The g max Archives - an Ace Combat 5 fan site

At high noon on October 29, 2004 I met with a friend at a local retailer where we combined our video game purchases to take advantage of a sale. Or so the story goes...

My part of the purchase included Namco's "Ace Combat 5, The Unsung War." Over the next month or so I played through and essentially completed the game, and I very nearly put it on the shelf and went on with the rest of my life, but I was really hoping for a little more... A few years before I had also played Ace Combat 04, and by the time I came to the game a number of other players had been at it for quite some time. It was pretty amazing. Surely Ace Combat 5 would be similar...

So I started monitoring the online forums, and in early December 2004 came the first rounds of record-setting challenges. I played the game a lot, learned a lot about the game, and set a number of records for the time. I also had the privilege of discussing the game in great detail with a number of other players avidly working on their tactics and setting records of their own.

Eventually we all started reaching our limits - and what we began to realize were the limits of the game itself. Challenges, goals, and interests started to shift, and many accomplished players moved on. The game, however, continued to enjoy a lot of interest driven largely by an ongoing influx of new players. I was interested in assisting the community, and offered advice when I could that I hoped would be helpful.

Much earlier on, I had considered writing a FAQ with a focus on setting scoring and timing records, and at the time there were almost no FAQs on the game whatsoever - so almost anything would have been acceptable. I wanted to write something really good though, and writing a really good FAQ is a lot of work. As many of the early players moved on my own motivation diminished. Many other 'general-purpose' FAQs and walk-throughs started to appear, and for the most part it seemed that the needs of the community were probably already being met.

More time passed and eventually I went ahead and organized some of the information I had collected, including some detailed comments on key FAQs. The result is what you see now - an archive - a generally quiet, probably dusty sort of place. There probably won't be a lot of changes from here on out, but it will be here for posterity's sake.

There is no way that this page would be complete without mentioning two of the pillars of the Ace Combat community: grandmort and Mitoro.

grandmort was behind the record-setting challenge that extended my interest in this game in the early days. He has a most excellent Ace Combat 04 site that enthusiasts will enjoy at shatteredskies.net.

Mitoro does a lot of analysis and keeps the fans and players in Japan informed. He has a site that covers Ace Combat 04 and Ace Combat 5, including a scoreboard for Ace Combat 5 where you can see some very serious records. The site is in Japanese and well worth a look even if you have to use babelfish. (That's what I have to do...) The site is at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/mitoro/page/.

Full credit also has to go to Namco for bringing the game to market. Keep it coming guys! I have links to Namco's sites at the bottom of this page.

Hopefully you will find what you are looking for here - or at least something kind of interesting. Have fun!

g _max

Here are some of the key pages on the site:

Here are some links to official Namco sites:

(requires flash and javascript)

acecombat5.namco.com (requires flash and javascript) Legal