Ace of Aces

Alex; let me guess... you had the tape version- I had that too! It was a *horribly* slow multiload made all the worse by the Atari's painfully slow tape drives.

I'm guessing that this was originally written and intended as a disk-based game, since it was developed by an American company (AFAIK the U.S. market was mainly disk-based by the mid-late 80s). I'd also guess that the tape version was an afterthought, possibly only commissioned by U.S. Gold for the UK release.

Here's the annoying thing- although quite a lot of UK Atari owners had disk drives (because the Dixons chain sold 800XL/1050 bundles at a very low price in the mid-1980s), the UK 8-bit market as a whole was still fairly tape-driven. The "Budget" computer games market (originals and cut-price reissues of full-price games) in particular was built around cassettes, and they were almost never available on disk. So even us disk-owning Atari users ended up with lots of stuff on tape and suffering slow loading and "Load Error" messages. That's why I had this game on tape. Aaaaaargh! Wish I'd known how good "Transdisk" was much sooner.

Ha ha ha, damn i remember this, the first thin was it took an eternity to load, and when the game started i was in some sort of cockpit before being shot down by something ( less than 1 minute into playing)and then it said something bout loading the game over...
Absolute long thing