Game 429: Fighter Pilot

 

Digital Integration's succinctly-named Fighter Pilot is without a doubt the most fully-featured combat flight sim I've covered as of yet. Not since SubLogic's Flight Simulator have I seen one that features takeoff, landing, plausible flying mechanics, air-to-air combat, and seamless transition between them all. And that game's combat was an afterthought, and everything else besides so rough that it makes Fighter Pilot look like Falcon 4.0.

Flight Simulator. This is a dogfight!

Fighter Pilot loses FS1's scenery, but at least you can read the damn instruments.

 

You definitely want to use a joystick to play - the keyboard yoke controls are clumsily mapped to the 5,6,7,8 number row cluster. Either way, you will need to learn to cope with some awkward input polling - light taps do nothing, but long presses send you spinning wildly. Given the frequent need to make precise adjustments for minor course correction or to level out, you'll need to get comfortable with the exacting timing that you need to push the stick just long enough to register as input, and no longer.

The manual is restricted to six pages of cassette liner notes, which are well written and use their space economically, but sparse on actual flying technique, particularly when it comes to landing. It took a good deal of trial and error to work out viable techniques on my own, and in the end I didn't quite feel like I was doing things right

Fighter Pilot offers four scenarios:

• Landing practice - Start airborne, and land on the runway.
• Flying training - Start on a runway, takeoff, and land.
• Air-to-air combat practice - Start airborne and engage a drone.
• Air-to-air combat - The complete package. Start on a runway, takeoff, engage hostiles, and land before fuel runs out.
  

There are four difficulty settings, which as far as I can tell only effect air-to-air combat by increasing the enemies' shooting accuracy, but does not affect their flight skill. There are also two independent difficulty-increasing options; blind landing, which encases the ground in fog and forces you to approach and land guided with instruments alone, and cross-winds, which affect your speed and lateral drift. No thank you!

I did complete each scenario in order, as the first three scenarios are practice for the fourth - landing is definitely something you want to get a good handle on before trying a combat mission.

 

Landing practice

 

Begin five miles from a runway, already oriented for a center-line landing, at 1700 feet. As long as crosswinds are not enabled, you will not need to perform any course correction, and this is not too difficult once you have a good glide-slope technique. If you do have crosswinds then I have no idea how you can possibly manage to compensate with these controls that manage to be too sensitive and not sensitive enough at the same time.

My technique is to immediately lower the flaps, which dramatically reduces speed and increases lift, then raise thrust to just below 7.5 notches, and raise the nose until VSI shows a descent of about 12 ft/s - you might not be able to hit this exactly. ILS is important but limited in usefulness - it seems to be calibrated to a fixed glidepath and won't be much help if you deviate too much from it. But it will help with making small corrections. Leave thrust alone and gently adjust pitch to correct your glidepath as needed, using 12 ft/s as the baseline descent rate. Once you get close, VSI becomes useless and you'll need to trust your own eyes.

 

On touchdown, kill thrust and slam the brakes. You shouldn't be landing at more than 135kn, and the F-15 can come to a stop from that pretty quickly.

The manual gives some terse notes on how to perform a flaps-up landing (these can be damaged in flight!), but either I'm missing something or the method given just doesn't work. The printed thrust and nose angle causes the Eagle to cruise at 200kn with zero altitude loss, missing the runway completely. Decreasing the thrust even a little bit causes rapid loss of speed and altitude until it stalls and crashes. Decreasing pitch makes it rapidly build speed until it gets fast enough to rip off the landing gear. Still, I did manage to land flaps-up once, by retracting the undercarriage, descending to under 100ft, then approaching at cruising speed and decreasing pitch at the last moment to land, which I suspect is not a safe landing technique in real life.

This is a good first exercise, and with some practice I could land the plane consistently, but it skips the most difficult part of landing - orienting with the runway.

Flying training

 

In this scenario, you must take off from an airbase and land. You have a choice of four airbases to land at, though one of them is nearly impossible to.

Takeoff is easy - you are already oriented line-center on the runway and don't need to taxi, and the F-15 can take off with flaps up just fine. Just increase thrust to full, lift up at 160kn, and don't forget to retract the undercarriage.

Once airborne, you can fly around at your leisure. As long as you don't let the airspeed fall below 130kn, or do something dumb like lower the flaps or undercarriage at high speeds, you're fine. It's not real interesting though - the terrain is almost completely featureless. Even the mountains are not rendered as scenery - they are simply invisible regions marked only on the map that instantly crash you if your altitude isn't high enough.

 

The manual does nothing to explain runway alignment, but the beacons are key. Three of the bases are flanked by beacons which can be selected to show their bearing and distance on radar. The fourth base, Zulu, lacks beacons, and I don't see how you're supposed to land on it. I find you need a good 20-25 miles out from an airbase to be able to stick the landing; it takes time to oriented the plane correctly, and you get closer while making adjustments. Furthermore, bearings are only accurate to the degree, so as you get closer to the base, that 270° reading may well become 271° require further course adjustment.

Flying toward Delta. Note the 274° bearing to beacon 4.

Some correction is needed!

 

At 6m distance, the flight computer becomes available which can help you make your final course adjustments.

471ft north of the runway. Gotta bear left a bit.

 

 Hopefully you don't need to fuss with this too much and wind up flying right over the runway while fighting the somewhat stiff and imprecise controls to align with it!

Air-to-air combat practice

 

This scenario starts you out in the air and close to a drone, which you'll quickly run into and be able to shoot down with your Vulcan - no lock-on missiles here!

After killing the drone, a real fighter spawns, and can be located using the radar for distance and bearing and flight computer for altitude. The map will also show you its position and heading.

Visual range is under one mile, effective weapon range is less than that, and trying to fight head-on is futile; as you'll just scream past each other in the blink of an eye. You've got to get on its tail and stay on it as it tries to shake you, and you'll need to go just fast enough to catch it, but not so much faster that you cannot match its maneuvers. Once in range and in your sights you can gun it down. Instrumentation will not tell you the speed, and is also not precise enough to be useful when it enters visual range; you'll have to rely on your eyes and intuition.

I pull off death from above.

 

After kill, you can land, or you can continue to fight - regular fighters continue to spawn. If you're good, they won't have much of a chance to hit you, but on higher difficulties they may land a hit during the initial split-second flyby. Damage modeling is simplistic; four hits will kill you.

Air-to-air combat

 

This is the total Fighter Pilot experience. Enemy fighters spawn immediately - infinitely but thankfully only one at a time - and they're coming for your airbases. Everything you've practiced in the first three scenarios is used here - take off, hunt and kill as many enemies as your fuel and fuselage integrity allows, and land.

The above video (note - the game has no sound!) demonstrates my best run at air-to-air combat, at the easiest difficulty settings, in which I kill four enemies before landing and very nearly out of fuel. I managed five in one prior run, but botched the landing.

Some luck is involved - fighters will target airbases when you are not engaging them, and you will lose some! If a fighter spawns far from you, and they will, it will almost certainly destroy the nearest airbase long before you can intercept it. Just hope that they don't leave you with the useless Zulu base. Conversely, during one attempt, fighters wouldn't stop spawning close to me (and the only viable airbase), and I ran out of fuel fighting them, unable to land.

GAB rating: Average. I'm impressed by the fullness of this simulation given the early timeframe of its release. In some ways it's more impressive than Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle of the following year - it runs at a better framerate despite the poorer hardware, simulates takeoff and landing, and the cannon duels are more engaging than F-15's fire-and-forget missile combat, if perhaps anachronistic in the age of jet warfare.

That said, it wasn't especially enjoyable, thanks to the somewhat clumsy controls. They're workable, but just annoying enough that I felt like I was fighting them more than I was engaging with the flight and combat mechanics. Simulations like this have a short shelf life anyway. When the goal, as the liner notes say, is approximate a realistic simulation to the best ability of computing's limitations, the effort quickly becomes irrelevant as technology improves and later sims do it better.

Game 428: Night Gunner

Digital Integration was a minor British developer best known for flight sims like Hind and Apache, and are credited with distribution on several UK budget re-releases. They didn't produce many whales of their own, and their earliest bona fide whale is 1989's F-16 Combat Pilot, but 1985 seemed a good year to introduce the company with Commodore 64 racer Speed King and their backlog up to it.

Their first game, Night Gunner, was originally developed for the ZX81, and like most ZX81 games is a barely playable piece of crap.

It's Star Fire, just with a WWII bomber theme. That makes the third Star Fire clone I've played that was made by a British bedroom programmer in 1982, and this is the worst one yet. To hit your targets you have to tediously nudge them into the center of your screen with painfully unresponsive cursor keys, awkwardly mapped to the 5-6-7-8 keyboard cluster (as it is with a real ZX81 keyboard), and whenever you push them it's not always clear whether the input was accepted or not.

I'd just move onto the next one, except that the ZX Spectrum version of the same game appears to be substantially different.

Alas, it's still not a side-scrolling shmup where you play as a flying wizard.

You will definitely want to emulate a joystick - the keyboard layout makes no sense even by ZX Spectrum standards.

 

It's still much like Star Fire, though this time the crosshairs move instead of your point of view, and it's all the better for it, even with more responsive controls than in the ZX81 original.

 

You still need to hit your targets dead-center, and now you have to lead them as well, but at least you have rapid-fire. Ammo is finite but I never ran out of it. Perhaps it becomes an issue on later missions. 

On the higher difficulty levels, your plane takes damage FAST, and this affects the plane's speed and handling. It's usually not even worth trying to shoot down the defenseless blimps, because you really don't want to let the fighters stay alive for a moment longer than necessary.

Once the plane reaches its destination, you switch to bombing mode.

Somehow the bombing is at day.

 

Here, there's no reason not to slow down to minimum velocity. You can't hit all of the targets, but the more accurately you bomb, the more points you score. The time limit is irrelevant; you'll certainly drop your bombs before time runs out, at either which point you turn around, return to the tailgunner seat, and try to survive the trip home.

Subsequent missions follow the same format - gunning, bombing, gunning - but get more difficult. Enemies get faster and more numerous, bombing targets become mobile ones like tanks and trucks, and sometimes it is a dive-bombing mission, which is far more difficult.

 

Once a targets appears past the horizon, you only have a few seconds before it passes under your firing line. If you aren't already diving when you see it, it's too late - and your altitude drops fast!

The tape liner claims 30 missions, but I couldn't get anywhere near close to that.

GAB rating: Below average. The ZX Spectrum is luxurious compared to the ZX81, but destitute compared to the Atari 800. With functional controls and visuals and some gameplay variety, this is one of the better action games I've played on an ultra-budget micro before, but that isn't saying much; only three such games have managed average or better (3D Starstrike, Gridrunner, Jetpac).

Game 427: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Dr. Jones' expression looks like he got his tenure revoked.

I’ve long considered the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to be underrated. It’s not the best by a longshot – that would be Raiders of the Lost Ark; the sidekicks in Temple are crap, the plot a bit weak, the Kiplingesque pro-imperialist connotations troubling, and there’s almost nothing of redeeming value in the first two headache-inducing acts which consist mainly of a relentless barrage of ridiculous action set pieces, culturally insensitive grossout gags, and Kate Capshaw’s endless whining and screaming.

But when Indy & co finally reach the titular temple and adjoining catacombs where the bulk of the action happens, it gets good. The stunts, the deathtraps, mine carts, lava flows, dynamite explosions and cave-ins exemplify the adventuring spirit of the films almost better than anything else in the entire trilogy. Plus, Thug leader Mola Ram is a way better villain than any of the Nazi bureaucrats that Jones squared off against in the other films. They're in over their soon-to-be-melted heads when it comes to anything magic, but Mola Ram commands magic with the panache of a Mortal Kombat boss. They wear their dinky little totenkopf insignias, Ram wears a giant yak skull headpiece with a smaller skull embedded inside.

Atari's Temple of Doom, like their Star Wars games, thankfully cover only the good parts, and Willie Scott and Short Round are almost nowhere to be seen (or heard). Unlike Atari's chronologically confused Star Wars games, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been adapted earlier as an Atari 2600 game by Howard Scott Warshaw, and from a cursory look may have been more baffling than E.T. This comparatively straightforward action/platformer is certainly better thought of as a standalone adaptation of the film than a sequel to the earlier game, absolving me from having to play it. Last Crusade would, of course, be handled by frequent Atari partner Tiertex, with the coinciding adventure game done by Lucasfilm Games.

My below video is on easy difficulty, which unlike Return of the Jedi will enable every game scene, and it's difficult enough - I can't complete medium without cheats, even when starting with six lives.

 

Difficulty selection is its own level, handled in a manner that makes me think of Quake - not just in how the higher difficulties are gated behind more challenging diegetic actions, but also in setting the stage for the game's gloomy, oppressive atmosphere even before it technically begins.

Regardless of difficulty, the game unfolds over four cycles of three scenes - the catacombs, the mineshaft, and the temple.

In the catacombs, you traverse the treacherous, maze-like paths in search of the children imprisoned here, avoiding traps, pitfalls, and Thugs, who are relentless but usually subdued with a good whip crack. They're also some of the least self-preserving enemies I've ever seen in a video game, routinely walking off ledges and into lava pits, spikes, pulverizers, etc. And the Atari voice synthesizer makes their vaguely offensive chanting sound like the Swedish Chef! Indy's voice doesn't fare much better either, constantly yelping "woah!" and "ayeee!" in a manner that sounds less like Harrison Ford and more like Pitfall Harry Jr.

Rescue the children and you can leave via mine cart.

The mine cart scene is for certain where I lost most of my lives. The cart moves fast, controls aren't always responsive, and limited screen space means danger often pops up quicker than I can react to it. There's always an explosive barrel right at the end of the scene, and you must whip it to blow up the tracks behind you or you will almost certainly be taken out by a pursuing cart, and if there's one close enough behind you this might happen (and has happened) anyway.

Succeed, and you enter the temple.

These stages are pretty simple. The Sankara stone sits on the altar by an unstable platform. Snatch it but time it carefully so that you don't get dumped into the lava, and use your whip to keep the Thugs away (and likely drop them into the lava). Take too long and the wooden bridge burns up, and you'll need to take the long route around. Mola Ram may show up to blast fireballs at you too.

 

But I was right at the top of the screen!

The stages repeat but get increasingly longer, more complicated, and more dangerous. Ram starts showing up during the catacomb stages as well.

The fourth cycle concludes with the bridge scene instead of a final temple.

Whip his fireballs before they get you, but watch your back too - Thugs will attack from behind, and you can't whip in both directions at once. The closer you get, the shorter the intervals between fireballs, until,

 

Alas, fortune and glory is fleeting - one last level remains, and this time death is your only exit.

Golden idols are hidden in this massive bonus stage, but the Thugs are more numerous than ever, the vampire bats small and difficult to hit, and the maharajah and his geographically inappropriate voodoo doll will show up and ruin you as he pleases. Eventually you die, and enshrine your high score for the world to see.

GAB rating: Average. From a look and feel perspective, this is a solid arcade adaptation of Temple of Doom, and captures the film's dark and twisted setting well. From a gameplay perspective, it feels unpolished and frustrating, with off-feeling controls and over-reliance on cheap kills. It's functional, but could have been a lot better.