AIRBORNE IN THE U.S.A

IT'S BEEN ONLY a decade since Top Gun debuted (and ended up amassing $177 million at the box office), but it feels more like a century: Not even Pat Buchanan could produce such a ramrod-straight, unquestioning celebration of military prowess, given the nation's drift from Reagan-era jingoism to Clinton-era cynicism. Still, as is so often the case, the commonsense rules that apply in the real world have nothing to do with multimedia -- which brings us to TOP GUN FIRE AT WILL! (Spectrum HoloByte, CD-ROM for PC, $50), a disc that pretends that it's still 1986 and there's no problem that can't be solved with a souped-up Grumman F-14 Tomcat.

A basic flight simulator with perfunctory, tacked-on movie elements, Top Gun puts you in the boots of flyboy cadet Lieutenant Maverick (played by Tom Cruise in the movie). You get your marching orders from Commander Hondo (bare-pated James Tolkan, reprising his movie role) and execute them with a notable lack of irony. The action sequences are serviceable, but they're nothing to write home about from flight school -- as with most such games, there's a heavy wonk factor (literally every key on the keyboard has some in-flight function), and the novice PC jockey anticipating a user-friendly interactive movie on the order of Wing Commander IV will likely experience control-panel shock. More important, anyone expecting Cruise or Kelly McGillis to put in an appearance will be carting this baby back to the store -- Top Gun is the latest in a long line of CD-ROM movie adaptations that conveniently omit the source's principal stars. To paraphrase the hit song from Top Gun, this isn't the kind of game that takes my breath away. C