Fire in the Sky

I just had to go to the source material. If you’re making a game about mercenary pilots, you’re going to be thinking about Area 88. You’re going to be channeling Area 88. That’s all there is to it. Why? Coupla reasons:

1) As far as I can tell, there are no mercenary air squadrons that fly jet fighter aircraft, and never have been. Real life PMC’s may fly their own helicopters and transport aircraft, but not fighters.

2) Fighters require way too much expensive maintenance to make them profitable to operate. And while it’s okay for private individuals to own certain decommissioned fighter aircraft, they usually aren’t allowed to mount effective air-to-air weapons on them!

We can quibble about light attack aircraft and such, but if you can find me a real-life, operational mercenary air unit flying F-4’s, F-16’s and whatnot, I’d love to hear about it!

So anyway, I watched the Area 88 OAV again last weekend and it was, as I remembered, awesome (last time I saw it was probably around 1988). The transfer was a good one and although the animation is a bit crude compared the GGI wizardry of today, I thought it held up well. The story of course was fantastic and I saw a lot of applications for the Energy mechanic in my game. Something else I want to be sure to bring in is the scrabbling for money that the pilots have to do.

Finally, the whole bit about Baggage and the pilots having to address it in play was spot on in regards to the way the characters in Area 88 had to deal with their issues. For example, at the end of the story Shin makes his choice (no spoilers), and it’s a good example of someone who’s run out of Energy. He’s got resolution on his issue, but things definitely do not go the way he had always thought they would. Another character, Nguyen, probably maxed out his Energy, but the outcome of his story was also not what he expected.

I’m going to think about this some more. Y’all go watch Area 88!

This entry was posted on May 22, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.