Pilotwings (SNES)
While Pilotwings may seem like a pretty straightforward flight simulator on the surface, the reasons for its existence become much clearer when you look at its time of release. The Super Nintendo was introducing new technical capabilities to 16-bit gaming that a flight sim would be perfect for showcasing, things like Mode 7 allowing for the game to simulate a 3D environment while using 2D assets like sprites and flat ground textures. Sprite Scaling was also an impressive new addition, the ability for pixel graphics to shrink or grow to simulate distance a feature that worked well alongside the faux 3D style. As a showcase of the SNES’s power and its new features, a flight simulator that could take advantage of this free 3D movement really was an excellent choice, providing the kind of display and interactivity older systems could only weakly simulate with different degrees of compromise.
Named for the pilot wings badge used to indicate an individual has received proper aviation training, it’s quite appropriate this flight sim is depicted as a sequence of tests to earn different licenses and degrees of flight certification. Rather than simply focusing on one form of aviation though, Pilotwings spreads it wings and provides the player with a few different styles of flight they’ll have to learn the ins and outs of to achieve certification. The Light Plane is the most expected and typical of the bunch, but the game includes things like skydiving and hang-gliding as well, with the last main style even being the fanciful Rocketbelt that is essentially a jetpack that aims to better emulate its use in fiction rather than the more realistic approaches to flight the other three styles emulate.
To progress in the game requires earning enough points across whichever set of these four flight forms is grouped together for a certain license level. The player is able to tackle whichever ones are available in the order they please, each one worth 100 points if performed perfectly, and while the point totals for certification don’t require perfection, they often do require a good degree of skill since grading often involves things like speed, hitting certain requirements unique to that style, and most importantly, not failing. If you crash, land in the water, or miss a target area, you will receive no points for that round, and while the Pilotwings island features long runways and big landing areas, you will need to measure your approach to best mix accuracy with speed of completion. If you don’t earn enough points across all the flight styles you can always try again from that level of certification and the retry option appears after any flight, but the presentation of Pilotwings is odd in one way. Rather than giving you the means to learn a certain control method through proper training, the game arranges it so you have to keep tackling them in groups. Rather than presenting scaling challenges in a certain flight type, you do a few across the different styles and then have them mixed and matched for the next license level. Retrying the same thing over and over seems like the only decent way to develop your skills in a style, and then you’ll inevitably spend time with the other styles after that, the need to master four flight forms splitting your focus and potentially leading to less retained knowledge between the styles.
This mix and match approach won’t hurt the player’s abilities to an overly detrimental degree, but it does make getting a hang of the game more difficult than it should be. Being able to pick the order you do a license’s challenges does mean, if you score high enough, you can even skip some styles for that round, although to do so usually involves taking huge risks rather than playing perfectly. In many challenges there are special areas you can land to unlock bonus games. Regardless of your performance in the flying mode, the bonus game comes with a free 100 point boost and the ability to earn more either by diving into a pool from a high dive as a penguin or using a strange wing suit to hop and fly into marked point zones. Landing on the bonus triggers is definitely hard, harder than aiming for an excellent score with the regular rating system perhaps, but it can also pull a round of challenges from the brink of defeat.
When it comes to the core flying styles, Light Plane feels the best realized and the most like what it should be. Most rounds involve flying a plane around in the air, either through rings or by hitting markers that are meant to lead you to the runway. Adjusting pitch and speed while flying the plane is the right amount of realistic without being too complex, and landing on the runway requires the proper lead-in, slow down, and angles to go well. The game has an Expert mode that unlocks after going through the initial batch of challenges where inclement weather can impact play by causing the runway to get slippery during the more difficult mission types, Light Plane feeling this the most due to its reliance on the landing, but it is mostly meant to ensure you’ve developed your skills properly rather than being a huge impediment to late game play. The other flight styles are a bit plain or straightforward comparatively. Hang-gliding is probably the least interesting, the player needing to slowly glide into updrafts to hit elevation requirements before coming in for a landing that just involves pulling up once you’re slow enough. Skydiving also feels a little too simple. Dropping from high above the island, the player needs to move around to pass through rings before opening the parachute and drifting down to a target area, the process usually just involving circling the desired spot in a way that controls the speed of the descent. Rocketbelt is more focused on the freedom of movement than the others, the hovering controls allowing for a range of vertical and horizontal movement, but it mostly just involves smacking into surprisingly solid markers before landing on a target area. Simplicity does ensure some of these are easier to master in the mishmash presentation of the certification challenges, but it also means some of them, especially hang-gliding, don’t ever evolve beyond their slightly enjoyable baseline design.
Perhaps the most unexpected moment in Pilotwings though is when the flight simulation style is put aside for a moment as small stories involving villainous kidnappers and an attack helicopter pops up. The EVIL syndicate on Izanu Island has multiple surface-to-air weapons that the player is asked to avoid or shoot down with their missiles while flying into enemy territory with a helicopter… a helicopter you are notably never trained to use. It is a pass/fail style of mission that can be repeated infinitely, but what is presented as a culmination of your training has no true tie to it. It flies differently with its top-down horizontal approach to flight, faces aggression, attacks back, and is even open to the player flying around the island in whatever approach they deem most effective. It’s an interesting deviation still despite being disconnected in concept, and while your helicopter is instantly taken down if a single hit lands, it still feels better executed than some of the flight styles that get repeated more often despite being less about flight simulation and more about action.
THE VERDICT: Pilotwings does show off the Super Nintendo’s technical capabilities well in this mildly entertaining flight simulator, but its mixed up style of presenting the different flight modes does it few favors. The demand for precision performance makes for a decent level of challenge, but mastering the styles is difficult as you keep shifting between them, with some reasonably fun and tight like Light Plane and others feeling slow and poorly realized like Hang Glider. Strange diversions like the bonus games and helicopter missions add some spice to the experience, but the presentation and point requirements hinders this batch of mostly decent play styles from soaring to greater heights.
And so, I give Pilotwings for Super Nintendo…
An OKAY rating. Giving the player a chance to acclimate to each play style before throwing them into the mix and match style of certification challenges would do a lot in helping the game get over the hump of the early game. When everything is new, learning the ropes, the unique physics to each style, and how to perform vital tasks like landing is complicated by being ripped out and pushed along to the next flight challenge. Hang Glider is the only mode that really feels lacking, most of them a fairly good mix of variables you have to actively consider with each movement, so even with the presentation giving you little time to spend developing your skills in them, they can still be enjoyable enough to sustain the experience. The helicopter missions are perhaps the best case of the game presenting things well. They do come out of nowhere and don’t truly connect to your aviation skills developed across the other games, but you can train up in the style since you retry it and only it repeatedly until you succeed, and by its reappearance later, the skills can either be relearned if necessary or were properly trained into you through repetition. If the game began with some starter courses for each style to help you get the basics down, then maybe the mixed challenges would have worked better, but even in its current form, Pilotwings does have an interesting degree of variety to it and reasonable controls that will make time spent with it moderately fun.
Pilotwings is an impressive title for the system it’s on and has polish in the right areas. Besides hang-gliding’s bland challenge design, most of what Pilotwings does borders on being good, it just gets delivered to the player in a way that doesn’t complement the tight requirements for success. Modern rereleases like the Wii U Virtual Console and Switch SNES games program can actually skirt around these issues with their restore point and rewind features allowing for less tedious training, but Pilotwings in its normal form is just a little bit too demanding with the way it presents its challenges, making it difficult to meet Pilotwings on its level.