Wings of Prey

[Art Blade]

yes.. by the way, it's not the crosshair that is "built in" into the cockpit, but a moving crosshair that preceeds a moving enemy plane so you know where to shoot to make the bullets arive at the same time that plane gets there. I know that as "pre-aim" (shoot ahead so the enemy runs into the bullet). That particular crosshair is only visible against some dark background = almost never.

I can still shoot though, that's what tracer rounds are good for, and in this game every bullet leaves some sort of a smoke trail to watch out for, which helps to time your shots right. However, if you keep doing that, you'll be both wasting ammo and spoiling your stats.

I pefer to fly around and chase my target until I am quite sure the enemy will "meet" with my bullets  ;)

[Art Blade]

I flew a few more training missions and tried to catch veteran pilots. It occurred to me that using the target camera would have been a good idea so I started using it: Once you've marked a target you can press and keep pressed a button that makes your virtual head tilt and move so your eyes stay on the target. The result is that you don't see your cockpit's controls any more once the target isn't in front of your plane. You'll have to imagine that if you're looking to your right but keep flying ahead that you'll have to use your flight stick to turn your plane so it lines up with your eyes/view. Pretty simple as long as you start out with an enemy who's straight ahead and fleeing, when he turns to the right, your eyes will follow him and you just move the stick to the right so you're back in line.

But.. if you lock onto your target and it's down left and behind, you get to see parts of the cockpit and plane you won't know what you're looking at exactly because, unfortunately, your virtual head snaps back so fast, in an instant, that you won't realise you're looking down left and behind. When you release that target cam button, you'd pop back to view ahead. What I'm trying to say is that I miss a slow movement from looking ahead to back down left so you can follow your own head's movement and realise where you're looking. Those are the moments you lose track of your enemy and start to guess where the heck he is, which in combat means he's in your blind spot and probably about to shoot you down or escape. So it takes a bit of getting used to that feature.. That's why I keep training so I can better adjust to those situations. If you do it right, you'll be surprised at how easy it is to follow your target or to think of manoeuvres that bring you in a position to attack! That's when the fun kicks in, like Yeah! :) If only the controls (joystick) were a bit smoother..

I realised that some of the unpredictable movements of my plane are quite obviously depending on air and breezes and friction.. so even in arcade mode it's not just simply "move" but feel turbulences and wind speeds etc, that's why your plane may feel a bit hard to get its nose down against the wind coming from below or why a sudden manoeuvre makes your plane kind of jump. Simple games would just smoothly move your plane as if controlling a big cannon mounted on a tank or ship. This game apparently is a fair bit more sophisticated and requires training indeed. Not bad though, but it costs time. I'm a bit impatient with that flying thing, I know what I want to do but I can't control the plane yet just as if it was part of my body. I need more training.  :)

[PZ]

I like the idea of being able to keep your "eyes" on the target.

[Art Blade]

it is a good feature, yes :) Following your eyes with your plane actually makes your flying look more graceful and clearly more effective. :)

[PZ]

Indeed - one of the reasons I've never been a huge fan of air combat games is that I frequently lost sight of the target and then didn't know which way to turn to acquire it again.  Of course, 9 times out of 10 I'd choose the wrong direction  :-()

[Art Blade]

Well, what can I say.. during my last training I tried to convince my opponent I was flying a sub and sunk my plane before the eyes of him without having been shot down. :-[ 8-X ;D

[PZ]

 :-()

[fragger]

That eyeball-tracking feature sounds useful Art, as long as, as you say, you start tracking when the enemy is more or less ahead of you. I can see how a sudden close-up view of the floor under your seat or something like that could cause disorientation :o

Sounds like a challenging game.

Well, what can I say.. during my last training I tried to convince my opponent I was flying a sub and sunk my plane before the eyes of him without having been shot down. :-[ 8-X ;D

LOL :-D :-D :-D

[Art Blade]

 ;D (by the way, I learned that tactic from a German veteran who was doing some fancy manoeuvres when I heard him go "AAAAaaargh" -- and saw a huge white spot on the water where he had sunk his plane without me ever hitting him.)

You got it spot on, fragger, that eye-tracking indeed makes you see the dusty floor of your cockpit or bits of your plane you don't know where those are and so on.. really disorientating. As you said, best to start tracking while the enemy is in sight.

[Art Blade]

Played and finished one more mission which was about taking out ships with bombs.

While in cockpit view, you can't see a thing. Guessing where the target is, drop one or two bombs and hope you won't hit a friendly plane that's flying beneath you (did that once, lol) and hope you'd hit anything at all. Stupid.  :-\

External view: You see a circle which looks elliptical due to that flight perspective, in it two dots resembling your two bombs and where they'd hit. I got my plane (viewed from behind) between me (eyes) and the target/aiming circle, rendering it useless. Well, you could still fly around and use the mouse to change the perspective while trying to manoeuvre, silly. ::)

Virtual cockpit: That's when you see everything but your own plane, so that seems to be the only reasonable way to get to see that aiming circle on the ground. Makes you lose any immersive feeling of flying a plane, it's just juggling an egg-shaped thing with dots until those dots are on top of your target. You need perfect timing: the moment one or two of those dots are on target you need to press the bomb trigger, split seconds later and the bomb will miss. Wouldn't be so bad on solid ground, but on water you just won't do any damage. ????

Some of the ships had a FLAK (FLugAbwehrKanone = flight/plane defense cannon) which kept shooting at me even after hitting the ship with a bomb. The ships don't necessarily sink.. they burn and keep firing.. I dropped truckloads of bombs onto them until they ceased fire and sunk. Stupid. Some radio messages were like: Bulls eye. Direct hit. Good hit. But I never knew when or if I had achived anything (like, hit it and fly away? or sink it?) Once I managed to assign a wingman to bomb a ship, but mostly they were useless. Stupid. I can't assign a target to wingman 1, another target to wingman 2 and so on, only my own target. Cool, what's that good for?  :-\\

Then the next mission goal: Hit more ships. How the hell am I supposed to do that with two bombs and like 8 ships? Only with help of my wingmen?  >:( I had unlimited bombs due to Arcade Mode, but still..

Then I saw a new secondary goal: Fight enemy fighters. Countdown.. I hit enter, but never saw enemies. Instead, I had to fly all the way home to that fricking air field. The next time I replayed the mission I skipped that part and my stats read 0/1 secondary goals. Bah.  :-(

Next mission: Intercept bombers over Dover (they were accompanied by fighters). I didn't count how many bombers there were, but I made out at least four groups, perhaps five or six, with like four or more bombers. I'd say a total of 20+ bombers. And three wingmen I can't do anything with but "clear my six" and "someone take care of that (my) target" - they've got to be joking.  >:(

Then, again, I had massive problems controlling my plane. Just on an aside, I have always liked WWII flight sims/games, but even HoE was easier to control. What happens is: You see LOADS of planes, red inscriptions hovering above them basically telling you "enemy" (well, you get the picture.. I never actually read what the red stuff read). Then you try to mark one, randomly, and start to craze out because you can't spot that one ant in an ant hill. All enemy planes cause red arrows on the sides of your screen, telling you "there are lots of them." One of which is your target. Try get him! The problem being less to get him but to find out who to get. So I started shooting at everything with a red text above it, but the pre-aim crosshair vanished (white on white) so I had to keep guessing whom to shoot and how to line up my shots. By the way, there were some green dots (my wingmen) and blue dots (friendly planes) too.. so better not shoot like a maniac not to take out more friendlies than enemies. Hehe, didn't matter anyway, I guess, I didn't much care any more.

And on top of all that, the plane controls. Imagine you know how to use a joystick. Pull it towards you = nose up, push it away = nose down. Left/right, rudder, ailerons etc, you know how to handle that. But the plane just doesn't do what you think you're doing. Like, carefully pulling the stick and your plane rips up into the air, aaaaarhg, the enemy is now too far below. No problem, a hearty push on the stick... I said, a hearty push on the stick.. f@#k's sake, PUSH!!! But your nose just won't get down much. When it does, all of a sudden and too much. Perhaps simulating friction and air speeds from below, simulating physical barriers going down while no barriers going up. I call that stupid imbalance.  >:(( Unnecessary fights with your own plane. It's definitely not my joystick, that's a good one and it works perfectly well.

25 minutes later: Mission failed, it took me too long.  :D

I'm not really looking forward to playing on much. That's why I was so reluctant to resume playing.

The only thing that's halfways fun is training missions when you can pick a plane of your choice and give another plane of your choice to one or more enemies and start.. Then you'll have time enough to fiddle with the joystick and slowly getting used to it, doesn't matter anyway, but during mission?

Hell, they can't be serious.

[Art Blade]

The mission I was referring to is apparently the one featured in the second vid there. Note how he struggles to fly/aim smoothly, I think I'm not alone out there ;)

Might be an issue of how to set up the controls for the game, but still.. why does it have to be a science to get it right?

[PZ]

Sounds like you're not having much fun any more - similar to what I experienced with HoE. 

I think that I'll stick with being on solid ground for now  :-D

[Art Blade]

Sad but true. I mean, the joystick can be set up in game, with a lot of adjustment range for every axis there is. The problem is, you can't really find out what is best because it seems to be either not keeping the settings when playing or the settings are being overridden by some laws of physics. I can't adjust the stick to my likings. What I don't understand is why the game treats an analog joystick almost as if it were digital. You have a lot of room until it kicks in, and it kicks in hard. Like, throttle. I move the lever and nothing happens until I'm almost at the end of the stick's range, like touching the physical limit of the joystick, and then you'd go full throttle. Adjusting speed is like a very small range at the lower and upper end and the big gap in between (dead zone). Same with the joystick: It seems only to register when it physically hits the limit, and a little before that.

I'll try to find out if I can adjust that dead zone of the stick. I believe the game would be really cool if the joystick was simpler to set up.

[PZ]

Indeed - I really like the landscape and the appearance of the aircraft.  Sounds like flying a plane is like driving a car in FC2 - all or nothing steering.  :-()

[Art Blade]

Yeah, maybe a simple console controller is better than a fancy joystick  ???? ;)

[Art Blade]

good news

I finally found the settings responsible for that poor performance. There is indeed a setting called "dead zone" which was set to the max.. now I reduced it to minimum and ta-dah.. the plane reacts just the way I had hoped for :-X :-X :-X

[Art Blade]

that bomber mission (take them out) was tough nevertheless. I shot down like 30 enemies but needed 2 attempts (got shot down myself once). Took about 20 minutes. Now it feels a lot better :)

I took a quick glance at what else there is to do in that game. Training missions (your choice who when where etc), Single Missions (out of like 10 chapters, perhaps another 10 missions each), Campaign (maybe 5 campaigns with like 5 missions each. You need to proceed sequentially, unlocking the next mission by successfully completing the previous one). So there are a lot of missions to be flown.

[PZ]

That is good now - now you can enjoy the game!  :-X

[Art Blade]

I don't know that yet.  >:D But at least I don't have to worry about controls before I even start to play  :)

The reason behind the maxed-out dead zone still is explainable with a very erm, nervous and sensitive reaction of the planes you're flying. I tried various settings that have slide bars (sort of) and chose three steps: left, middle, right, which equals min, average, max. I did that because the default setup wasn't to my taste and small adjustments were too small to really notice a difference, so I did drastic changes. I must have done that last one before I started with the game ALPHA Protocol and then forgot I did that particularly with dead zones. Now that I realised what it was I was able to fix that one. NOW is the time to do small adjustments  :)

[fragger]

Put your ground crew on report ;D >:D

I hope you can enjoy the game better now that you have some semblance of control. Still sounds frigging tough, though...

[Art Blade]

hehe, it's a lot better now, still fine-tuning controls here to get a balance to my likings.

I'm flying missions again that hadn't played out well before. Those campaign missions may be quite big, last time that bomber mission, I shot down 36 enemies without getting shot myself. It is not easy if the sky is packed with both allied and nazi planes. Chasing a pack might take you away from battle, so after chasing and taking down a few, you need to return to the main area where the other planes are.. silly to put a time limit there (25 minutes).

However, I realised I don't always need to mark a target or use that tracking cam when I'm close to any enemy, I just shoot them down :)

[Art Blade]

[smg id=2525 type=link align=center width=400 caption="WoP impressions 005"]

[fragger]

However, I realised I don't always need to mark a target or use that tracking cam when I'm close to any enemy, I just shoot them down :)

;D Shoot first - whys and wherefores can come later :)

There's a time limit there? I agree, that's pretty dumb:

"I say, Smythe old boy, you've only got 25 minutes to shoot down that Hun chappie as your cup of char is getting cold, so do go in and knock Jerry for six, then hurry back - there's a good chap" ;D

Nice piccie there, mate. Spits in flight are such graceful looking birds :-X

[PZ]

Nice - I'm looking forward to further impressions - still on the fence regarding this one

[Art Blade]

fragger: hehehe, nice line there  ^+-+ Reminds me, kind of

"What! They're attacking? Good God, but it's tea time! I must say. They are so uncivilised. Gentlemen.. I'm afraid we do have a lesson to teach."  ;D

PZ: The game is kind of like adrenalin rush while in combat and movie time when watching the replay (you can save those). During the missions you're really busy and won't see much than kill and survive, and bloody let's not forget about the mission itself (don't fly away too far, don't waste too much time). So it is intense but after that, a chilling phase is in order and you, being a graphics enthusiast, will have time to enjoy all the shiny glamour there is :)