Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship for Sega Dreamcast

Take flight to the skies of big cities, volcanoes, castles and more in what would've been a pretty good eight player online game.

This was a game that I was really looking forward to after E3 2001. Dreamcast needed more games like this with fast paced online arcade style action. Disappointingly, the game was never released.

The story goes that the game was done, and as far as I can tell, it is complete. However, following the events of September 11th, 2001, Sega decided against publishing it because of one level called "Tower City" that would've allowed people to crash their planes into skyscrapers.

Propeller Arena is a game that takes place in the future but uses WWII era planes. You see, in the future it is a sport for a bunch of pilots to try and shoot each other down. Planes include the P-51 Mustang, P-38 Lightning, the German made Messerschmitt Bf 109, and a British Spitfire. There are eight characters to choose from, each is associate to one of the aforementioned planes.

There are also eight levels that consist of having battles over what appears to be Cape Canaveral, a big city, an erupting volcano, high above the clouds, at the ruins of a castle, in a lightning storm, in the American Southwest, and near some icebergs.

The environments create obstacles, like building to fly around, structures to fly through, or dangerous balls of fire flying through the air. There are power-ups to be gotten in the game, and sometimes these are put in places that are somewhat tricky to get to. Typical power-ups are weapons, bombs and missiles, health, or items that mess with the opponent, such as reversing or freezing their controls. I find them to be mostly useless as the effect wears off pretty quickly.

The flight range is pretty limited. The levels are small and if you go up too high you'll stall. The basic controls are good. Advanced controls, on the other hand, are not what I would call intuitive. For example, you can simply pull up to loop, or to the side to barrel roll. No, you have to perform a specific button combination like in Street Fighter to pull off a move. It's okay, but I would've preferred more simple controls. I'm not a really a fan of them having to be special moves.

One thing that threw me off the first time I played it is that there are not targeting vectors for the enemy planes to show you where to aim to lead into your target. At least there are a wide number of views, including cockpit.

The soundtrack is very punk, a la Crazy Taxi, but with a lot less talent. There are nine licensed tracks from bands like Zero Down, Rise Against, and No Use for a Name. On top of that there are 11 original punk tracks by AM2. Fortunately, there is a way to turn off the BGM, change the track, or turn it down.

Speaking of sound, the fucking announcer is annoying as shit. "Danger," "Danger!" Pfftt... Danger my ass. I've never been shot down once when he said danger, and he says it all of the damn time. I like to imagine that Sega would've smoothed this out a little bit before publishing it, but I doubt it.

The graphics in the game are good, really good. The planes look nice and the environments are a lot better than I expected. As it should be, because it's not like there's a lot to render. The character models, on the other hand, look like total shit. There no excuse for how bad they are.

For the low, low price of absolutely free, everyone should play Propeller Arena. Sure it would've been a lot cooler playing with eight people online with voice chat, but the single player and split screen modes are fun for a while. While it's not the killer app that would've saved the Dreamcast that some of its fans claim it to be, it's a pretty cool arcade game.