Looks good to me as there are no bobble heads or cutesy, childlike graphics. Hoping the AI will put up a fight.
Both true! Although I am not sure about the causality in the second bullet point.
+1 to the Likes
Actually bobble heads would be really fun.
Don’t make me come down there!
Come on, who doesn’t love bobble heads!
You guys are great for recommendations! Unfortunately $14.99 is just a bit over my “ah hell, why not” threshold so I’ll wishlist it until the next sale.
This is one of the things I love about X-wing. They are at 7mm scale, not the 3mm of this game, but they come prepainted. Which means that I can play with nice looking fleets with no painting skill of my own, and no time to do so.
I almost forgot about the ridiculously happy pilots in Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol.
I had at one point unseen, and now I cannot unsee again.
Ok … I … MUST HAVE some of that picoarmor stuff. I found some WW1 stuff but have a question. When adding it to my cart a Folker triplane says it’s $3.75 for 8 pieces, or a Mark IV tank is $2.10 for 15 pieces. Does that mean these tiny things need to be assembled? Or does that mean I get 15 tanks? I assumed they’d be tiny diecast molds. I want to know before I check out and get a bunch if tiny tank parts and hours of assembly ahead of me.
Edit:. It might be total inventory on hand, just want to make sure these are tiny molds…
You get 15 tanks I seem to recall.
These things are tiny. Much smaller than microarmour so be aware of that. No assembly was required for my stuff. Although do remember bases for planes :)
They look like a tapdance routine captured at the very end of a gig: TA-DA!
I had Flight Commander 2 on every system up to Win XP. I still have the disks but no 5 1/4 floppy drive. :)
Jorge Cabrera has put up a preview on his blog
from this screenshot
is clear to me that they’re replicating quite faithfully the miniatures game. I am not sure how rewarding it will be to interact with these dragging a mouse and clicking buttons. I am for sure unnerved by those propellers being static rather than happily spinning away… so as Jorge says
I am confident that this war game is going to be a great success. For the miniature gamer this is a guaranteed buy.
For the air combat flight simulator enthusiasts, it will be up to them how much they can detach from their HOTAS and explore these new skies.
so YMMV
Only 24 hours!
So, I’ve played this game for a couple hours. And I can see what they’re doing, and trying. And I respect the desire to make a real air mini computer game. But I’m not sure the way they have chosen to represent this visually is going to work without a lot more interface work.
It reminds me of digital Conflict of Heroes in a bunch of ways.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Bruce. I didn’t love CoH so it’s a pass for me.
$30 seems kind of high for this. Guess I’ll wait for a sale.
I should make it clear that the reason it reminds me of Conflict of Heroes is that both games could have done a much better job of using the existing presentation to convey a lot more information, and their failure to do so makes the game feel thin and chintzy when I shouldn’t. Conflict of Heroes is all about boiling things down to essential modifiers and using them to your advantage, yet when you fire at someone it that game, you just get a “% chance” and then “Miss!” or something. No elaboration. No explicit display of why the odds were what they were, or how close your roll was, or anything. It was like the developers had no understanding of the appeal of stat accrual in a game that was all about integers. Were these guys even gamers?
Check Your 6! reminds me of this because of the way it displays the hit chances, then flashes “Miss” or “Airframe” or “Engine” in the most ephemeral way, as if to say, “ok, that happened, but don’t think too much about it. Focus on your cool planes!” Yet the camera isn’t robust enough to accommodate the free motion you need to make sense out of the incredibly busy display. This could use better art design.
I do really like the way in which they turned the movement controls into a flight stick, which I think is a wonderfully intuitive interface trick even if it isn’t exactly clear at first how it corresponds to the game rules.
Miniatures in actual use on the table top are wonderfully individual pieces that attract attention to themselves by their very existence. The digital representations in the game do the opposite: it’s as though the fidelity of 3D models actually cheapens them. I love the fact that someone tried to make a miniatures game on the computer, but I don’t feel like they quite knew what effect they were going for. It just emphasizes how far above the rest of the field Shenandoah Studio was in their understanding of the representation of standard tabletop tropes and how much polish it takes to make them hold up digitally.