Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES

> The information to properly land the plane is in the manual. The required air speed and altitude have never been a secret, if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).

It's also on-screen. What's missing is the acceptable ranges -- +/- 100 for altitude, +/- 50 for speed, per the post. Knowing that the slop for altitude is much higher is definitely helpful information.

The saying for landing is: "throttle for altitude, pitch for speed". Most folks attempt the opposite.

> if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).

Most kids did't read the manual? I would rtfm for every game I got my hands on during the car ride home from toysrus or blockbuster. If Mom had several errands to run, I may rtfm a dozen times before I finally got home with the game.

if you rented it or borrowed from a friend it was very very unlikely you had the manual. I don't remember how I eventually figured it out, but it's the landing instructions that I think are misleading.

> The information to properly land the plane is in the manual

Look, I already liked the nerdy blog post! I don't need even more reasons to like it.

There was a manual =0

I don't specifically remember it, but I had the manual, and I was a voracious manual reader as a kid. I also remember the carrier landings being the hardest thing in any game I ever played. Felt like about a 1% success rate, and I never quite knew what separated a successful landing from an unsuccessful one that looked identical on approach.

Man I miss manuals.

This article, and the mountain picture, are the only pages indexed by Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arelaxing.run

Chances are, this is the site's inaugural post.

ZScaler (at work) classifies this whole site as

Website blocked

Not allowed to browse Weapons/Bombs category

You tried to visit:https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/top-gun-landing/

My recollection is that if you missed it you kept playing but were doomed to crash maybe 30 seconds later from low fuel. Talk about punishing.

> 1398 mi/h

Isn't that something like Mach 1.8? That's one fast tanker.

The refueling music is the best part of the soundtrack, and somehow that video doesn't have it...different version of the game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfUZix8jVBY&t=187s

How convenient that refueling also replenishes your missiles.

Hah, same for me:). But still loved to do these things over and over again.

This was the part that my brother and I could never, ever, not even once, complete. I still rue it to this day.

How in the hell is that tanker flying at ~1,200 knots (1,400mph)!? That is nearly Mach 2!

ugh i had forgotten all about this game until I clicked your link and then promptly closed the tab. Carrier landing was frustrating enough but the re-fueling was another level. I played this at my friend's house whenever I would go there and spend the night.

That was an actual thing back in the day, you'd get your parents to let you stay the night at a friend's house and then you'd stay up all night playing NES, eating pizza and watching movies.

The number of times I've used that quote in the last 12 years . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnRdPZjoMKM

And the follow up, where the AVGN attempts the landing with a technique as arcane as decompilation: https://youtu.be/MYDuy7wM8Gk?si=VE22_o6tfQ5jvrL1&t=512

You gotta point people to the original episode, it's classic certifiably unhinged AVGN.

"What a shitload of fuck! This game chews turds! This game sucks your balls off and spits them up your ass!"

https://youtu.be/ofM11nPzFo0

Super Mario 64 was an N64 launch title. Resident Evil 4 was a late Gamecube title. In my mind that's probably the biggest gap in graphical fidelity between generations of console. But I can see how going from NES games like Super Mario Bros to SNES games like Star Fox would be a close contender.

PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 or Xbox -> 360 feel more iterative because they started after the 3D era had already begun. We haven't had a new dominant paradigm for gaming since then (besides mobile gaming).

Console Generations are a step function.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible in real life. The Navy tested a C-130 on the USS Forrestal and accomplished 21 landings. I'm sure a C-130 has better short-field performance than a 737, but they were also testing it with substantial cargo on board. Official figures for required runway distance for a 737 are far in excess of a carrier's deck length, of course, but those figures include weird things like "safety" that are not strictly required, and tend not to fully account for the 40+kt headwind you can get from a carrier steaming into the wind.

The secret is to only move up and down when trying to dock.

Very prescient, too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech

As long as you delivered the proper ordinance on the designated target, then the mission was accomplished whether you live or not. They have more planes and more pilots for the next mission.

Seriously, I'm glad everyone else is young enough not to have been scarred by games that either were designed to eat quarters or designed to keep you at it for a couple of months so you got your money's worth.

Why not show the last race from Decathlon by Activision to see if my forearm muscles cramp up instinctively.

There was also that water level in TMNT https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI

Thank you! I was looking for this comment amongst the "this was easy" ones. I was pretty young when this game came out. I rarely got past this landing.

I think I still have the Top Gun NES cartridge in a box somewhere. Maybe this is a good excuse to fire up the NES and try it.

My friends owned it (I was never allowed to have a NES myself). Not once did ANY of us ever manage to land the plane. We tried MANY times. This blog makes it seem so easy I want to be angry at it :-)

Oh my... This is how the code could look indeed. Which LLM did you use to generate this?

Your code is returning TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW for the case when the heading is too far right. The disassembly in the op looks like it correctly jumps to too_far_right.

My grandpa’s greatest gaming achievement was beating Top Gun: The Second Mission on the NES, in the ‘90s. Perhaps his training as a B-17 tail gunner gave him an advantage, lol (he never fought, war ended after he finished training but before he saw a combat sortie). He was better at the game than any of his grandkids, hahaha.

(I’m pretty sure it was the second mission, it was the one with the space shuttle launch or whatever at the end)

Back when video games separated the men from the boys.

It was tough, but it wasn't Battletoads tough.

Also likely you don't have as much time. I'd be more keen to discover things on my own a few decades ago. Now I'm limited by work/family life to an hour of play here and there. That means if something looks annoying or long without a good reason, I'm going to look it up and not feel bad at all.

Man you just unlocked a memory. I'm about the same age...I had forgot about when we lucked our way into "turtle trapping" (didn't know until I read your post it was even called that). When the lives counter goes crazy (we called it "infinity men") we genuinely had no idea what was going on at first and thought we broke the game.

It happened when a buddy and I were completely bored messing around with the game and I remember calling my friends and explaining it but no one "got it" until we showed them.

Gosh, I miss the aesthetics of vector games of this era. My absolute favourite was Armour-Geddon (on the Amiga), which because I'd pirated it I barely had any clue what to do but.. it was still fun, and so beautiful. And fast!

I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.

I didn't either!

Granted, I wasn't good at video games in general. And this one infuriated me, because I loved it. I could easily beat the first level, but then I crashed on carrier landing. This happened for years. I only ever saw the first level of this game.

Then one day, while staying at my elementary afterschool sitter's house, one of the kids there told me he played Top Gun as well. He could land, but wasn't very good at the rest of the game.

A plan was formed.

The next day, I brought the cartridge over, and we settled in. I'd play the level, then hand him the controller at which point he'd plant it on the deck. Rinse and Repeat. Top Gun and Top Gun: The Second Mission didn't have too many levels, (6 maybe?) and I don't think it took us too long to beat. Neither one of us had seen much of the game. But working together, we beat both in a matter of hours.

I still look back on that as one of the few NES games I finished without codes or a Game Genie, just the help of a friend. =D

Depends on the level, some are better flying up, others are flying down... you don't need to move left/right except to avoid being locked on from behind, unless you need to dodge missiles from the front.

The trick is just to know the numbers to aim for and ignore the instructions.

I had the game and the manual, but I can’t recall if I ever read the manual. I played the game a ton and was maybe 50/50 at the landings, but just followed the on-screen instructions. I could probably have puzzled out the target numbers, but never did (was it in the manual?). Now you can just google the correct values and nail it every time (paying no attention to the on-screen directions).

[edit] incidentally, my “it’s not actually hard” thing from the NES is the dam level in TMNT. It’s a challenge like the first two times you play it, then never again. It’s just not that hard. I think it’s easier than tons of Mario game levels, for instance.

That said, this is bad game design. A manual should never be needed.

Except for those of us as kids who RENTED the game which didn't typically come with the manual...

So it was pretty much an arcade port of the NES game? The procedure and numbers are so different IRL that I find it hard to believe someone else would have come up with an almost identical minigame.

In the "bad ending" to Rocket Knight Adventures (complete the game on Easy or lower), you actually see Sparkster leave the Pig Star's crashing escape pod as a pixel, then there's a little sneezing sound as a tiny parachute deploys. It's kind of disappointing, but then to see a real ending you're supposed to beat the game on a higher difficulty.

> ...but seriously, you didn't even get your score reduced for crashing the plane on landing?

Well, you don't get the 10,000 bonus points

It's probably not feasible to display the graphics to take it all the way to touchdown on the NES.

If you could afford an amiga around this time, you most likely weren't impressed with any of the consoles. Even if you had a commodore 64, you may not have been interested with the NES, my experience was that the games on the commodore was that many of the games were closer to the arcade than what you got with the early NES cartridges could do. Later cartridges outstripped the commodore since they added extra processing in the cartridges themselves. By the end of the NES life, the games had gotten really good, some games could almost compete with the early SNES titles.

I had a similar feeling towards the N64 some years later. I had a 486 that could do much better 3D and with more interesting games, and there was nothing in the nintendo catalogue that could compete with what I basically had free access to due to the internet.

F/A 18 Interceptor on an Amiga 500: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-18_Interceptor

The first mission is to start and land on a carrier. Video games were never even a question: You couldn't copy games and had to pay ridiculous prices for each!

Archer? Is that you?

Don't think there was ever a Top Gun for Virtual Boy.

Docking computer was like the very first thing I would buy. That or a mining laser so I could more quickly get the cash to buy the computer. On the C64 version, it would play Blue Danube in a shout out to 2001, and I still remember the horribly flat note in it (it had to be deliberate, the same note is fine in the rest of the piece). Sometimes it would try to dock with the wrong side of the station, but that usually only happened if you turned it on when on the wrong side already.

Before then, just approach the bay straight on and if you go slow enough, you'll dock fine even if it's perpendicular. Probably differs with whatever version you're playing though.

If memory serves, that was relatively easy? Compared with this?

You fly to the entry, point towards it, and then rotate until rotation speed and phase match.

But yea, the docking computer was definitely easier =)