Ghost Pilots (Arcade)

Approaching an SNK multicade cabinet can be a bit daunting, choice paralysis easily setting in when you approach something that can pack in over one hundred games. Even the cabinets that only have three or four can sometimes make it hard to pick which of the games on offer to play… but since I didn’t think I had the time to learn an SNK fighting game, the pool of options suddenly condensed to a much more manageable number. Having never heard of Ghost Pilots before, I picked it from the remaining options, and unfortunately it soon became quite clear why I had never heard of SNK’s 1991 shoot ’em up.

Beginning with minimal setup, up to two players play as the Ghost Pilots, Tom Phillips and Charlie Stingley heading off to fight a Nazi general in World War II. To combat the pair’s seaplanes, the general will throw all the planes, tanks, and ships he can at them, as well as some specially designed boss vehicles that are often more tanks and aircraft fitted with multiple guns and special weapons. The players rely primarily on a pretty typical pair of machine guns, the bullets able to gradually chew through any foe no matter their type so long as enough shots hit. By defeating special groups of red planes though power-ups will appear, some upgrading the plane weapons to fire more shots, some providing extra lives, and others providing additional bombs. Before a stage, players can pick from two bomb options, the specific weapons changing over the course of the game but many of them are simply high damaging attacks that cover a decent area for a short period. Napalm lingers on the ground a while, aerial mines spread out more, and there’s even a bomb whose explosion can be guided after it has been fired, but for the most part they’re big blasts meant to either clear out crowding enemies or deal big damage to a boss vehicle.

Your abilities are plain but decent enough for a shoot ’em up and the different bomb types are mildly interesting, but the problem is this fairly standard design is an incredibly poor fit for the game it’s found itself in. Ghost Pilots is ruthless, the screen quickly getting crowded with plenty of planes who are firing at you or dive bombing towards your plane. If you’re above land, ground forces will join in too, and since your only counter to the abundance of baddies is to shoot them with front facing guns, you need to weave around a lot to try and thin these abundant hordes. At first it’s tough but manageable, but the game begins to add in enemies who will fly in from behind you, fly in by flipping over you, and vehicles that take plenty of shots before they’ll go down. Mixing in enemies you can’t kill until they’re positioned right with the same mad rush of basic foes requires you to be constantly on your toes, and since many enemies can fly in from below first or flip in from above, it can be hard to keep track of what can even be targeted by your shots in the mayhem. Ghost Pilots is definitely trying to crowd the screen so it can score easy kills on you, and while you do get three lives to a quarter, they can go fast, especially since you lose all upgrades to your shot any time you die.

The bosses are interesting in concept but run into the same issues as regular enemies sadly. Fighting a giant boss covered with guns you gradually destroy does mean you can try to pick where to strike first to remove that danger from play, but there are often so many that finding a safe spot before you’ve destroyed a few is likely going to take some lives. You do get three bombs after a death so you can brute force bomb your way through a fight, but you also lose any extra bombs you had if you die before dropping them. Fighting a well armed hovercraft, battle-ready zeppelin, and the final boss’s flying fortress involves dodging a lot of bullet spray from various directions, and while these can be a bit more fair if you come to the fight packing weapon upgrades, the path to the boss makes it difficult to approach these more interesting foes with anything but the basics. Two players working together can ease up on some of the deliberate quarter-munching difficulty of it all, but the design doesn’t get better just because you’re not the one taking every shot.

Some people might approach the high difficulty as a challenge, and if you’re not too beat up about losing quarters then a game that puts up such a fight sound appealing. However, the level layouts are what ensure that Ghost Pilots isn’t enjoyable as a hard game. While the forward movement of the play area is controlled by the game, the screen doesn’t show all the room there is to maneuver. There are horizontal areas that the screen will scroll to show when you approach, meaning that enemies have even more room to approach and might do so in a way that’s harder to see coming. There are even bosses so wide you can’t view all of them at once, and there are unfortunately weapons waiting on those areas that can be hidden by the screen borders meaning you can be killed by something you can’t see coming.

The horizontal scrolling can lead to the gameplay problem of being blindsided by a shot from seemingly nowhere, but what really drags down Ghost Pilots more than anything is that on top of its eagerness to kill you, it just doesn’t have enough enemies to stay interesting across its nearly hour long run time. After the opening levels, the game lets you choose which of two paths to tackle first and that will influence the next few stages, there being ones taking place over land and ones focused purely on aerial dogfights, and it’s the sky focused stages that really drag on because the plane enemies are all so similar to each other. While colors and vehicle design are mixed up slightly, they all copy each others tactics, the shots, the movement, the diving in from above or rising from below… these aerial stages are just countless waves of similar baddies repeating what you’ve already seen before. There are some larger planes who mostly rely on their size to dominate space and threaten you, and then these are recycled and repeated so often they grow stale as well. The ground stages are an improvement mostly because tanks and ships are added to the mix, but these all feel very similar to each other because the ground enemies don’t influence the action enough to distract from the fact the aircraft are still the same foes you’ve faced in every other stage. All the creativity was spent on the bosses while the regular baddies you spend most the game fighting just fill time repeating the same attack approaches you’ve seen constantly during your session, and not even in a way where you can learn their methods and dodge them better for it. They’ll attack from a different spot or delay their weapon fire more than the previous one, Ghost Pilots staling very quickly no matter how you feel about its difficulty level.

THE VERDICT: Ghost Pilots focuses too hard on killing the player instead of providing them a fun shoot ’em up experience. The seaplanes you play as are basic and any upgrades can be easily lost to the abundance of enemy fire, but even if you can retain your more powerful weapons you’ll find your time spent shooting down the same enemy types over and over, the only interesting breaks in the action being bosses who come in with so many weapons they sometimes can’t even fit on screen all at once. The main problem is definitely the monotony, so many stages being the same experience of flying forward and facing essentially identical enemy planes who all use the same tactics, so even if you do want a challenging shoot ’em up, Ghost Pilots makes sure part of the challenge is pushing through tons of tedium.

And so, I give Ghost Pilots for arcade machines…

A TERRIBLE rating. Overcoming a difficult game, even one with unfair moments of offscreen shots, can be satisfying in its own way. However, Ghost Pilots mostly achieves its difficulty by recycling the same enemy types over and over and trying to cram them all onto the screen at once. The levels end up being slow flies through constant repetition, the game hard because it slaps too many of the same generic planes on screen instead of having foes with interesting attack types or unique fighting methods. The bosses threaten to be more interesting though, but their weapon indulgence means you often can lose your special abilities at the start of the fight where you might not even be able to target all the of the boss yet. Ghost Pilots ends up frustrating because it’s so desperate to drain your quarters and only offers up repetitive action that doesn’t warrant the devotion needed to get to the mildly interesting boss battles. If it had been shorter it might not have felt so excruciating to fight the same planes over and over, but the true fix would be making the enemies more interesting to engage with and making them truly feel different from each other.

With both your own options limited and your opponents limited in variety, Ghost Pilots only really has its bosses to show off as a reason to play it, and those aren’t really that impressive either. It is a game that both throws everything it has at you but has so little to throw, so if you are looking for something in the SNK multicade to play, you won’t be missing much if you skip over this forgotten shoot ’em up.