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> Results: After Burner: Black Falcon
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The ESRB Says
Mild Language: GamerDad heard pilots get surprised and in trouble and react with mild words like 'hell' and 'damn'. Mild Suggestive Themes: Especially playing as the female pilot you will hear a few suggestive comments. Use of Tobacco: There is incidental smoking as part of occasional cutscenes. Violence: All of your missions involve blasting aircraft out of the sky or destroying ground targets. After Burner was released as an arcade game twenty years ago and was enormously popular partly because of the excellent controls and graphics, and also because of the unique hydraulic seat in the enclosed cabinet version. Either way you were in for thrilling action taking on wave after wave of fighters and ground and sea targets. Something terrible has happened - no, it isn't that they messed up the game - a rogue group has taken thirteen of your most top secret planes away and it is up to you to lead the forces and bring them all back - dead or alive. The action is right out of the arcade, but the graphics are excellently done. You can see things coming from miles away, and the sense of speed is tremendous - yet the game never slows down a bit. The controls map perfectly to the PSP, so you never feel like you need an extra hand to make things work. There are twenty-five missions per pilot, and each pilot has different objectives to suit their individual characteristics. This provides plenty of replayability, which is good since the multiplayer is ad-hoc only and fairly limited. Upgrades and alternate ships feel significantly different, which is something the game shows you on the second mission, where you have a strike bomber rather than a fighter. The biggest complaint I have is that the entire game is 'on rails' - you are headed in the direction the game dictates whether you like it or not, and trying to cruise above something you are supposed to be below simply means crashing. Other than that this is just unbridled fun from end to end - the missions ramp in challenge, and the optional mission elements give you plenty of extra things to strive for while up in the air. Missions are fairly quick and can be retried if you fail, making this great for gaming on the run!  
The fact that some of the pilots engage in smoking pretty much earned this game a T rating. There is nothing else in the content that would warrant a rating above E-10+, and given that the tobacco use is incidental in cutscenes and not glamorized in any way, I'm giving the game a GamerDad Seal of 10+. The rest of the game is a harmless arcade flight romp. You shoot down planes, blow up ships, take out bridges and radar, and all in the same way as the arcade game from ages ago. The mood is pretty light throughout - there is no desperation or vengeance, just missions upon missions.
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