Overview
The game released on Sega CD and FM Towns as "After Burner III" started life as an arcade game called Strike Fighter. Sega first developed the game as a sequel to G-LOC: Air Battle and released it exclusively to arcades in 1991.
CRI, which regularly took Sega arcade games and converted them for high-end Japanese home computers able to support the tech behind them, then adapted the game for the FM Towns system in mid-1992 as After Burner III, adding a feature that allowed the player to switch from the default (and originally, only) cockpit view to the third-person perspective more commonly associated with After Burner. That computer port then became the basis of the Sega CD version, which was released in Japan at the end of 1992 and in North America and Europe in 1993.
Even in its original form, Strike Fighter closely resembled After Burner and re-used various elements such as the "fire" sample used when locking on and launching missiles. In the game, players control an F-14 Tomcat through over twelve levels of dogfights and air-to-ground combat.
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