Space Ace - DVD Video

Back in 1983 the relatively new technology of the laserdisc allowed Don Bluth Studios to produce a videogame that utilised traditional, Disney-style animation. It was called Dragon's Lair and caused a sensation in the industry, making $30 million in 40 days. However, the limited gameplay meant that the laserdisc-based games were doomed to die out once the novelty wore off, but before the industry moved on to the next fad (moving cabinets) Bluth Studios had released two more titles: the sequel to the original Dragon's Lair, and the subject of this review, 1984's Space Ace.

The video games had laserdisc players inside which held a CAV laserdisc. These discs span at 1800RPM, and could contain 30 minutes of video and audio. This was enough to hold every possible path available to the player, who would choose the direction to move the hero at certain points. Basically, you're looking at a high-reflex 'Choose Your Own Adventure'-type game, with a lot of frustration involved!

Now that many years have gone by, the old fragile LD players have mostly broken down, so Digital Leisure have taken it upon themselves to keep the games alive by re-releasing them on interactive DVD-ROMs.

The plot of Space Ace concerns an evil villain, Borf, who has created an Infanto Ray which turns people into children, zapped Ace and kidnapped Ace's girlfriend, Kimberley. Ace has to save the girl, destroy the ray and defeat the villain. Pretty standard fare.

The packaging claims the video has been 'remastered for DVD', but by modern standards, the video here really suffers. The original laserdiscs were created long before the industry cared about quality (in fact, before the THX program started around 1990, most laserdiscs looked horrible). I would suspect that the video has come straight from an original laserdisc, as it exhibits all the flaws you'd expect from analog video from the mid 80s.

Colour is very oversaturated, and verges on bleeding. Detail is not as high as I'd expect from a quality laserdisc, let alone DVD. Add to this the video noise common in film-video transfers from the era, and you end up with a not-too-impressive looking disc.

The audio is apparently straight from the laserdisc as well, and sounds reasonable, but it was obviously created on a budget and with a cheap speaker system in a game cabinet in mind. The engineer in me hears ancient effect units and fairly primitive mixing techniques (for example, everytime you hear Borf talk, you get a cheesy double-tracked voice). The music and sound effects are heavily compressed with no dynamics. That said, as 15-year-old game music it's not bad at all.

The guy doing the voice of Dexter (Space Ace's young double) wins my 'extremely annoying' award. His voice grates!

Besides the promo trailers for other Digital Leisure titles, there's some interesting footage that Bluth and others from the company have saved over the years on VHS. Dragon's Lair was a phenomenon when it came out (I still remember seeing it on the news! God, I'm old!), and the reports reflect this.

The DVD allows you to watch many of the sequences without actually having to play them, which basically removes all incentive to try, so I'd avoid this option if you can. There's also a walkthrough at the Digital Leisure website.

The most interesting part for me was seeing an interview with Don Bluth, in which it was apparent that at the time he really thought laserdisc was going to make it big. The sad thing was that it probably could have, if it had only been marketed properly. I hope the studios can keep the DVD momentum going so it won't suffer the same fate.

As a fan of emulators and old games in general, I respect Digital Leisure for taking the effort to save this game from extinction, but the sad fact is that it was never very much fun. At no point when playing it did I ever enjoy myself, and the game is actually extremely short once you know what to do.

I personally wouldn't spend my money on this, but if you find it cheap (and I'm told it won't be nearly as expensive as Dragon's Lair was on DVD), then it might be worth some bucks for nostalgia value. Just don't expect to invest much time in it.