It’s hardly recent, but reading a War in the Pacific AAR has pushed me to fire up IL-2 1946 again, which is now up to version 4.12.2. (Who knew?) With a supermod (HSFX 7) and a better dynamic campaign generator (IL-2 DCG), I’m finding it holds up pretty well. HSFX totally revamps the sounds, which makes the engines much meatier, and updates some of the particle effects. (Much inkier smoke when you light someone on fire, mainly. Here’s an example.)
One of my complaints about stock IL-2 is that the dynamic campaign isn’t; it’s just a series of random missions. IL-2 DCG is much better in that respect—it actually tracks concentrations of ground units and puts them into the missions. The front moves according to success and failure in missions, and in between, when it does some ground war voodoo on its own. I have a campaign going in New Guinea, and on the transit mission in, there were at least twenty other aircraft in the sky, mostly attacking Japanese positions along the Kokoda Track.
It also makes for much, much bigger missions. I played a few missions out of a Wake Island campaign, and on the morning of December 8, we (eight Marine pilots in our delightful old F2A-2 Buffalos) took a raid from at least fifty Betties, in one continuous stream. I was chasing what I thought was the last in the line, then looked to my side and saw another full squadron next to me.
It’s kind of sad that we’re not likely to ever see such an exhaustive flight sim again—nowhere else can I fly in every major theater of the war in basically every plane that saw combat use.
Ohhhh, I’ll have to give that DCG a try, thank you!
1942 Pacific Air War, F19 Stealth Fighter and Knights of the Sky have just popped up on Steam today.
Editer
1844
1942:PAW? I’m torn between being excited and not wanting to tarnish my memory of its awesomeness l.
I’m not sure of PAW is the gold version, but I asked on the Steam forums.
I played 1942 a year or two ago, just a bit of it, but it was still fun!
One of the screenshots implies Gold? Ie the 1944 dated shot of some army planes - iirc the original edition was just carriers?
Apparently it isn’t? From the developer:
Hey :) I’m afraid the gold version is a Windows 3.1 game. We can’t package that without packaging the operating system in with it.
And as you can probably guess, legally, this is the equivalent of cutting your own head off.
It’s just the standard version.
Well alrighty then.
RichVR
1848
I have this somewhere. When I get a chance I’ll look around for it.
Nonono, I mean I found one, cheap on ebay. Been reading through it, it’s so great. That and the EF2000 Strategy Guide are some of my favorite things.
Thank you though. :) You’ve already done enough by sending me that Manta squishy! ;)
It’s funny Fishbreath mentioned IL-2 just yesterday, because now you can get it on GOG for $2.99 in their current sale.
Been meaning to double dip on a digital version. Glad I waited.
re: PAW 1942
“Gold” was just the original game + the Army expansion + a Windows 3.1 “multimedia” experience and launcher. With this release it’s unclear whether or not you get the Army expansion.
Also, the last patch for PAW killed the digital sound in DOSBox. Wonder if they got around that.
F19 Stealth Fighter: buy F-117A over at GOG instead.
Knights of the Sky: every early DOS WWI sim was rendered obsolete by Red Baron, which you can also pick up at GoG. RB ruled the roost until Rowan’s Dawn Patrol came out.
At any rate I’ll probably find out since I have a few extra bucks sitting in my PayPal account.
Here’s what you get!
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PAW: 1942, plus its Army Air expansion, running in DOSBox, and patched to its latest version.
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You do not get the Gold version, which was just the DOS version packaged with a bollox Win 3.1 multimedia launcher.
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For those who know their old sims and DOSBox, the digital sound works fine. Getting PAW sound to work in DOSBox could be a real bear.
So, for the game itself:
This is a an old classic for Microprose game collectors, old flight-sim grogs (like myself), and the like. As with all of these retro releases, there is very little here that modern gamers or folks not fond of this genre will find interesting. (Truth be told, however, I’d rather fly this old sim than, say, later efforts such as MSCFS 2 or Pacific Fighters!) But for the graphics – which are that lovely mid-90’s smear of big textured pixels – PAW’s flight model is surprisingly good (if actually a little too punishing), the enemy AI is challenging, and there are many scenarios to choose from.
Highly recommended with the caveats I’ve mentioned above.
(Note: use CTRL-F12 to increase the DOSBox cycles – 3000 isn’t nearly enough!)
Yay, thanks for taking one for the team!
That’s where I have my version from, too. :P GoG also keeps their IL-2 1946 installer up to date—download the five parts and the patch, and you’ll be on the state-of-the-art 4.12.2m, ready for supermod or dynamic campaign of your choice.
I started an (ahistorical) campaign in a Marine F2A-2 Buffalo with HSFX 7, since I love the engine sounds. I’m flying out of Port Moresby (in a fighter that’s a bit of a hog and from a New Guinea airbase means I have no choice but to call it Guinea Pig), which I’m streaming/putting on Youtube. It’s a good time. The Buffalo is a fighter so devoid of redeeming qualities that it’s proving to be an interesting challenge.
JeffL
1857
I would argue that Knights of the Sky was only rendered obsolete by RB2. While RB1 had better graphics, sound, etc. KOTS had a basically dynamic campaign and you could run into other aircraft and combat if you veered outside your flight path. I still remember trying to get home with a crippled plane, being jumped by a German aircraft, doing everything I could to get away, and then being shocked when two allied aircraft flew over and rescued me by taking out my attacker. I also can remember flying back from a mission and seeing a dogfight going on in the distance and flying over and joining in,
RB1 was pretty, but it was linear missions and if you flew outside your assigned flight path you would break the mission. There was nothing outside the pre-placed aircraft that were put their for the mission. The flight models in RB1 were also better, to be fair. To me, RB1 was much like IL-2 - really good graphics and flight models in a very linear and predictable campaign. And, for me, the campaign world in which you fly is everything, which is the reason for my opinion.
Interesting… my experiences with KOTS range back to my Amiga days, so my memory is definitely spotty :)
Editer
1859
What are the good mod packs, etc. for IL-2 nowadays? Would love to get some Sabres, MiGs, etc. in there.
The three options of which I’m aware are the Community User Patch, Ultrapack, and HSFX. I use the latter mainly because of inertia, and a perceived greater focus on doing WWII well, and supporting single-player. It also has MiG-15s and F-86s.
Ultrapack, as far as I know, is centered around providing an online dynamic campaign, which sounds nifty. I might have to make a third IL-2 install to try it out, and report back after I’ve done so. I just found out about CUP while Googling to see if I was missing anything. It seems pretty exhaustive, with everything from WWI to the modern age. I have no idea how well it’s done.
HSFX still gets my vote, though, for three reasons:
- The experience of flight is a lot less sterile than stock IL-2. It’s easier to tell from visual and audio cues when you’re near the edge of the aerodynamic envelope or the my-plane-will-fall-apart-like-a-wet envelope. Diving away from a Zero is a whole lot more thrilling when I hear my wings creaking ominously as I pull out.
- It’s still IL-2 graphically, but some of the visual effects and all of the sound work is a big improvement over stock. Smoke is inkier, engines are meatier.
- It’s not so vastly different from stock that IL-2 DCG doesn’t work. (You may have to fiddle with some campaign settings—my New Guinea campaign featured the German US 49th Fighter Group flying export-model P-39s from a Japanese airstrip until I fixed it.) IL-2 DCG is what makes IL-2 dynamic campaigns tolerable for me—what you do actually matters, and the scale and liveliness of each mission is so much better than the stock IL-2 campaign generator. Without it, IL-2 singleplayer is ultimately just a big toybox. Supermods add more toys, which is cool, but DCG lets me take them out and play with them, and that’s even better.
