A link in the Bargain thread to another game (Secret Weapons Over Normandy) reminded me of this game, which was also often called B-17 2. I enjoyed the heck out of it back in 2001 or so (I think), and I still have it somewhere. Does anyone know how it runs under XP or on dual-core machines, etc.? How about fan-made graphics upgrades?
I remember that you could tweak the ini files to put as many squads in the sky as your graphics card could handle, and it just looked awesome (at the time, anyway: the screenshots on mobygames look a little rough now).
I remember reading and getting all hot and bothered over an online multiplayer version where each player filled a different role for various missions. I don’t that game ever got released though. :(
Actually, IIRC Screamin’ Demons Over Europe (1999) allowed you to do that, didn’t it? Or was it one player per plane, and you could just switch positions on the fly? Probably the latter. The cool thing about B-17 II was how niftily the Norden Bombsight was modeled (of course, I’m not an übergrognard, so they may have gotten it totally wrong and I wouldn’t know). SDOE’s “bombsight” was a much more primitive affair.
As wicked cool as that would be in theory, how would you handle the boring-ass parts of the real life missions with multiplayer? Would one person control the time compression for everyone else or what? Or would the game autoskip and navigate to the target and only become playable when enemy fighters got within a certain radius of the bomber group? It all becomes even more complicated when you make the enemy fighters player-controlled. How was it going to be handled in The Mighty 8th before they dropped multi, does anyone know?
You could just compress the bejezus out of everything. I can’t imagine I would play a multiplayer B-17 game with realistic mission durations.
Five minutes to the target tangling with fighters, five minutes over the target dodging flak and lining up the bomb run, five minutes to nurse your limping Fortress back across the channel to England. Sounds fun to me! The only thing lacking here: what do the gunners do while you’re over the target and there’s no enemy fighters to plink at? If we figured that out, we’d have ourselves a game, boys.
I don’t recall how early iterations of the Mighty 8th were going to handle multi.
I can imagine that, though I wouldn’t do it. There are already “virtual airlines” on the net where flight sim pilots fly real airline routes in real time. And you don’t even get to bomb anything.
Side anecdote: Years ago, I was at a pen-and-paper gaming con. This one guy shows up every year and runs a multiplayer version of the old Avalon Hill solitaire game B-17: Queen of the Skies. A bunch of guys sit in a room, flying as a squadron through a historically accurate mission. In that session, we were bombing Romanian oil refineries.
Anyway, I talk my buddy into doing this, and five minutes into it, I can tell it’s going to be a deadly dull six hours. Five minutes later, my right engine explodes due to a random failure and my plane crashes. I bail out of the game, go play something more fun, and leave my buddy to sit through the whole six hours. ;-)
It runs on Windows XP without any issues. I haven’t got a dual core so I can’t comment on that. The graphics actually hold up pretty well so graphics upgrades aren’t necessary.
Wayward simply didn’t know what they were getting in to. They gave us a pretty complete bomber sim, but you had a community that was more interested in shooting those bombers down than flying them, and took great exception at the cursory modelling of the fighters. There was also a big (and much more deserved) growl at how small the B-17 “boxes” were and “ghost planes”, which kind of defeated the purpose of a late-war bombing sim. Those folks who otherwise who have shrugged their shoulders over all of this didn’t like the fact that the sim didn’t have the promised multiplayer – yes, there are folks who don’t mind spending a bunch of time doing nothing with their mates. I remember long hours in B-25 “dethstars” in Air Warrior, circling and vulching enemy fields, shooting the breeze and having a great time.
In any event, Wayward took their ball and went home to develop not-sim stuff, instead of tweaking a decent sim into a classic. Really can’t blame them.
