* On stages 27, 20, 15, 08, and 04, a V-formation of red planes will come straight down from the top. If all 5 of the planes are destroyed, a Black/Red POW appears, giving the player an extra airplane when picked up.
* Staying Alive: Racking up high scores and killing high percentages of enemy is a great way to play, but survival is the key to beating the game. Nothing else matters if you can’t keep your plane alive through the 32 increasingly grueling stages. The following is a collection of tips that will help you keep your fighter in the air, and the quarters in your pocket.
* Stay away from the bottom: It’s very tempting, with all of the planes that swoop down upon from the top of the screen, to keep your fighter backed all the way on the bottom of the screen. While this strategy may work in other shooters, and even in 1942 throughout the very early stages, it won’t work for long. 1942 likes to send a number of larger, slower moving planes up through the bottom of the screen from behind you. They don’t launch onto the screen like the small planes do, so you should have plenty of time to see and avoid them, unless you’re pressed up against the screen. At the very bottom, you really won’t provide yourself with enough reaction time to get out of the way of a newly arriving aircraft. Somewhere right between the bottom half and the bottom quarter of the screen is a safe place to remain, pulling all the way back in case of emergencies, then correcting your position as soon as the danger has passed.
* Keep your eye on your plane: One mistake that novice shooter players tend to make is to monitor everything on the screen except for their own craft. In 1942, this is especially dangerous because the enemy fighters are not simple drones that fire directly on your current position. They employ a little intelligence and try to shoot at where you are most likely to move. If you insist on following your instincts in order to set yourself up for the most advantageous shot, you will likely find yourself colliding unexpectedly with a bullet that slowly floated to meet you at your destination. Therefore, if you spend a little more time watching your own plane, you will have a higher tendency to see any potential dangers immediately around you, and react faster to them. Oftentimes, it is better to stand still right where you are and let the bullets whiz past you, even though this may feel counter-intuitive.
* On stages with the wingmang powerups, use them to kill off the large bombers easily by crashing a wingman into them. You will get a second chance to get them back later on.
* On the stages with the boss planes, save all your loops; shoot at it quickly, loop down to avoid the shots, shoot at it again and THEN loop. You should be able to kill it this way.
* Most of the time it is easier to keep only one wingman rather than both; that way it’s easier to maneuver around enemies. If you miss the red airplanes that give you the wingman powerup, kill off your plane (assuming you have some remaining) and the game will place you back before them.
* An interesting bug : If you win an extra plane from points when killing a boss plane, no extra planes will be awarded on the basis of points. Extra planes can still be obtained by getting the Black/Red POW, but no point-based bonuses will be awarded for the rest of the game.
* The end of stage bonus for 100% shooting down is actually 50,000 points, even though the game displays a ‘special’ bonus of only 10,000 points.
When the player loses all of his ships, the game offers to continue for another credit. If this option is chosen, the game continues where it left off but the score is reset to zero.
* There are 6 kinds of powerups : Quad fire, destroy all enemies on screen, 2 wingmen, make enemies stop shooting temporarily, extra loop, and extra life. Note that the destroy all enemies powerup does not destroy the small slow plane that has the 5,000 bonus item pickup.
Quad fire powerups are found on stages 32, 28, 24, 20, 16, 12, 08, and 04.
Destroy all enemies powerups are found on stages 31, 21, 19, 18, 11, 07, 03, and 01.
Wingman powerups are found on stages 30, 26, 22, 18, 14, 10, 06, and 02.
Extra life powerups are found on stages 27, 20, 15, 08, and 04.
Stop shooting powerups are found on stages 27 and 15.
Extra loop powerups are found on stages 23, 18, 17, 13, 09, and 05.
* % and point up Stages: Stages 29, 25, 21, 17, 13, 9, 5, and 1 are referred to, by the game, as % and Point Up stages. These stages are your opportunity to dramatically increase your score and your destruction percentage, because none of the small planes will shoot at you during these stages. The large planes that enter the screen will still shoot, but you can remain free of the fear of getting shot by everything else, enabling you to play and shoot a little more boldly than you would otherwise. You will be informed of these stages just as you take off from the aircraft carrier, but they begin when you have 29 stages left, and occur ever four stages thereafter.
* If the player earns enough bonus planes so that 10 ships or more are in the reserve, the 10 remaining ships indicators are replaced by the Greek letter sigma (Σ).