Normality throws the player into a dystopian metropolis leaning towards the psychedelic. Right in the middle of it, you take over the role of a teenager in his fourties called Kent who finds himself in his flat which has gone under in total chaos. Due to the game being classified as appropriate for six-year-olds, there are no beer bottles, porn magazines or even a huge, filthy bong to be found. Instead, there is just a boob tube, a dripping faucet and a permanently nodding tumbler bird. The run-down gloominess of Neutropolis does not fit with the good-natured and carefree mind of the protagonist.
Nothing stolen, nothing gained. While the world was anxiously waiting for the next generation of the Micro Machines series, Ignition came out of nowhere and took pretty much exactly the same line. OK, strictly speaking, they're not toy cars, but you do drive unlikely vehicles across unlikely tracks.
So you're in a school bus (obviously, the coolest choice), plowing right through the jungle, the 'road' leads you right across the top of a pyramid and oops… a boulder dropped down from above and flattened you good. Oh well, no worries – you'll be up and running again in a moment, just that you've lost precious seconds against the competition. So, like Micro Machines, Ignition is good, light-hearted fun racing where you can shove, push or crash as many times as you like – if you think it will be to your advantage.
With the advent of new technologies comes a time of innovation, a time when pioneers set out to explore the potential of the latest inventions. Red Baron is remarkable in this concern because it is not only about the early days of a new kind of warfare, but because it was in itself one of the first dedicated combat flight simulators for home computers set in this era. And so it helped to lay down the basics of the genre just like the historical biplanes in it did for the aerial combat. A very fitting combination so to speak which gives the game a timeless appeal: Entering this world of rough 3D graphics and simplistic flight models seems to have a lot in common with taking off in one of those fragile flying machines of WWI. But let us take a look at how exactly this works to the game’s (dis)advantage and what else makes it a classic.
