I spent most of Friday playing an aerial combat game that’s currently pre-beta, and chatting to some of the people behind it. It was a pleasant enough day, but a few of the things the Project Lead said caused me to shake my wizened noggin in a ‘Will they ever learn?’ manner. Now, I’m not one of those simmers that believes every flight game has to be as brutally realistic as Falcon 4.0 or DCS: Black Shark, but I do feel certain elements of aviation-based entertainment are non-negotiable. After the cut, my list of Eight Things Every Air Combat Game Should Sport.
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1. Cockpit views
Viewed from a chase cam all warbirds look small, floaty and faintly ridiculous. For 24-carat immersion you cant beat a plexiglass dome and a panel of twitching gauges and flickering warning lights. If the pit features wear and tear, crumpled pin-ups and those four fleshy appendages that usually protrude from a pilot’s torso, all the better.
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2. Landings and take-offs
A flight game without landings and take-offs is like a race sim without a starting grid and chequered flag, or a fox without a waistcoat and pocket-watch. They don’t have to figure in every sortie but sprinkled through a campaign, they add tension, provide closure, and help prevent dogfight fatigue. Some of my most cherished genre memories come from nursing flak-ravaged, smoke-trailing craft back to base. Far too few lite flight titles facilitate such experiences and of those that do, scandalously few greet dogged returners with scurrying emergency vehicles or freshly-laid carpets of foam.
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3. Interesting AI
Bizarrely, the lighter the flight game, the more important it is to have interesting AI. If you’re going to be downing twenty bandits in a single sortie rather than a more plausible one, or none, it’s vital all twenty don’t execute half-hearted left turns or head straight for the deck when bounced. How hard it can be to create a selection of AI ‘characters’ – cocky, nervous, wily. etc. – and apply them randomly to computer-controlled planes ? Too hard, apparently.
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4. Parachutes
Bailing out of a stricken crate not knowing whether your silk canopy is going to a) deploy quickly enough to to save you or b) deploy at all, is priceless. All flight games should put you in that position now and again. A sky full of enemy chutes also presents wonderful opportunities for ‘This is for Johnnie, you Luftwaffe swine!’ Geneva Convention flouting.
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5. Kill tallies
What’s the point of shooting down/up stuff, if, during subsequent sorties, you can’t see those kills represented in symbolic form on the side of your fuselage?
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6. Dirigibles
Blindingly obvious this one. Air combat games are far better when they let you pour lead and rockets into gargantuan bags of super-flammable gas.
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7. Bridges
Indisputable fact: There is no finer way for an Ace to perish than ploughing into a river while flying inverted under a bridge.
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8. Irascible COs
After successfully flying inverted under a bridge it should be mandatory for players to face a cutscene in which a CO (moustachioed, and with a face like thunder) snarls something along the lines of “If you pull a stunt like that again you’ll be flying transports and target tugs for the rest of the war.”
Related Stories:
European Air War, anyone – shed loads of modding, etc.?
Landings/takeoffs – it depends whether or not you’re interested in the “returning to base” or the “challenge of landing” thing. So F-14: Fleet Defender made a big deal of landings, because it’s a big part of being a Navy aviator, and rightly so.
But actually, a lot of the hard stuff is getting back to base in one piece. If you get there… surely it’s not the end of the world if you don’t land the thing yourself? I’m not advocating beginning – and ending – in medias res, but there are some other nice ways to get around this issue. Heroes of the 357th didn’t do landings, but it was primarily about dogfighting and bomber escort, and I don’t think it impacted vastly.
Much as Fleet Defender was fun, I found modern-era flight sims harder to engage with than I wanted to; 1942:Pacific Air War was the pinnacle for me, really. I did my simming at a young age.
Challenge of landing? Top Gun for NES! Refueling was pretty hard as well. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever managed to do either successfully
I suppose my biggest qualm with auto-landings is that they are an immersion-breaker. The reason I brought up Valve is that they do immersion better than most people, notably Half-Life’s way of never letting you out from behind Freeman’s eyeballs.
Obviously needlessly complicated manoevres are a Bad Thing, because clearly we don’t want an only averagely-hard mission made impossible because we can’t stick the landing (I love saying that all of a sudden. Stick the landing! I hope it doesn’t mean anything I don’t think it means!). So I’m not against some computer help in landing my plane/helicopter/Viper Mk II, but at the very least you need to feel like you’ve landed your bird.
Oh man I love pilot jargon!
The only flight sim i’ve ever played was Red Baron. It was entertaining at the age of 11 or 12.
Surely the ultimate in over-the-top-realism-in-a-flight-sim was Shuttle. Every single switch and dial in the cockpit of a space shuttle was simulated and the take-off sequence lasted several hours.
I know the menu music loop from Crimson Skies by heart. What great art direction that game had! the music, the planes, the movies, even the menus were cool. Too bad it was so difficult for me. I could never get past a couple levels. If only the mouse controls were a little smoother…
@Plopsworth
The otherwise mediocre Wings Over Europe had nice damage modelling. A burst of cannon fire could tear the wing off an enemy fighter, sending them spiralling to the ground. Very satisfying.
@teo
Pot calling kettle black? Or is my sarcasm-radar turned off?
Vehicle Simulation Game
Simulator
Please enlighten us as to how it is stupid to require a simulator (the word sim is an abbreviated form of) to pass a certain threshold of realism.
Crimson Skies does gives you the option to skip a mission if you failed one again and again and again and . . .
Ah, looking at the first screengrab reminded me of one more:
This is pure fluff, but I love seeing streams of shell-casings tumbling from the ejection-ports of the guns. Almost as lovely as good looking tracer-fire. Especially if you’re flying something like an early-war Hurri or Spitfire or Thunderbolt and you’ve got eight (count’ them, eight!) guns spewing .303 or .50 calibre death.
*presses pause, switches to third-person, rotates & zooms camera* Ahhh.
@Ack no that’s not wrong, I guess I phrased myself poorly
What I mean is that a game does not cease to be a game just because it passes a certain realism threshold. Lots of people in flight sim communities use ‘game’ as a derogatory term
It has to do with people’s stupid ideas of self worth. They think they’re cooler because they ‘fly’ a sim and not a game, when in fact it’s both.
I’ve encountered a similar behaviour in the Diablo II community. I used to play hardcore mode in DII, which in case you don’t know means that if you die once you’re dead forever. When DIII got announced people on the HC boards were talking about wanting some kind of special item that was only available for HC players.
The point of that was of course that they wanted to feel special for playing what is a harder and more unforgiving game, which is, again, stupid. You should play HC-mode because you enjoy it more, not because of what you want people to think of you.
Dawn Patrol. Those were the days….
Also B17 Flying Fortress, which really could have been so much more fun, were it just a little more tweakable.
60-odd posts and nobody’s mentioned AP favourite Knights of the Sky?
That was fun, in a fling the bally kite round the sky kind of way.
Looking back, it’s amazing what low frame rates we were prepared to accept in those days. And I say this as a man who managed to finish Wing Commander on an A500, which shows determination and suspension of disbelief beyond the call of duty, I think.
@Kieran – actually, at RPS:
You guys really need to interview Oleg Maddox. He’s developing different AI personalities for SOW:BOB apparently, however I cannae be arsed looking up the references.
Mush mush!!
I’m sort of between games right now, and all this talk of virtual piloting is starting to intrigue me. These sorts of games are foreign to me on all levels. It’s one of my few gaming deficiencies (Vitamin FlightSim?).
Does anyone have any recommendations for a game where I can gain a foothold in this genre? My head is a bit spinny from trying to fish one out of the existing comments here, so someone just telling me what to play would be much appreciated. Demos or decent freeware preferred, until I figure out whether I like this sort of thing or not.
Satsuz, I’d go for IL-2: 1946 if I was you. The tutorials are atrocious and the UI is awful, but once you’ve worked past that, you’ve got one hell of a flight sim. Loads of different planes to fly, numerous campaign options (admittedly not always as immersive as they might be) great MP, and strong damage and flight modelling. Plopsworth’s sortie story says it all really.
The scrooge in me is wondering if anyone has ever played IL-2 or the like with the Xbox X360 controller. I mean on the PC, since there will be a IL-2 coming to the 360 and PS3 too.
I found the analog stick on the X360 controller very usable for Amiga emulation. Could flight sims be added to that list as well?
Ive used my old PS2 controller on my pc…(started using it with PES6 originally) ……..its way better than keyboard.. :D
Ive now got a Saitek Evo wireless joystick off Ebay for £4 !!!! virtually brand new….and its exellent
Thank you very much Mr. Stone. If you consider it a good representative, that’s what matters. I’ll get right on it.
If things go well enough maybe I’ll do a writeup of my experiences in the forums.
Wow, that last screenshot of the mustachioed officer gave me some serious Wing Commander deja vu! I casually enjoy flight games, both sims and arcade, so perhaps this game will satisfy those cravings I’d dismissed since being disappointed with Secret Weapons Over Normandy.
I finally got a hold of IL-2 to try it out with a Xbox 360 controller.
My verdict: perfect. 10 buttons to map all those life saving tasks to, triggers that are great for ‘yawing’ and a stick that doesn’t need calibration every reboot. I’m actually enjoying a sim-ish (realism settings <3) flight sim now.
I love playing flight sims. IL2 is fantastic; however, I have a problem whereby I can be fairly impatient to do stuff; combined with poor dogfighting skills means that I end up being bored for fifteen minutes whilst I fly to the fight, then irritated as some smug simmer shoots me down during a mp session.
Most fun I had with 1946, though, was on one MP server where the only aircraft available were the wacky jet fighters. It was absolutely mental fun, and the planes themselves are fast enough to be forgiving of my stupid maneuvers; I actually shot down one or two planes in my time there (including one absolutely fantastic kill using the primitive wire-guided missiles from the nutty nazi Lerche. That was a good day.
Also: JETSTRIKE, anyone?