Ace Combat 8 shows that old-school arcade thrills are timeless

Over the past 31 years, video games have changed a lot, especially in the realm of big-budget console releases. Chasing high scores has fallen by the wayside to an extent, and there's sort of an expectation that everything adopts RPG elements, or chases the high of an open-world, or otherwise follows some other recent trendy design choice.Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is not interested in most of that, judging from a short demo I got to play prior to the game's launch on Oct. 2 for PS5, Xbox Seri