I’m about a week and maybe 10 or 15 hours into the DCS Apache. Not much needs to be said about the nature and quality of DCS first-party modules, so I’m going to skip that and jump ahead to reviewing the aircraft.
Of the five DCS helos I own (Ka-50, Mi-8, Huey, Apache, Gazelle) it’s the second-hardest to fly. The parenthetical is in increasing order of difficulty. Relative to the Ka-50, it’s twitchier (likely a result of the Ka-50’s stability augmentation system, possibly to be solved by future feature implementations for the AH-64?), but it also feels a little underpowered. Hovering with a full load demands a lot of torque, and I have to think further ahead with the Apache to keep myself out of situations where I need to yank on the collective, of which it is much less tolerant than the Ka-50.
I am to the point where I can do the helicopter things now: pick up to hover, transition to forward flight, maneuver, come back to a hover without cartwheeling wildly around the sky, and land on a particular point, more or less. That means I can start getting into the avionics, which are admittedly where the Apache ought to shine. There isn’t much written material on procedures yet, but what I have seen looks really cool. I look forward to digging into the front seat, and into the AI that does the other half of the job for solo players.
Such good games. Make sure to patch the SAM shoulder-based missiles to their correct levels (see the gog forums). Amazing that they were able to accomplish this stuff before 32 bit protected mode on the 386. You have no idea how hard this stuff was to do on 16-bit systems.
It’s mindblowing that the source code for Tornado was released. It was so incredibly challenging to write efficient code for these old platforms. Tornado was written entirely in assembly due to the need to make it as efficient as possible (and the limitations of compilers in those days).
Just spent the last several mornings streaming Megafortress. God what a delight. Really no other game like it to this day, but god it hates the player so. Much. Why yes, I’m sure I can be detected by radar flying a stealth bomber at 400 feet. Of course I can! ;) It’s so good though.
I’ve never actually played Megafortress. You just said it’s like no other game but could you somehow describe the way it plays? My impression was that its core gameplay was in a sense more similar to flight sims of today compared to its contemporaries with manipulating systems and clicking buttons and navigation and what-not.
It’s a multi-seat modern bomber sim, and it’s a stealth bomber, so there’s a lot of EW stuff going on. Once you take off you barely manually fly the thing, except evade missiles really, as even refuelling is mostly done by the autopilot. Most of the time you’ll be in the nav station setting temporary waypoints to avoid radar sites, in the weapons station lobbing off bombs and missiles, or in the EW station jamming radar. It’s VERY involved but not complicated, just complex.
It’s just so fun and tense. I’ve died a LOT, but I’ve never been mad because I know I just have to get better at it, not that the game is really unfair or anything.
Thanks, that actually sounds like something I’d have loved back in the day. Like Red Storm Rising, Shuttle Simulator and a classic flight sim combined I guess. I wonder if anyone would take a crack at something similar considering what I perceive to be somewhat of a 90s gameplay sensibilities revival with the zombie Microprose games and the growth of flight sims post new-MSFS. There is at least, a lot more people with joysticks now compared to early 2010s.
I’m honestly sad no one else took a crack at this. It apparently did well enough to warrant a mission disk that added two more campaigns, but then poof. I think Three Sixty Pacific went bust which also might explain it.
