Hello everyone,
Lots of games to chatter about today. I had a sudden random thought about needing something more though. What’s behind the door today ?
It’s the iconic XWing today. Introduced in the first Star Wars movie and ever present in the films that came after. A balanced starfighter, agile with excellent firepower from guns and missiles, protected against glancing attacks with shielding, an astromech droid for repairs and navigation and good for atmospheric flight too.
Oh and perhaps a small cross section profile too, making it more difficult to hit. Many little boys (including me) would have grown up wanting to fly these, which probably contributed to the XWing game being such a success back in the day.
What was the random thought ?
Ah there we go. I read the Timothy Zahn Expanded Universe books first but a little earlier in the timeline came these, by Michael Stackpole and the later Wraith Squadron books by Aaron Allston. These were brilliant books. There was a huge amount of homage and information about how the XWings worked from the Rogue Squadron and Wraith Squadron books, although this just added to the character stories in the novels. I’d thoroughly recommend these, if the Timothy Zahn books were the rightful Eps 7, 8 and 9, then these would have been the basis for an excellent series.
About the games ? One thing George Lucas had been aiming for with the space battles was something akin to World War 1 dogfights. So Brain went to some of the flight sim games I have …
Yep. That’s a map of Korea and Southern China …
It looked good as well, for the time it came out. Flight sims have been on computers since the early days of the BBC, which had the game Aviator. This one saw you attempting to repel an alien locust invasion in a … Spitfire. Good game. Excel used to have a flight simulator hidden away in it.
Military jet flight sims have been a thing for many a decade too, although they reached a peak and went away after Falcon 4.0. They’d start with a small, artificial map and as the games improved, the map would get more and more detailed. Hills would be added. Towns and other features.
And then Falcon 4.0 models Korea … And has a fictional war break out where the North has invaded the South and you’re a small part in attempting to repel them. Your F-16 Fighting Falcon was fully modelled too with a manual almost 2cm thick. (I will do penance later for abandoning the glory of the Imperial number system).
There was a Bubble system, where the closer you got to places, the more the combat would resolve from Macro scale to Micro scale. This concept turned into flashes on the horizon at long distance resolving into individual missiles flying across the sky as you got closer to the combat zone.
It was a cracking game too, although I didn’t stay in it long enough to learn the systems fully. There was an active fan patching scene for Falcon 4.0 as well until that was apparently stopped in a pre-DMCA style STOP THAT order involving an update called Falcon 4.0 Allied Force.
The next one there is from 2001 and it was a misbegotten Eurofighter Typhoon sim …
As a Brit, I’m more interested in flying what we have instead of what the other countries have and this led me to being very interested in the Typhoon sim when it was released. This saw you as part of a detachment of Typhoon pilots stationed at Iceland … when the Russians invade.
It seemed like a very promising game but was deeply flawed. This covered things like the AI being unable to pilot properly (they couldn’t land at one airport due to a hill in the glideslope behind. But it was also a damage model that was just horribly wrong, leading to needing 2 missiles (Brimstone) to stop each tank. That was annoying.
What really made me bounce off this one was that it was extremely shallow, essentially an arcade game (like the MFDs there) rather than a simulation on the scale of Falcon 4.0. The expansion, Operation Icebreaker, tunneled even deeper into the “Oh you did not do that” level of bad with Super Typhoons on an Aircraft Carrier.
I did manage to acquire a copy of Joint Strike Fighter (the one that turned into the F-35) but didn’t manage to get that playable.
That brings me to the second picture and Crimson Skies.
This was pure arcade sim action, with modernised World War 1 style planes duking it out from airships.
I didn’t play this too much but did enjoy what I did. Perhaps it felt a bit shallow again. One really notable feature in Crimson Skies was being able to skip missions if you couldn’t satisfy the victory conditions.
I managed to finish Tie Fighter and the XvT Balance of Power campaigns but hit solid walls with the campaigns in XWing and if you couldn’t satisfy some really tough victory conditions, you didn’t progress in the campaign. This is how they extended the gameplay time in those days. If you got stuck in Crimson Skies, it would give you the option to skip and progress anyway.
I think I appreciate features like that much more nowadays where I’m more interested in playing through the story than in satisfying some daft GitGud urge. I don’t need to prove the skill, I’ve done that time and time again. (This is why Concussion 2 scared me with the lagged reactions)
I’m there to enjoy the game, especially seeing the story progress.
Brave New World is on the telly at the moment. I’ve stuck with that to see how the story progresses as well and … if there’s a season 2 I don’t think I’ll come back for it. The story has been a bit meh.
I’m hoping that a second season of the lovely Ghost In The Shell SAC 2045 comes soon. It’s the version of that story which I’ve enjoyed most so far. It doesn’t mine into the origin story like the live action movie and it doesn’t lose you in dull, overthought oddness like the older anime. It went for fast, light hearted (most of the time) fun instead.
Entertaining stuff is good. Hopefully the entertainment doesn’t come at the cost of others though ! (There’s a big AAA game out imminently that I will not mention here for many reasons)
On that note … I need food, time to put the dinner on.
Stay safe everyone, be well.