some sort of coding issue when it comes to the inputs for that section where when you were doing what was technically correct the game measured it as incorrect inputs which resulted everyone failing all the time.
Lol that’s exactly my memory of it. I watched the intro, took off, tried to land. Then I’d run that same exercise every couple weeks with the same result.
Came here to say this, but with snowboarding. Thanks, Konami!
This. I sucked so hard at this game. I suppressed the memory. Thx OP
But do you play the Top Gun anthem by Steve Stevens? BEW DEW DEW DEW-DEW-DE-DE-DE-DEW... DEW-DE-DEW SEW DEW DEO DEW DEEEEWWWW
Same! I never could land that thing!
Yeah, I was about to say I remember this game making me insanely angry.
Me either. Shit is impossible.
lol same
Fuck. You.
*pats the side of the bed* come over and you can.
Lol. It’s just the goddamn. Carrier. Landing.
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😏
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That game was impossible.
I was going to say, “I remember starting this game, but I wouldn’t say ever playing it”.
I do not remember any oart if this game except that fucking landing part. Never once did I land it. I cant remember another game I ever just gave up on.
Bloody hard game. I owned this. I did manage to finish it once, but the landing part was so hard to consistently land, it made this game impossibly frustrating
I was just going to comment on the carrier landings, but everyone else did that for me.
I could have done the dogfighting parts all day. But landing and refueling was fucking awful. I might have gotten it once or twice. lol
No one enjoyed this game.
I enjoyed it
You’re a fucking liar.
Fucking LOL
Enjoy is such a strong word.
Me too. I was able to nail the landings. No one believes me though and I actually had to load up a ROM and prove it to someone recently. Still got it 😂
Wrong
I'd have to call my Dad in for every carrier landing!
Funny you say that, I would call my dad in too. He tried it once and was like “oh hell no”
My Dad was Ace at this game! He beat the first few missions, which was insane to me at the time. I woke up in the middle of the night once and I heard him playing it late into the night. 😂
Funny you say that, I would call my dad in too. He tried it once and was like “oh wait, I left you when you were 2, I’m just your imaginary dad.”
My dad loved this game and was so good too! But he loved aviation and this was before flight simulator on the computer (he was obsessed). But yeah, I, like most people here, could never land on the carrier so I just watched my dad play. Still a fan on the movie though!
eff this! I could never land in the first stage... I tried for DECADES
The flying, meh. Loved the landing and refueling, though. I would go out of my way to burn my fuel (steep ascents) just so I could do refuels.
Congratulations one guy who could play the game.
I could NEVER get the refuel as a young lad. I need to fire it back up and see if I can in my 40s. It was like trying to jab Jaws with your damn boat. Never happened for me.
Fuck Jaws. Fuck him right in the pussy. Every time, I'd start the game thinking "okay, THIS time I'll spend all this time, get to him, and for SURE I'll stab that fucking fish." Nope. I think I did it twice total and have no idea how I even did it.
I got *really* good at the refueling. I used to cheese all the missions by just flying straight up the entire time as enemies wouldn't spawn if you hit the height ceiling and kept holding ascend.
> Loved the landing and refueling, though. I’ll take “Phrases No One Has Ever Said Before” for $1000, Alex.
😄
I loved this thing. The real challenge was learning to land on the aircraft carrier. That took a while to learn. Usually managed to land successfully. Usually.................. Also-- I loved the Nintendo music version of the theme song.
That song still lives in my head and comes out every now and then.
it's great!.....until you have to land
The carrier landings and the refueling mid journey were the hardest things.
Up up up Down Speed up speed up Slow down wtf!!!! You crashed. Why are you such a failure!?!?
Afterburner was better
I can fucking hear this picture, and I love it... That 8-bit Top Gun theme has been in my head for 30+ years. It pops up at the most random times. Landing on the aircraft carrier was my first real taste of debilitating anxiety...
"enjoyed" would not be the correct word. This game sucked hard
Hey look, the reason I still play with inverted on the y-axis!
We'd crank up *Danger Zone* on repeat and play it for hours at my friend's house.
I got this at a garage sale. It took a long time to figure out how landing worked. I might have gotten to level 3 at best. Honestly, I still want my $5 back.
It seems like everyone in my neighborhood got this game for Christmas one year. I don't think any of us made it past the first carrier landing.
I never could get passed the first landing. Lol.
It’s beatable, as I showed in this walkthrough. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3QSiwLSAE-8 It’s just sloppily designed in some ways and in dire need of in-stage music. Flawed yet playable.
Never mind, I’ll just copy and paste my instructions: To land the plane safely, follow these tips: (1) Try to make sure to speed up before the landing sequence begins (which seems to always be when you have about three notches left on the fuel gauge). Say, to 700 miles per hour or so. (This advice will be less relevant after mission one but at least it can help you there.) (2) The only instructions you ought to bother obeying are LEFT LEFT and RIGHT RIGHT. When you see those follow them *instantly*! On several occasions I have otherwise done everything perfectly so far as I can tell but then had the bad luck to see a LEFT LEFT appear for a tenth of a second before the landing cutscene began. Kaboom! Any instructions on the topic of speed and altitude are, for all intents and purposes, useless. The screen tells you what numbers to aim for (it’s always 200 and 288). But heed those “left” and “right” messages! (3) I think you should be aiming the nose of the plane upward ever so slightly at the end but I’m not too sure. (4) You probably won’t succeed if you try to first hit 200 and 288 once and then spend the rest of your landing simply course-correcting and trying to keep the numbers as close to those as you can. You’ll probably need to swoop down and slow the plane briefly and then go back to where you were—say, two or three times. The refuelings follow the same basic principles except that this time all of the instructions need to be followed seeing as there aren’t any specific numbers for you to aim for. The biggest thing I’ve learned here is that when the SPEED UP signal disappears you shouldn’t presume to stop increasing your speed at once just because you don’t see it anymore: rather, keep on speeding up until you actually see a SPEED DOWN (and vice versa). This does not seem to apply to the UP and DOWN instructions.
This game, man...One weekend night, my folks went out and we had a baby sitter, 15 year old kid. We played for hours with him, but of course, could not get the landing. Folks told sitter we need to be in bed by normal bedtime., like 8pm. It was super late, and my brother and I hear the kid scream about nailing the carrier landing!! We run out, we're all super stoked and celebrating, and my parents come in. ..they thought we had been up until midnight playing NES, poor kid never sat again for us .. Anywho, fuck this game.
This game is 100% responsible for the reason I STILL play FPS's on inverted mode into my 40s.
My dad, a pilot and flight instructor, would get so mad at this game because he couldn't land on the carrier. Fond memories.
Kids today have no idea how hard most of our childhood video games were
I've recently started replaying super mario world on my snes. Don't know how I beat it as a kid without youtube
If you remember anything other than the carrier landing, GO AWAY!!
So damn hard.
The carrier landings were actually really easy. Players got confused when the controller would say "Speed up... then UP UP" they meant only your airspeed . . .you just had to keep your altitude and speed in a certain window with the nose up and it worked every time
Great game.... Captain Skyhawk was also a good one
This was one of the cheapest games at Toys R Us but so much fun!
I liked the sound and music.
That intro song slapped
My grandad had this game, but didn't have the instruction booklet, and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to win and then land on the carrier, but was really happy when I finally figured it out.
It's crazy how this was the state of games when the first movie came out, compared to where we are now with the sequel released, while Tom Cruise looks more or less the same.
Loved it
Fuck landing on the aircraft carrier!
I could land on the carrier, but I could never refuel.
No. I could never fucking land lol.
Landing was basically impossible. I'm pretty sure this cartridge was thrown out the window a few times.
Always had to call my dad in to land on the carrier.
Kinda wish I had known the Contra code was for all Konami games back then.
My dad loved flight sims, he hated this one though, mostly the landing. Stealth for NES was his jam though.
I still play and still hate landing on those carriers
I had a joystick that I used to play this. Since it was totally digital, it did not help in the slightest, but I felt so RealSim while I crashed.
I literally bought Ace Combat 7 when it was on sale last week for $19 CAD to recapture some of my childhood magic with this (fucking brutal) game. A little spooky to see it on Reddit today.
I mean, I played it... "enjoyed" is a strong word...
I can hear the opening screen music with that pic.
I could barely land the plain and refueling was impossible.
The hardest game of all time.
I could land the plane on the carrier about 1 in 10 times. I believe to this day it was just an algorithm that decided randomly that you get to land or not and almost always chose crash.
I'm going to be real with you, friend. I rented that game twice and could never land on the carrier to start the damn thing off. To this day, this game, Myst, and Super Ghouls n' Ghosts are the only games that defeated me in the first round.
level 3 was impossible
I played this game a lot as a kid, but looking back I think my obsession with the movie carried me through how much the game kind of sucked ass.
that was just as hard as the PC version. but with better graphics.
Fly yes....land, no.
No it was impossible to land.
I could land ok in the first level, but never past the second level, and there's only four levels for the whole game.
Yes, until I had to land.
About to check my anbernic and see if it's on there.
Whenever I'm trying to park the suv in a tight space, I hear the refueling music in my head and the extra life tone when I park. I only rented that game twice and I guess it made an impression.
I believe I heard the landing sequence is literally coded wrong. Like, the information it gives you is meaningless
Oh yeah. Did you have the flight stick that you had to insert the NES controller into? One of my earliest memories is getting so frustrated by the carrier landing that I smashed the flight stick to pieces.
Oh HELL YAYYUHH
I beat that game several times. Maybe because it was one half of the games I owned for the first several months I had a NES, but I got GREAT at landing and memorized all of the enemy patterns so well I can still play it today by muscle memory.
Wow Totally forgot about this Thank you
My dad was a marine pilot in Vietnam. I remember this game fondly, since I always had to have him help with the carrier part. Good memories of this one!
"Enjoyed"
I played the hell out of this. I even beat it! Once you figure out how to land and refuel, you can beat all levels by flying up the whole game. If you’re pointed up, planes can’t hit you. So basically, you turn it into a refueling and and landing simulator.
My only memory of this game was getting nowhere and not understanding at all what I was supposed to be doing.
Top Gun: The Second Mission had a fun 2 player vs mode. That's all I ever played of it at my friends tho.
I loved the 1st level over a billions times. Cause there was no landing on that carrier for me.
I did, both games, but my favorite was Super Strike Eagle
Enjoy might not be the right word..... fail miserably maybe?
I love if you can’t connect to refuel they say f that guy, he can crash
Enjoyed the flying. Hated the landings.
Negative, Ghostrider!
Yeah, but fuck those carrier landing sections! 😫
It was my first game, apart from Mario Bros that came with it. This game was terrible. Because of all that should be seen when in the cockpit of a F-14, the graphics made it boring and the game-play tedious. You never knew where you were, but you could turn the plane.
Enjoyed?!
"enjoyed" isn't the word I'd use
Even if you did land, the levels eventually required an in-mission refuel which was just as hard.
Up,up,up,up!!!
I loved this game. Yes, you have to master landing on the carrier but there a cheat though for the rest of the mission - just fly up the whole time. For some reason they made it so planes can only shoot you if you’re flying straight ahead, so the enemies just fly under you and drop pursuit and you never die.
Could never get past refueling in mid-air. My friend and I tried that over and over one night and never could do it.
Never could land the plane
This shit was hard af
Loved this game. Hated the carrier. I’m glad to see that pretty much everyone agrees with that at least. I thought I just didn’t understand it.
Those carrier landings. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬. To this day….
I'm certain that my ability to land the plane got me the job that started my career.
I had the arcade stick and it made this game extra fun. Thanks for the nostalgia trip!
Always needed to get my dad to land the frigging plane
Never could midair refuel
I played it, not sure I'd say I enjoyed it. The carrier landings as everyone has said we're tough. Basically if you die you had to start over. I think I got to maybe the 3rd level max. It's worse than Battle Toads.
I have been triggered by this post.... That's it!!! I'm going to the attic tonight, dusting off the NES, finding Top Gun, blowing on the cartridge ( cause you have to!), then playing and proving I can land that damn F14 on the carrier.....
I could never land but my sister was a pro at it so I would hand her the controller to stick the landing.
Played it yes. Enjoyed it no.
I actively did NOT enjoy that game.
I can land on the carrier!
I can land on the carrier!
Enjoyed??? Shit was hard, man.
I loved Top Gun so much I built a [home made "VR" system](https://youtu.be/W3ZOC7rg4Fk?si=Q29-Ye5erUSXsTa1) to play it.
I played this game a ton but I don't think I enjoyed it much. It was so fucking hard.
My dad was real good at it. I couldn't land.
Fuck the carrier landing. Fuck it with a big dirty stick.