P-47 Aces



P-47 Aces is a horizontally scrolling shoot'em up arcade game developed by NMK and published by Jaleco in 1995. It is notable for its obtuse "bumping"-based scoring system, highly detailed pixel art, and high degree of difficulty.

It has not been ported as of September 2020.

Controls
P-47 Aces is a 2 button game with a typical 8-way lever movement.


 * A: Shot (with internal autofire)
 * B: Bomb

It's worthwhile to have an autofire A button at 30Hz, as it's faster than the internal autofire. Keeping the internal autofire button is useful both for handling slowdown more effectively, and to reduce gaps in the firing pattern. For scoring, it is also common to add frame buttons on movement, to make positioning for bumping simpler and more consistent.

Internal Autofire
The autofire rate is different for the 3 parts of the player shot (main shot, anti-air shot, anti-surface shot), and are at the following rates:


 * Main Shot: 15 Hz (every 4 frames)
 * Anti-Air: 12 Hz (every 5 frames)
 * Anti-Surface: ~4.6 Hz (every 13 frames)

Tier List
For a 1 credit clear, with S being easiest to clear and D hardest to clear.

Power-ups


These items increase the Anti-Air and Anti-Surface weapon power levels by one. These items also serve as a bomb fragment system, and every time 6 of these (combined) are collected, a bomb item is generated.

Bomb


Increases bomb stock by 1. Up to 8 bombs may be stocked, and there is a small bonus (10'000 points) when collecting extra bombs.

Hyper


Increases the Anti-Air and Anti-Surface weapon powers to maximum. This item is only spawned by a player running out of lives, and is provided as a continue service. In a multi-player game, it's possible for the remaining player to pick up this item anyways.

Rank
P-47 Aces features a simple rank system, based entirely on survival time. Rank only affects enemy firing patterns, by removing bullets at lower rank values. It has 4 steps, from 0 to 3. Difficulty settings only adjust the rank minimum, maximum, and increment time. Each stage has a different setting for minimum and maximum rank. When a player dies, the value is subtracted by 3, effectively resetting the rank to 0.

Scoring
Score is primarily gained from many individual tricks that are generally unrelated to each other. As such, it's possible to avoid difficult tricks and only lose the points from the trick itself.

Hidden Score Areas
One of the most prominent score sources are the hidden score areas in each stage, which range in value from 100 to 10'000 points (mostly in increments of 1'000 points). These score areas are destructible objects with no graphics, generally placed on the top or bottom of the screen, or next to ground scenery. The higher the value of the area, the more damage is required to uncover it.

Tick Points
There are also significant amounts of points from the mere act of hitting objects with your shots. The object being hit does not need to be destructible, so it is possible to milk points out of scenery by getting close and firing repeatedly.

Enemy Destruction
Enemy destruction points are also not exactly obvious, as some enemies are built out of a multitude of parts. When an enemy is destroyed, it only awards points if the part being destroyed has been hit by the player. As such, some parts will not award their points unless the player has shot the part at least once before destroying the enemy.

Bumping
In addition to the above mechanics, 100 points are awarded every time the player touches a non-bullet, non-item object, which causes the player to bounce away from the center of that object. On its own, this is a rather hard source of points, but due to the design of the system, it's possible to put the player ship in a position where it will rebound between multiple objects quickly, causing a rapid rise of points. There are a few bosses, notably the stage 6 and stage 7 bosses, where it's possible to completely wedge the player ship inside the boss, making the player invincible for the duration, and causing a dramatic point gain.

Strategy
See P-47 Aces/Strategy for stage maps, enemy and boss descriptions, and advanced play strategies.

Version Differences
There are two versions of P-47 Aces, the original release (V1.0) and a relatively rare bug-fix update (V1.1). The differences are:
 * V1.1 fixes a bug that can cause severe sound effect cuing lag.
 * V1.1 fixes the sound test to actually work.

Trivia

 * The working title for this game was P-47 Kai
 * The stage 1 layout is a rough recreation of the stage 1 layout from the original P-47
 * The stage 7 boss theme is an arrangement of Theme of Bismarck from the original P-47

Gallery
See P-47 Aces/Gallery for our collection of images and scans for the game.