Games 430-431: Full Throttle & Speed King

Completing this early retrospective of Digital Integration we have a two-fer, starting with an obviously important 1984 ancestor to their C64 motorsport hit Speed King.

 

Game 430: Full Throttle

This Full Throttle is listed separately from 1985's Speed King on Mobygames, but other sources, including Wikipedia, describe them as the same game on different platforms - Full Throttle being Micromega's original release on ZX Spectrum, and Speed King the C64 conversion by Digital Integration and subsequent releases by Mastertronic.

Having played both, I'm inclined to agree with Mobygames' list as two different games, though they have several things in common, including the author Mervyn J. Estcourt.

This game looks an awful lot like Sega's Hang-On from the next year, doesn't it? Just uglier with flickering, monochrome sprites and no road scenery.

To my surprise, I found this game quite a bit harder than Hang-On. It seems more forgiving - the controls are pretty responsive, and there's not much penalty for going off the road; your bike just decelerates very quickly, and when you get pushed off-road because you took a turn too fast, you probably wanted to slow down anyway.

What makes it hard is the other bikers! No, you don't take a dramatic spill from your bike when you collide with an opponent. It's perhaps even worse - the computer emits a shrill beep, and your throttle instantly ceases to function. You sloooowly lose your speed until it hits zero, and only then can you accelerate again from a stop, at which point you've probably fallen into last place.

Avoiding a collision with the bikers seems hopeless. The hitboxes are impossible to read, and the constant flickering makes it even worse. When they aren't swerving left and right, they seemingly teleport left and right instead. Turns do not affect their speed or lateral movements - you, on the other hand, will get pushed to the outside of a turn, often into the path of a biker. Slowing down so that you can wait for a better opportunity to pass or for better control during the turns might seem like a good idea, but if you aren't already in last place, slowing down allows your opponents to bump into you from behind.

You can practice courses without the bikers, but it seems pointless. The tracks themselves are not challenging without opponents, and memorizing the course doesn't give much advantage in racing it.

I managed to get first place in the Donington course but it felt like luck; quite often it looked like I was passing right through an opponent's sprite. Once I got to the head of the pack it was easy to stay there.

 

There are ten courses in total but I didn't see the point in playing the rest.

GAB rating: Bad. Full Throttle is overly simplistic and overly punishing of collisions that you aren't given adequate means to avoid.

Game 431: Speed King

 

It's easy to understand why Speed King is often described as a C64 conversion of Full Throttle. You have the same premise, the same game options, eight of the ten tracks are the same or variants (even if Paul Ricard is renamed "France," and, well, look at it.

But this is a very different-feeling racer that leans somewhat into the simulation side, more so than any other racer I've covered yet. Transmission is a manual six-gear setup, with no option to drive automatic. Trying to speed through the course at top gear will consistently lead to disaster as sharp turns come out of nowhere and you'll veer off course at 200mph - or into an opponent in front of you who (unlike you) slowed down in anticipation - and either way take a nasty and costly spill.

 

You'll have to familiarize yourself with each course before you have any chance of coming in any position but last, and learn where each curve is, how fast you should be going before entering, and when to change gears. The game offers tools to help with this - a preview flyby (which to my frequent annoyance will play automatically after about 30 seconds on the main menu), a practice mode to try the course without the nuisance of traffic, and three difficulty levels. The maps, sadly, are unreliable as visual aids - they have some correspondence to the actual layout of turns and straightaways, but you'll need to internalize their inaccuracies - Sweden's final right-angle turn, for instance, comes almost immediately after the one before it, and not after a medium straight as the map suggests.

It's a much more demanding game than Full Throttle, and no less punishing, but this is a net positive; I'd rather fail and feel like it's my fault for sucking at the challenge than fail and feel like it's the game's fault for being broken.

My gripes with Full Throttle's rival bikers are largely taken care of here as well. They don't flicker or warp, they behave sensibly albeit not always predictably, they actually slow down during and before turns, and they cannot ram you from behind, but instead let out an annoyed honk as they harmlessly pass through your sprite to overtake you (you, however, will still crash if you ram into them from behind). Passing your opponents is still pretty difficult; it's always a struggle between the speed needed to overtake them and the maneuverability needed to get around them, and I still crash a lot, but this is an issue of skill and risk assessment. Staying ahead of the pack once you get there is quite easy... on the easiest difficulty setting. Any higher and you will have to keep up a good pace to keep your position.

But I have one new gripe, and it's a big one. There's no way to brake! Ironically, this wouldn't be as severe in a less demanding game like Full Throttle, but there's no simple way to reduce your speed on a 220MPH straightaway so that you don't skid right off the turn at the end of it. Methods of slowing down include:

• Letting up on the gas. Sometimes this is good enough, but it takes awhile to drop to safe levels. If you're driving in top gear, then by the time you see the upcoming turn it's probably too late.
• Downshifting will make you decelerate faster, and is often the more viable method, but repeat downshifts are a clumsy way to manage this, and depending on how sharp the turn is it might still be too late by the time you see it. Decelerating in advance is safer, but it's tricky to assess how close to the turn you really are.
• Riding the curb kills your speed in a hurry, but this is dangerous. It's really easy to unintentionally come to a stop or even spill this way.
  

The lack of brakes combined with the very short viewing distance can make for a lot of frustrating crashes, especially on the higher difficulty settings where you have to go in one of the top two gears to have a chance of passing anyone. At above 180mph or so, by the time you can see something you need to react to, it's probably too late to react to it.

Below is a video where I complete the Sweden course on "Champion" difficulty, the second-highest. Here, I pull into first place early on and stay there, and even momentarily lap some of the bikers at the rear, though it's by no means a perfect sprint. In parts I use the wrong gear and even crash a few times, but still manage to win.

I did try some of the other courses, but not all of them. It just wasn't interesting enough to take up much more of my time.

GAB rating: Below average. This is the most sim-like racer yet, which is an ambition that I admire more than I love. In the end, having gear-shifting but no brakes is a bizarre design choice that hurts the experience.

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.