1942 review: a roll button, a P-38, and a sky full of Zeros

A twin-boom fighter climbs up a scrolling ocean, and enemy planes come at it in waves from every angle. A single hit, or a single collision, and you lose a life. That is a hard rule. So 1942 hands you one great escape: press the roll button and your plane loops up and out of the fight for a moment, untouchable, then drops back in.

The loop is the design

The roll is what makes 1942 more than a busy shooter. It only lifts you out of the fight for a moment, so every loop is a decision. Roll too early and you come back down into the same mess. Roll too late and you are already gone. Good players start reading the sky for the moment the fire converges, then loop right through it and come out behind the formation.

It changes how you look at the screen. Instead of dodging bullet by bullet, you plan around the few moments when dodging is impossible.

Escorts and the percentage

One power-up gives you two smaller escort fighters that fly alongside you in formation, and for a while the sky feels a little less crowded.

1942 also keeps a second score next to the normal one: a percentage showing how many of the enemies you shot down. It is a quiet challenge for the perfectionist in the room. Survival gets you the high score. Precision gets you the percentage.

In 1942 the most important button is the one that does not shoot.

What it meant back then

1942 was the first Capcom game designed with Western markets in mind, and it shows. You fly an American P-38, called the Super Ace, across the Pacific in a story loosely based on the Battle of Midway, pushing all the way to Tokyo against a sky full of Zeros. For American kids who had grown up on their grandfathers' war stories and Saturday afternoon movies on TV, that setup needed no explanation.

In the United States it became one of the top five highest-grossing arcade conversion kits of its year, which meant arcade owners were swapping it into old cabinets all over the country. You often found it in a machine whose side art said something else entirely, at a pizza place or a convenience store, humming away in the corner. For Capcom, it was a breakaway hit.

Playing it now

1942 is still a clean, demanding shooter. It is hard, but it is rarely unfair, because you can usually see the moment you should have looped. Save your rolls for the moments you cannot dodge, grab the escort power-up when you can, and try, just once, to finish with a good percentage.