Game 405: Jump Jet

 

Jump Jet, listed on Mobygames by its 1988 Amiga release title Harrier Mission, simulates author Vaughan Dow's day job as a Sea Harrier FRS1 pilot. Flying a single-seat, single engine, subsonic jet fighter capable of VTOL thanks to its angled thrust nozzles, you must launch from your carrier, locate an enemy fighter, pursue and destroy it, and return to the carrier and land on it safely.

Getting this to work correctly was slightly tricky. First, there was the issue of realizing that no Commodore 64 game called Harrier Mission exists. Jump Jet is the correct title. Second, I found two disk images floating around. One of them refused to load. The other had completely unintelligible speech, and I couldn't quite put it out of my mind that this wasn't right, or that something else might be wrong too. But ultimately I wound up playing a T64 tape image, which loaded much faster than the disk version, and offered clear-sounding radio chatter (mostly "Mayday-mayday-mayday. I'm bailing out!" given my piloting skills).

The Sea Harrier's distinguishing characteristic is its angled jet nozzle, which may be oriented in four directions:

• Vertical, used for VTOL and hovering. At this orientation, pitch controls forward/backward movement rather than altitude, and banking controls lateral movement without turning. Thrust power will control rate of climb.
  
• 45°, used to build airspeed from hover. Thrust power controls rate of climb and forward acceleration; pitch and banking don't do very much at all.
• Rear-firing; only effective when airspeed exceeds 180kn, otherwise transforms your jet into cannonshot. Handles like a conventional jet with maximum level speed of 600kn; pitch controls altitude, banking turns, and thrust controls acceleration.
• 45° reverse, used for rapid deceleration. 

 

This is definitely more of a flight simulator than Dow's previous Flight Path 737. Gameplay is still stratified into phases, but where Flight Path 737 immediately ended the trip when you didn't follow procedures correctly, Jump Jet simulates the flight physics just enough to make you face the ramifications of your failure. When it can't do this (stalls are still not a thing, for instance), a warning light flashes, and too many of these will abort the mission.

A multilingual manual offers five pages of English instructions - this affords more detail than the two pages of terse liner notes offered by Flight Path 737, but is still a bit inadequate for explaining exactly what you need to do. There is also some flat-out incorrect information; the manual says that the skill level is selected by the computer and automatically advances upon a successful mission, but you have access to all five from the start. I had to trial and error my way through the first two, and faced a showstopping difficulty on the third.

Below is a walkthrough of skill level #2, "Flight Lieutenant."

Takeoff

Way easier than taking off from a runway. Pretty much the only way you can screw this up is by forgetting to lower the flaps first. The manual notes that a real Sea Harrier is equipped with 6,600 pounds of fuel, full arms, and must take off from a ski runway, but in this simulation, we only have 5,000 pounds, four missiles, and can take off from rest.

• Press F to lower the flaps.
• Press 3 to fire the jets vertically.
• Hold '+' to increase thrust to maximum. At >75% power, you will ascend, and the silhouette over the landing zone shrinks.
• At 50ft, the scene changes.
  

 

Takeoff, scene 2

 

• Press 2 to fire the jets at 45°. You'll move forward, away from the carrier, almost immediately.

 

Sea flight

 

Here, the game switches to a first person sim-like perspective, and it looks kind of nice at first, with its animated waves, clouds, and horizon. But then you notice the cheapness of it all; there's almost nothing to look at here, banking doesn't tilt the horizon, which simply goes up and down in response to your pitch but is unaffected by altitude. Even Hellcat Ace on the Atari, a game I noted for its primitive pseudo-3D visuals and gameplay, was more convincing than this!

Your goal here is to locate the enemy fighter, which is represented by a triangle on the radar. The only other object here is the carrier, which spawns at a random distance and orientation from your origin even though you just took off from it.

• Press 'R' to enter radar mode. Note that this will take flight control away from you until you exit radar mode, so don't do anything stupid like entering a dive before doing this.
  
• A cursor will appear on the radar screen. Use the joystick to .slowly. move it onto the triangle and then press the fire button.
  
• The enemy fighter will be 'selected,' and its distance to you will show on the radar.
  
• Wait until your speed accumulates 180 knots, if it hasn't yet.
  
• Press '1' to activate rear-firing thrusters.
  
• Press 'F' to raise your flaps.
  
• Press 'U' to raise the undercarriage.
• Use the joystick to pitch up until you have attained at least 1,000ft of altitude. Do not let airspeed fall below 180 knots - reduce your pitch if it falls too low.
  
• Use the joystick to level.
  
• Use the joystick to bank and rotate to face the enemy's direction, and then level.
  
• Approach to a proximity of 5 miles.
  

 

Dogfight

 

Here things become a real horror show of programming shortcuts as you finally see the enemy flit about all over your screen like an ant on crack. You see, the enemy plane doesn't fly in pseudo-3D space with any sort of attempt at modeling flight physics, but is merely a sprite that moves around your 2D screen space, moving up or down as it pleases, but never leaves your screen no matter how you maneuvers. You, unfortunately, still have to obey flight physics, which is why you'll want to approach with a somewhat high altitude; aiming downward makes you dive, and the enemy can't crash into the sea, but you can. A simple distance parameter causes the sprite to enlarge once the gap closes. The goal is to get the sprite inside your reticle and pull the trigger, which instantly destroys it. If the distance closes to 2 miles, it destroys you. Disengagement is impossible; you kill or be killed, and if you run out of missiles, tough luck.

The trick here is to use the reverse thrusters. Can't close the distance if you're moving backwards!

• Press 'M' to turn on your missile sight.
  
• Press '4' to engage reverse thrusters.
  
• Use the joystick to get the enemy into your sight.
• Fire.
  

 

Return to carrier

• Press 'M' to turn off the missile sight.
  
• Press 2 to fire the jets at 45°.
• Press 'R' to enter radar mode. Again, make sure you aren't diving or banked, or this will go badly for you.
  
• Use the joystick to move the cursor onto the carrier and press fire.
• The carrier will be 'selected,' and its distance to you will show on the radar.
• Use the joystick to bank and rotate to face the carrier's direction, and then level.
  
• Wait until your speed accumulates 180 knots, if it hasn't yet.
  
• Press '1' to activate rear-firing thrusters.
• Reduce pitch, and approach carrier to a proximity of 5 miles. Level before altitude reaches 200 feet.

 

Carrier approach

 

This part was probably the most difficult to figure out. You've got to get very close to the carrier and enter a hovering descent, but the graphics and display don't make this easy to judge.

• When the carrier comes into view, bank to center it.
• Approach with an altitude as close to 200 feet as you can.
  
• When somewhat close, level the plane and press '4' to activate reverse thrusters and rapidly decelerate. The exact distance will depend on your approach airspeed - you want come to a stop close to the carrier, but you don't want to overshoot.
• When airspeed approaches 0, press '2' to activate 45° thrusters and reduce thrust power.
• Adjust your thrust angle and power as necessary to inch forward.
• Once you are very close - the carrier should be close to the bottom of your screen but not off it, press '3' to activate vertical thrusters and set power to 75%. You will decelerate and hover.
  
• When airspeed reaches 0, reduce thrust. You will descend.
  
• When altitude falls below 200ft and the game thinks you're close enough, the scene will change. You may still need to adjust thrust angle to get closer.
  

 

Landing

 

This part is tricky - almost certainly the most difficult part from an execution standpoint. And on higher difficulties it is so much worse.

If you enter this scene going more than a few knots, it's entirely possible that you might just fly away from the carrier before you have a chance to do anything, which aborts the landing and returns to seaflight mode, causing the carrier to magically spawn somewhere at random again! Yes, this happened to me, and it is frustrating.

• Press '3' to activate vertical thrust.
  
• Set thrust to 75%.
• Use the joystick to pitch and bank to maneuver over the landing zone until you are directly over it and in a steady hover. This is very sensitive.
• Press 'F' to lower flaps.
• Press 'U' to lower undercarriage.
• Reduce thrust. You will descend.
• At 30 feet, the scene changes.
  

  

Touchdown

• Increase thrust to 75%.
• Use the joystick to pitch and bank to maneuver over the landing zone until you are directly over it and in a steady hover. You may lose altitude while doing this, and may need to increase thrust to avoid landing too soon, but easy does it - you don't want to climb too high either.
  
• Reduce thrust below 75%. You will descend and land.

 

With higher difficulties, you must destroy multiple targets before landing, and the manual says there is a lower tolerance for warnings but I found this is incorrect; you fail after nine regardless of setting.

But the true difficulty factor is the weather. Being jostled around during seaflight is bad enough, but on levels 3 and above, you also have to fight the wind while landing. And I found this impossible.

Crashing your jet into the deck? That's six demerits.

GAB rating: Below average. Jump Jet is more ambitious than Flight Path 737 and gamier, so I feel I can evaluate it as a game, but the core here is bare bones compared to games I've called bare bones.

It's too bad, because there's some promise. The VTOL aircraft is cool. The presentation isn't half bad, with pleasing colors and animation. Ingame speech is pretty decent quality, the instruments are clear, readable, and well laid out, and the multiple perspectives involved with takeoff and landing, which itself is something I haven't seen in any earlier combat flight sim, are a neat touch.

But there's not enough to do here, and the flight simulation is half-baked and unconvincing. Air combat is pathetic - like an arcade game from the 70's, but honestly, I can't even think of one of those that doesn't look and feel better. Compare to Hellcat Ace, from three years earlier on Atari hardware, where the horizon tilted as you banked, up to two enemies could be present at once, and they at least seemed to follow the same flight physics as you, able to climb, dive, and maneuver off-screen and behind you. I called that simplistic.

It will be awhile before we return to Anco Software for a bona fide whale, and I'm not sure I feel all that enriched by this retrospective series, but hey, they can't all be winners.