Wings of Prey

[nexor]

I have EA Jane's Combat Flight Sim WWII Fighters for Win 95/98 and MS Combat Flight Sim 2 for Win 2000/XP
I don't think the EA game will run on Win 7 but I must see if the MS game will, maybe both will run on Vista
I tried Wings Of Prey on Vista, seems to be ok, the joystick settings were messing me around and couldn't adjust the
sensitivity of the Ailerons and Elevators which made me crash all the time.
Never had a problem with any of the other games, other than the two mentioned I also have MS Flight Sim 95,98 and X, Flight Sim X is mean bugger, you need to be just short of being a real pilot when attempting this game, I haven't played any of the others for some time and was totally lost on FS X

[fragger]

Thanks for the thumbs, guys :)

nex, I also had (actually, still have) Jane's WWII Fighters and MS Combat Flight Sim. I can't remember whether I tried Jane's on Win7 but I did try MS CFS and it installed, but when I ran it all I got was a cockpit view with nothing outside. I tried all kinds of compatibility modes and graphics settings, but nothing worked. AND I seem to recall that it soon spat the dummy and crashed to desktop. But you may have better luck with Vista, I've found that there are some older titles that W7 won't have anything to do with but will still run under Vista (although you may have to run in a compatibility mode).

They were both good games. Janes's was my fave of the two. I loved the 40s-era swing music that would play in the menus. Sometimes I would fire up the game just to listen to the music :-()

Speaking of which, here is the original intro, with the cute Jane's title animation at the beginning: Ah, the memories...

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[nexor]

That's the one, think I'm going to try it on Vista   :-D

After I did the posting I scratched through all my old games and came up with two more.
The one is Electronic Battlefield Series Falcon 3.0 for DOS
https://www.google.co.za/url?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_(video_game_series)&rct=j&frm=1&q=&esrc=s&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjhkIn2i8rMAhWDBsAKHXXvBO4QFggTMAA&usg=AFQjCNFagyUC9U5Awee2n9siVca8qCZihg
and the other one is an OEM version that Mecer Computers included in their brand name pc's and laptops, it is a EAFighter Pilot for Win 95 and 98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHJ5o2nBVN0

[fragger]

Those are a couple of golden oldies 8)

Here's some more screenies, but there might not be too many more (see further below):

Mainstay of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain - the Hawker Hurricane MK II. Not as sleek and glamorous as the Spitfire, but far more prevalent.

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The Hurricane office. Like the aircraft themselves, the cockpit details in WoP are superb, and very accurately depicted.

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I had to take a crack at this - Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe (world's first operational turbojet) vs. a trio of Boeing B17G Flying Fortresses (one broke formation already here).

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Scratch one! I had to fly through a storm of lead to get at them. After the war, German fighter ace Adolf Galland said that trying to attack a flight of Fortresses was like "trying to walk around in the shower without getting wet". With 13 guns on each Fortress giving almost complete coverage, it's not hard to see what he was on about. I took a few hits doing this, but not enough to bring me down.

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Scratch two! I nearly flew into him.

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Scratch three! Some of the Fortress crew floats back to Earth - but being over the Ardennes, they're probably just going from frying pan to fire.

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As much as I am impressed with Wings of Prey, all in all it isn't quite doing it for me. It's so close to being a top-notch flight-sim, but it just misses out on the cigar. As pretty and as beautifully presented as it is, and as accurately modelled and researched as it is, it has a few serious shortcomings that mar the experience for a bit-of-a-hardcore simmer like me.

Major personal gripe number one, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is the lack of a free-flight mode. It would be really, really nice to be able to just fly around in the aircraft of my choice without any combat to be concerned about in order to get familiar with the handling and the cockpit layouts. Even real pilots got training time! There are only combat missions of various types and you pretty much get dropped into the action with each one, so you either don't get a chance to get a feel for the plane's character or study the instrumentation layout, or you get shot down while you're trying to. So you don't get to develop a real rapport with the aircraft. It also means there's little opportunity to hone your navigation skills - it's a case of fly to the next waypoint or follow the other guy(s) to it (the waypoints are marked by yellow flags hanging in the sky - not very sim-like) and engage the target until you've done your duty, at which point the mission ends. Maybe the magic yellow waypoint flags don't appear in full-on sim mode, I haven't really looked.

Gripe number two is the lack of take-offs and landings. The Single and Campaign missions allow you the option of a take-off, but you never get to land. As soon as you've achieved your objectives, the mission just ends in mid-air. I want to be able to navigate home and land, dammit! I want to be able to use my flaps and undercarriage and prop pitch and do side-slips with the rudder. Half the challenge of a good flight sim is the landing, and half the satisfaction is successfully pulling it off. MS Combat Flight Simulator not only let you do those things and land, but let you then taxi and park your plane in the hanger. That's what I want to be able to do with this.

Gripe number three is with the quick-flight missions (called "Training" missions in this title). The only quick-flight missions are dogfight ones. Some other types of quick-flight mission would be nice, e.g. ground support, bomber escort, strafing runs, and so on. There are quite a few single missions in addition to the Training and Campaign ones which encompass those types of missions, but being of a preset nature in terms of aircraft, locations and targets, I think they might get old fairly quickly.

There are things I love about the game - the look and sound of it, the environments, the quality of the flight modelling, and the beautiful, highly-detailed reproductions of aircraft that have always held an allure for me. In some respects it's WW2 flight-sim heaven. But the oversights and omissions bring it down a few points for me - my own, very subjective, rating would be about a 7 out of 10.

Maybe I'll look at IL-2 Sturmovik. Everybody in simdom seems to rave about that one, even if it is an older title. I'll happily trade superficial beauty for fullness of character.

[Art Blade]

what you said reminded me of an old game called Aces Over the Pacific from 1992. There I was allowed to take off and to land which was particularly cool when done on an aircraft carrier. And I was to choose a plane of my liking which usually was a Zero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rndsUKy2Cs

[Binnatics]

Weird, Fragger, that the game is so limited. Even no landing, I can imagine it's a bummer. And the lack of freeroaming abilities is also disappointing, taking in count the beautiful landscape I saw in your earlier pics. Hope you find the right flight sim on that next tittle then ;)

[Art Blade]

I was excited when I got this game back then but at the time I also got the game Alpha Protocol. The latter one, I really played the living daylights out of. And forgot about WoP as it was.. disappointing and getting on my nerves. I read the topic from start and remembered.

[fragger]

Yes, it's a shame. So much time and effort has obviously gone into the game's creation. But there's not much point in having controls for undercarriage, flaps, propeller pitch and fuel mixture when you never get to use them, unless you choose to take-off for a mission ???? Dunno why they bothered. There's all sorts of other controls for various aircraft functions, such as separate controls for aileron, elevator and rudder trim, and controls for various aspects of engine management, but the nature of the game is such that you never really get a chance to explore these controls. You're too busy twisting and turning and trying not to get shot down.

I don't really know how to define it, but the game just doesn't quite engage. It seems kind of unfocused. It's almost like two different developers were working on it with each being unaware of what the other was going for. The result is a game doesn't quite know what it wants to be: hard-core sim or arcade dogfighter, and it fails to please in either category - too much of a sim in its complexity to be an arcade shooter and too truncated in its design to be a full-on sim.

I may play some more of the campaign and see if it makes me feel differently about it, but at this stage I don't think it will.

[Binnatics]

Heheh, maybe Wings of Pray would've been a better name :-D

[Art Blade]

 :-X  :-()

[fragger]

Hehehe

My prayers weren't quite answered with this title :-D I mean it's good, don't get me wrong, it's really good, it's just not the kind of sim I can lose myself in. Apart from the sims already mentioned I remember another one, Mircoprose's F15 Strike Eagle III (1992), that I flew the dickens out of and I played through the campaign mode at least a dozen times. For quite a while I couldn't get enough of it. Lucasfilm's Their Finest Hour (1989) was another one, and EA's F16 Combat Pilot, from the same year... Them were the days young Harry, the Golden Age of Flight Sims :-()

WoP is good for when I feel like ducking in for a quick mish or two, but then I'll move on to something else.

I'd love it if somebody would do a really good WWI fighter sim. There are a couple out there these days but they don't get very good ratings. The old Red Baron game from Sierra/Dynamix way back in 1990 was excellent for its day, and a Win7-compatible version is actually available from GOG.com, but I couldn't bear to look at it now - a tad too primitive graphically for this day and age.

[Binnatics]

Have you ever heard of a helicopter 'sim' called Comanche?

I played the living daylight out of that tittle. It was one of my first 3D game environment experiences. Somewhere in '95 I think. Just checked; '92 PC game:

! No longer available

[Art Blade]

I played that one, and a lot, too. I think it was called Comanche versus Werewolf. At least I remember the back then revolutionary voxel graphics the devs were proud of.

[Binnatics]

It was called Comanche Maximum Overkill. There are sequels, but I don't know any of these.

It's so funny if you see the size of these pixels from back then. It's almost like minecraft :)

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

 :-D

Same with early shooters like Doom. If an enemy got right up in your face it was like a confetti blizzard :-()

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

Turns out you can fly home and land in some missions. When you've achieved the objectives, a message appears at the top of the screen saying "Mission Completed". It stays there for about 10 seconds, and if you do nothing, the mission will end. But another message appears along the bottom saying "Press ENTER to continue mission". If you do that before the time runs out, you can go home and land. But you only seem to get this option during the Campaign missions, that message doesn't appear in the Training or Single missions.

I must say that the way flak is depicted is very impressive. The shells burst, you can see the fragments flying, and if you're close to a burst your plane gets buffeted in a most unsettlingly realistic manner (and tends to get big holes knocked in it...) You can almost feel the shaking. I actually found myself ducking my head a few times :-()

[fragger]

Since WoP didn't quite slake my thirst for a good flight sim, I've been looking around to see what else is out there, and I've been getting more and more interested in one called Falcon 4 (F16).

Microprose originally released Falcon 4 way back in 1998, but it's been kept alive and progressively enhanced ever since by legions of dedicated aficionados and modders, culminating in the definitive v. 4.32 by a community team called BenchMark Sims in 2012.

Now THIS is what I call a flight simulator!

You probably won't want to watch this whole clip as it goes for over an hour - but check it out from 10:00 to 17:00 to see what you have to do just to get the plane powered up and started! The 3D cockpit is superb - if you have head-tracking software like the fanatic who made this clip does... Otherwise you use the "ordinary" cockpit views that the game comes with.

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Note that the guy is playing in full-on sim mode, you don't have to go through all that every time you want to play - you can start with the plane in the hanger like the guy does here ("ramp" start) or you can start already on the taxiway, or on the runway and ready for takeoff. There are tons of missions, and a huge array of training missions if you want to be the real deal. And if you want, it can be as hardcore as you can get - master it all and you could be just about as qualified to fly an F16 as you possibly could without actually getting into one. The game world may not be as pretty as it is in some other sims (even so, it's not half bad) but the game makes up for it in sheer depth of simulation.

[Art Blade]

that vid, at 44:44 "and.. unfortunately, my foe has just wrecked into the ground. [chuckles]"



Man, quite a handful. I once had a sim like that and gave up on the runway. Never touched hard core flight sims again, since  :-()

[fragger]

 :) Yeah, it looks like a commitment. I think it's something about the atmosphere of a sim that makes it interesting to me or not. Microprose's F15 Strike Eagle III was pretty full on, and Jane's F15 Strike Eagle some years later was even more so (every little switch and button in the cockpit could be operated), and I loved both of those. But there was another one, Digital Integration's F16 Fighting Falcon, which was no less ambitious and graphically attractive, yet it left me stone cold. There's some kind of indefinable quality to some sims that gets me in. Whether it's in the presentation, the design, the gameplay, or just the overall character of the thing, I don't know. Call it the "X Factor" :-()

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

Just had to post some more screenies from WoP, it produces such awesome aerial combat scenes 8) It's such a shame this game falls short in a few critical areas as previously discussed, because it's got to be one of the best-looking combat flight games ever. I've played through a bit of the campaign and I don't like it much - it's kind of lackluster and the missions don't feel terribly authentic somehow. Sometimes you get the option to take off, sometimes you get the option to play on and land after completing the mission objectives, but you don't always get either or both of those options in every mission. I was able to play on after one mission so I flew all the way home to land, only to have the mission end when I got near the airbase, so still no landing :D Dunno what the point of that was. There was another mission in the campaign where all I had to do was fly from one waypoint to the next, with about half a dozen waypoints in all, with nothing else to do. And it wasn't like I had to do any instrument navigating, or anything remotely challenging - just fly towards the next silly yellow flag hanging in the sky. Reach the last one and the mish just ends. Dullsville...

Anyway, here's some pics:

This is a fantastic effect, flying through a rain cloud. The still image doesn't do the effect justice - drops hit the canopy and stream backwards in a very realistic manner, and there's even a rippling, refractive effect on the metal surfaces inside the cockpit as the light passes through the water. It just looks amazing.

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Oops, got a bit too close there and clipped wings with a Heinkel. That's half of my port wing tumbling away in the centre.

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My chaps and I wreak havoc on a bomber formation. There were scores of enemy bombers in the group, it was quite a sight. Attacking them isn't easy - they all have defensive gun positions so there's always lots of guys shooting at you when you're trying to close in.

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Too close #2. At least I didn't lose any crucial airplane parts this time!

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Flak in the game is another terrific effect that doesn't fully translate into static screenies.

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What more iconic image of the Battle of Britain could there be than a Spitfire mixing it up with Stukas over the White Cliffs of Dover? Those two guys on parachutes didn't come from the burning Stuka, they were from another one I'd shot down just before this. It would have sucked to bail out of one Stuka only to get flown into by another... But they got lucky and it missed them.

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By the way, although most of the images I've posted are from Spitfire flights, there are lots of other plane types. I just haven't gotten around to them yet - apart from the Spit, so far I've only flown a Hawker Hurricane Mk. II, a ME 262 and a P51D Mustang. I've gone for the most famous classics first :-()

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[PZ]

 :-X