Any of you play this? Its great arcady helicopter fun. Love those water effects too. Plus its an awesome helicopter!
Its a Cold War boondoggle, but it sure looks cool.
… Too bad they never made Longbow 3. The design doc sure looked cool…
I haven’t played Comanche since the first voxelly one. Remember the Novalogic games back then? “Is that a tank or a rock, its kinda fuzzy…”
Comanche 4 is utter and complete ass. Novalogic’s BHD, on the other hand, is pretty good.
What were some of the highlights, just to make me crazy?
What were some of the highlights, just to make me crazy?[/quote]
Jesus, Tim, while you busy sticking a dagger in your heart, why don’t you ask Alex about Jane’s A-10 as well? :o
What were some of the highlights, just to make me crazy?[/quote]
Jesus, Tim, while you busy sticking a dagger in your heart, why don’t you ask Alex about Jane’s A-10 as well? :o[/quote]
You know as well as I do, Gordon, that it takes a certain amount of masochism to be a flight sim fanatic. I am completely in character here. Pass the cat o’ nine tales, please. :)
Well, I don’t remember all of the design doc for Longbow 3. It was pretty cool though. Basically, much more of the same, with an online matchmaking system, the Comanche replacing the OH-58D, new graphics engine… all that great stuff.
The main thing that was going to be cool about A-10 was the FAC system, where you in your plane would loiter around the bad guys calling in air strikes and what not by using rockets and things like that.
Plus the A-10 model itself was really neat. The designers had a nasty weapon all planned to kill the player with – a combination ZU-23/SA-16 weapon. Plus I found a nice guide to a Russian air defense network in a book and had layed out the “overlapping SAM coverage that will kill everyone” layout. Plus I wrote up some missions that sound like they were out of a bad technothriller for the single player campaign.
Been a long time though, so that’s all I can dredge up from memory.
I saw Jane’s A-10 while it was in development, and to say that it looked shitty would be an understatement.
Computers simply didn’t have the processing power to render what they had in mind at a smooth frame rate. You had humongous amounts of draw-in and pop-up when you rolled onto the target. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the “extra” stuff like buildings and trees popping up… but a lot of times you’d be flying toward the ground waiting for the target to “pop up,” which meant that you’d only have a couple of seconds to actually correct your course and aim the gun.
I tried Commache 4… too acrcady for me. But if they could mate Longbow-style avionics and gameplay with that graphics engine, I’d be excited. It wouldn’t even have to be fully hardcore… but the problem is that NovaLogic’s approach is very arcadish, while I’d just love to have the opportunity to actually “skulk” about in a Commache and execute hit and run raids on enemy formations.
Speaking about Helicopter sim games, anyone tried the Fair Strike demo out or saw it displayed at E3? The press I read were they were trying to make the game like IL2 Sturmovik in that you could pour on the realism or turn some of it off.
Those crazy Eastern Europeans are definitely putting in the hard yards to try and keep some of these older game genre’s from dropping off the face of the planet. :)
I think Fair Strike is closer to Blue Byte’s Extreme Assault rather than to other helo sims.
sorta offtopic… but I read some military articles somewhere from yahoo a couple weeks ago about how the military is dissapointed with the attack choppers performance in Iraq (AH64) … they are considering remaking an A-10 type attack plane and souped up prop plane gunships. Isnt that weird?!?1 like WOW! And the Osprey seems to suck… it crashes too much!
etc
Its strange… its like the East Europeans (broad general description) played games from the late eighties to early/mid nineties WITHOUT any console influence… almost hardcore pc oriented. KIND OF COOL IF YOU ASK ME! fer instance, I’m hoping that UFO Aftermath game is as good as Xcom!
etc
That’s probably because those computer games were much easier to pirate than console games…
I dunno, I think Comanche 4 is good arcady fun. Its like how the airwolf game shoulda been.
Woolen Horde,
If you saw Jane’s A-10 when it was under development, you saw the placeholder graphics engine. (It was an adaptation of another engine – can’t remember which one.) The final game was going to get a whole new graphics engine.
And I’m sure the cost and time needed to get that engine finished had a bit to do with Origin killing the game. (The main reason it died, though, was Origin killing all non-MMP games.)