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Comments (154)

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  jordigh
  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).The real difficulty, not explored in this disassembly, is that the game has semi-realistic physics! My older brother was in flight school at the time and was able to easily land the plane and taught me how to do it.As the article states, "Altitude and speed are both controlled by throttle input and pitch angle". So you can't just hit the engines or air brakes button to change your speed. If you lower the nose of the plane, you'll speed up and vice versa! So you have to carefully juggle your speed and altitude by altering both your pitch and your engines/air brakes.My brother taught me that my speed wouldn't reduce if I'm nosediving, so raise the nose a little while opening my air brakes for a quick reduction in speed and then level out to maintain altitude. The game actually models this somewhat accurately!
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  dynm
  Incidentally, this is not a blog that makes it easy to look at the archives!- No link to other posts- This post is at https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/top-gun-landing/- https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/ gives a 403- https://relaxing.run/blag/ gives a 403- https://relaxing.run/ gives a full-page picture of some beautiful mountains- No Atom/RSS link hidden in sourceNot a complaint! If this is an intentional choice, I respect it.
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  debo_
  I never had much trouble landing on the carrier, but refueling in the sky? I think I only managed it a few times.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vetEg8J-wcw
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  nocoiner
  This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.
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  jjice
  Classically featured on the Angry Video Game Nerd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZTUX1bwJ0
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  ghc
  I never played Top Gun, but I did grow up playing "Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone" for the SNES. All these years later, it's still amazing to me how much the graphics improved from one console generation to the next. I don't remember any other console transition being so consequential from a graphics perspective.
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  proctorg76
  Landing in Top Gun is easy and I'd like to see everyone whining about it dock with the satellite in Captain Skyhawk while all of RARE's best demoscene tricks go off all around you.
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  jcalvinowens
  I love sim hijinks. It's possible to reliably land a 737 on the carrier in X-plane: just take off with 30min of fuel, drag it in with full flaps and high power, and set the parking brake before you touch down.
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  ethagknight
  The mission accomplished regardless of crash or land is hilarious
• TuringNYC
  Brought back memories! This was so frustrating, felt like a huge amount of randomness added to the controls. And each time you failed, you had to re-do the whole level. The other frustrating part of the game was mid-air refueling.
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  pikkoloassembly
  Oh god the trauma this brought back.
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  JoblessWonder
  I rented this game *TWICE* as a little kid and never got to actually do anything because I couldn't figure out how to land the damn plane.
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  01100011
  I'm 50 and got my NES in Xmas '86. It's funny how the difficulty has changed. I remember having no problem with carrier landings as a kid, beat Metroid(with the bikini ending) without reading Nintendo Power or calling the help line, figured out turtle trapping on my own...Going back and trying to do all this via emulation is now a lot harder. I don't know if it's the timing or the fact that I'm just old and crappy now, but if I didn't have the save states of an emulator I would have given up on gaming ages ago due to frustration.Then again I don't have the hyperfocus and 12 hour marathon gaming sessions like I did for much of my youth.
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  tuhgdetzhh
  Just for comparison, this is how the code could look like in Python: SUCCESS = 0 TOO_FAR_LEFT = 2 TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW = 4 TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH = 8 MIN_ALTITUDE = 100 MAX_ALTITUDE = 300 MIN_SPEED = 200 MAX_SPEED = 400 MIN_SPEED_200_RANGE = 238 MAX_SPEED_300_RANGE = 338 MAX_HEADING_RIGHT = 8 def landing_skill_check( altitude: int, speed: int, heading: int) -> int: if altitude < MIN_ALTITUDE: return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW if altitude >= MAX_ALTITUDE: return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH if speed < MIN_SPEED: return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW if speed >= MAX_SPEED: return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH if speed < 300: if speed < MIN_SPEED_200_RANGE: return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW else: if speed >= MAX_SPEED_300_RANGE: return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH if heading < 0: return TOO_FAR_LEFT if heading >= MAX_HEADING_RIGHT: return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW return SUCCESS
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  Supermancho
  Most NES games had "cheat" methodologies for game testing purposes, which made it into production cartridges. For Top Gun, you could bypass fighting anything on EVERY level, by flying up and to the left for the duration of the combat. I only knew a few of these tricks. In Parappa the Rappa, there were various patterns that would essentially complete every level with various outcomes, regardless of the actual songs.
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  teekert
  Reminds me a bit of the game Retaliator, when I was 12 a class mate earned himself a night of "pick your own time to go to bed at camp" because he could show the teacher how to land. [0, the landing is at the very end]. I think at the time nobody knew what key to hit to deploy the landing gear (and flaps, though I think you could land without flaps). And since it was all copied stuff there was no book, no internet...[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYwcrxbhiLs
• cloverich
  This just made my day. This landing was the bane of my existence back in kinder at my friends house, and I'd forgotten all about it. <3
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  amarant
  I was pretty smol when I played this game last. I don't think I've ever managed to actually land on that hangar ship. That was what my older brothers were for!
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  BashiBazouk
  Most people? Am I one of the few who grew up with video games from the beginning and mostly missed Nintendo? My equivalent for the time period was Falcon, in my case played on an Amiga 1000.
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  throwaway150
  > After about a minute of flying the game checks your state and plays a little cutscene showing either a textbook landing or an expensive fireball.So the game does not let the player go all the way to perform the landing? That'd be dissatisfying?
• dylan604
  Sometime ago I bought a USB NES controller to use with an emulator. I took it on work trips to kill time mainly playing Zeldas. This bit of nostalgia makes me want to knock the dust off of it and load this up.
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  rob74
  > After about a minute of flying the game checks your state and plays a little cutscene showing either a textbook landing or an expensive fireball. Either way, you get a “Mission Accomplished!” and go to the next level (after all, you don’t own that plane, the taxpayers do):For realism's (and comedy's) sake, they could have shown a pixel ejecting from the five (I think) pixels that form the jet before it explodes into a fireball, then floating down on a tiny parachute and being rescued by a tiny boat....but seriously, you didn't even get your score reduced for crashing the plane on landing?
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  throwaway2037
  The best part: > Best read with Danger Zone playing on loop
• burnte
  It took me months of play as a kid to finally land on that carrier. I felt like a Maverick himself when I finally landed it.
• pavel_lishin
  If I remember correctly, this game was very briefly featured on the Dungeons & Daddies podcast in the most recent season.
• pak9rabid
  Damn, that was a walk down memory lane.
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  Scene_Cast2
  If you're into carrier landings and have a VR headset, I highly recommend checking out VTOL VR.
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  thinkingtoilet
  I remember this being next to impossible as a kid. The whole game was tough, but this was on another level.
• reactordev
  Getting to stage 3 was a miracle when I was 9…
• angryjim
  Thank you for this.
• axpy906
  “the landing portion of the stage looks like this” Have not seen that ever and had an NES
• blitzar
  Come on, buddy, pull up. Pull up, Cougar.
• bjourne
  The landing was a piece of cake compared to the inflight refuling mission! I played Top Gun until the casette broke but could only pass that mission a handful of times.
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  moron4hire
  This is one of those cultural memes ("The Top Gun landing was ImPoSsIbLe") that tells on the person saying it for not having read the manual. If you don't read the manual, the landing sequence is pretty much impossible to figure out. If you do, you pretty much get it the first and every time after that.
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  busterarm
  I actually learned how to do this by playing the aircraft carrier landing simulator game that was at the USS Intrepid. It's a little more fleshed out but the speed range and altitude is roughly the same. The simulator gave you a light indicator to assist with your approach.
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  monooso
  Now I just need to get the hang of docking in Elite.
• flowardnut
  lol zscaler:>Request method cautioned for category Weapons/Bombs
• unwind
  Meta: Should have "NES" added to title to clarify it's about a game, not (as I thought) the movie.
• drbig
  Lers of Spoil: this is about a NES game ;-) Pretty cool still, especially if one's into reverse engineering.