We are pleased to report the iranian space shuttle has been destroyed.... wait what? You see, in Top Gun the film, Maverick actually downs 3 MIG fighters in the only actual combat mission of the story. In Top Gun the NES video game, you do that within the first 10 seconds of gameplay so... yeah... the only things Top Gun here are that you pilot a plane in the navy and you get a 8-bit rendition of the famous musical theme of the movie. A lot of money must have went in the rights for the Top Gun name, logo and music, because not much is left for the game.
The game is a pseudo flight simulator. The top half of the screen is the cockpit view and the bottom half is the cockpit, with a radar, info about your speed and altitude, remaining missiles (before each mission you pick one of three missile types), fuel and 'health'. It's not uncommon for games of that era to have big chunks of the screen used by a mostly static UI to lighten the graphic work load. This is a pseudo flight simulator, because you don't actually freely fly a plane in a space. It's more like a rail shooter, so you get set encounters based on a timer, but you can adjust the direction you look at and the game will adjust the trajectory of the enemies accordingly, sorta. No barrel roll, no looping, no Immelmann here. Only look right, look left, look up (by pushing down flight stick style)
, look down, A button to shoot your gun, B button to lock and then fire missiles. Bare bone stuff. In fact, this is so bare bone that you also don't get any music during combat missions and also, no pause button (it's unclear to me if it's a strange oversight, a technical limitation because of the way the game is coded or a pretty mean design decision - the Souls games, again!).
While rudimentary, the system kinda works and there is something satisfying about tracking and gunning down enemy planes (there is a nice friction here, because the more you look off center, the more the camera wants to look back to the center, a bit like a rubber band trying to pull it back, so the camera movement is not linear, but sorta logarithmic), getting rid of people on our 6 (this is materialized by an alert on the radar and you have to do some left and right to stop being tailed - I guess you get shot down if you don't break the tail, but it never happened to me!), shooting down or dodging incoming missiles or seeing gun fire whiz past you.
To add flavor to the combat phases, each mission ends with an infamous landing sequence and the middle point of missions 2, 3 and 4 have an in-flight refueling sequence. Both kinda work on the same principle: you need to do the right thing by following commands given to you on the radar (Speed up! Left! Right! etc). The refueling is pretty trivial (do what you are told and you end up winning before running out of fuel), but the landing is a lot trickier, because at the end of the sequence you are supposed to go toward the right direction and be in the ballpark of the right altitude and speed. Also, depending of the inclination of the plane, the speed and altitude affect each other differently. These correlations and the fact only one order can be given on the radar at a time can lead to very frustrating situations were you still crash even if you follow the prompts... fun times. When you get how it works though, you land the plane most of the time, but it still remains a nerve wracking experience... so I guess it's good?
This all would be pretty cool if it was not for a pretty big problem with the game: it is ridiculously hard if you try to play it honestly. You have a total of three lives to beat the game. Fail a landing? Here goes one life. Get hit by one of the dozens of rockets fired at you because it somehow tracked you despite your attempt at dodging it or because inexplicably your bullets missed it? Here goes another life. Get hit 4 times by gunfire during a mission? Down you go.... Oh and level 2, 3 and 4 end with boss battles where you need to kill a static ground target that vomits missiles at you while planes shoot at you, so you better reach those with a lot of hp or going down is a real possibility.... I suspect that to win the game honestly, you need to memorize and anticipate the whole script of the levels (and those are pretty damn long and, unlike a typical rail shooter, you don't have visual cues to help with the memorization). So yeah, you need to cheese it.
The cheese is simple: if you can't see it, it can't hurt you. Pull that flight stick as hard as you can, and all those destroyers and submarines and AA batteries become inefficient. Slide it left or right as hard as you can and 90% of the enemy planes will fly past you and miss you with their guns and missiles.... This is reminiscent of another '80s film: WarGames. "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." Obviously, 'playing' like this is not fun, a bit painful (remember there is no pause, so you are pressing that D pad diagonal for minutes) and it's till possible to die! You can die in boss fights, you can die in landing sequences, you can die because some planes here and there still manage to fire a rocket at you, you can die because you still have to break tails and when you maneuver to do that, you are exposed to enemy fire and rockets.... So yeah, the madness of this game is that even with cheese that cut out most of the content, it's still tense as heck and still feel like an achievement when you beat the game (because yes even with the cheese it took me several tries and boy are you not happy when you fail to shoot down that lone rocket after 15 minutes of pressing the D pad like an idiot...).
Iranian space shuttle though? Why?