What Video Games Have You Been Playing, Part 10: Or; A Shameful Display!

[Dachs]

AH okay that makes some sense. I still don't think using missiles would be as fun as guiding machine gun tracers into your target which you have to do in ww2-era sims. Incidentally, the two games I used to play in that genre were Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator (the one focusing on WW2 in the Pacific, don't remember the specific version though I have tried to find it a few times) and Out of the Sun, which was an absolutely delightful flight sim for Mac that had missions in the Pacific and European theaters and even a sandbox mode where you could fly around the whole world and shoot up landmarks like the Pyramids and Eiffel Tower if you wanted.

I have IL-2 Sturmovik in the Steam Library, it remains unplayed as I'd like to get a joystick and I haven't been willing to invest the time to familiarize myself with the keyboard controls yet.

How's the ammunition on those MGs? Do you run through bullets as quickly as the actual planes do?

What's your opinion on X-Wing and TIE Fighter?

 

[Lexicus]

The keyboard controls are utter trash so that's a good call.

Figured they would be. I think you can change the key bindings but that takes time I've been, as I said, unwilling to invest. I got the game for something like $2 on sale.

Keyboards sound awful for flight controls

It worked okay back in the day, admittedly I didn't fool around with flaps or ailerons or any of that stuff so I was probably missing out on a good amount of the game (never did figure out how to land on a carrier deck, pulled it off on an airstrip a few times) but I was able to shoot down like 15 planes on a single mission and that was the fun part.

How's the ammunition on those MGs? Do you run through bullets as quickly as the actual planes do?

I don't think so. I dimly remember having like seven or eight hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition and that was usually enough to last ~1hr which was about how long I would play any given mission in one sitting. I would pretty much always run out of cannon shells, bombs, or any other special ammo you got, but I don't remember ever running out of machine gun bullets.

What's your opinion on X-Wing and TIE Fighter?

Never played either one. I'm no flight simulator junkie and just to be clear I wasn't trying to put down Ace Combat, just explaining why I think it wouldn't be as fun for me as the WW2-themed stuff.

 

[Dachs]

I don't think so. I dimly remember having like seven or eight hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition and that was usually enough to last ~1hr which was about how long I would play any given mission in one sitting. I would pretty much always run out of cannon shells, bombs, or any other special ammo you got, but I don't remember ever running out of machine gun bullets.

That's cool. Concessions to "being fun" are important.

Never played either one. I'm no flight simulator junkie and just to be clear I wasn't trying to put down Ace Combat, just explaining why I think it wouldn't be as fun for me as the WW2-themed stuff.

Oh, no, I'm not stanning. We're good, haha.

Consider that X-Wing bit a recommendation. Old games, very fun with a nice USB joystick, mostly about gunplay (well, lasers) rather than seeker missiles. X-Wing was my first big-boy computer game (i.e. "not Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon") and I still adore it.

 

[Lexicus]

That's cool. Concessions to "being fun" are important.

Serious ammunition restrictions might make more fun if you could somehow construct a game around making multiple sorties rather than single self-contained sorties. I have no idea how that would work though.

Consider that X-Wing bit a recommendation. Old games, very fun with a nice USB joystick, mostly about gunplay (well, lasers) rather than seeker missiles. X-Wing was my first big-boy computer game (i.e. "not Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon") and I still adore it.

Cool, I have heard good things about it in the past as well. I might look into getting it if I ever get that joystick, lol

 

[Dachs]

Serious ammunition restrictions might make more fun if you could somehow construct a game around making multiple sorties rather than single self-contained sorties. I have no idea how that would work though.

Even in Ace Combat, with dozens of missiles and potentially several bombs at your disposal, you usually have to resupply during the longer missions. There's a return line on the map in the direction of your base and you can return there mid-mission to resupply and bring airframe damage back down to zero. The way that it works is a little gamey in that apparently no time passes in the mission between trips to your base, but the option's still there.

In Ace Combat 6, maps are large enough that many of them actually have a friendly airfield (or an airfield that friendly forces can/will capture in the course of the mission) on them, so you can resupply there instead. It's a little less immersion-breaking.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I spent half my time in X-Wing trying to tell which pixels were the good guys and which ones were the bag guys. If they just updated the graphics to something a bit more modern I'm sure it'd still be enjoyable today. I remember when I learned I could adjust shield settings - it was a real mind blowing moment of my childhood.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

TIE Fighter all the way!

 

[civvver]

I spent half my time in X-Wing trying to tell which pixels were the good guys and which ones were the bag guys. If they just updated the graphics to something a bit more modern I'm sure it'd still be enjoyable today. I remember when I learned I could adjust shield settings - it was a real mind blowing moment of my childhood.

Tie fighter is much more playable today. It's a better game anyway, x-wing was ridiculously hard. Tie fighter more balanced.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I never got that one. X-Wing was hard and I mostly died but I guess at the time I didn't realize it was over-the-top difficult. My first console was NES which spawned 'nintendo hard' as a meme. It didn't occur to me then that gaming wasn't supposed to be mostly frustration.

 

[Phrossack]

I had X-wing Alliance, which was fun. Apparently modders remastered it some years ago, but I haven't had a good joystick in years.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I have an awesome joystick, unfortunately it requires a gameport.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I have an awesome joystick, unfortunately it requires a gameport.

Gameport to USB adapter cable, eight bucks.
Priceless.

 

[Synobun]

Erika still rocks a 15-year-old XP rig that's kept together with scotch tape and a lot of hope, so you might need to wait another 10 business years before that adapter gets bought and/or cobbled together from 30-year-old parts.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I got a new case for it and cleaned all the parts and ended up a ball of lint the size of a football. Still sounds like a jet engine taking off when it powers up though.

 

[cardgame]

IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 does feature historically accurate ammunition amounts and rates of fire. It's quite easy to burn through all available ammo, because marksmanship with a joystick is really difficult, and in some cases you only have about 8-12 seconds of sustained fire capability.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yesterday I installed Napo Total War plus the NTW3 mod because the hype. First impression is it is half done. Someone has tried it?

 

[civvver]

X-wing was good but really hard and really out dated graphics, although there's a 98 version of both x-wing and tie fighter that remastered them into a higher resolution. I think it doubled from 320x200 to 640x480, hard to find the exact specs. The original x-wing was on floppy discs lol. The remaster was cd-rom, original tie fighter I think was cd rom only.

People complain that the remasters aren't as good cus they don't have dynamic music, like battle music starting when enemies engage. I think that's the only difference in gameplay. But the resolution diff is well worth giving that up.

X-wing vs tie fighter sucked. It was a half baked multi player game, literally zero campaign. It had some individual training missions. Playing multiplayer flight sim in 98 wasn't very much fun. Alliance was better, they went back to the campaign, but there was one really hard mission I couldn't get past so I never finished it. Probably didn't give it a fair shake. It's very different because you begin as a neutral freighter pilot, not as part of the rebels or empire.

But anyway, I still think tie fighter is the best. On gog they're like $10 each, they go on sale a lot though. My xbox controller works as a joystick with the gog tie fighter, it has support for it. On the old games with the plug in serial joystick though you could use mouse and joystick simultaneously so I would use the joystick for the big turns and stuff and the mouse for precision aiming. Can't do that on the dosbox setup, it only supports one or the other.


For poops and giggles I tried a playthrough of FTL but with a self imposed rule that I had to jump to the next sector using the shortest path possible. If two nodes ended up the same distance I could choose between them. I ended up dying in like sector 5 lol. Not nearly enough scrap to upgrade anything, I only had 2 shield bubbles and enough weapons to only bring down a level 2 shield myself.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

X-wing was good but really hard and really out dated graphics, although there's a 98 version of both x-wing and tie fighter that remastered them into a higher resolution. I think it doubled from 320x200 to 640x480, hard to find the exact specs. The original x-wing was on floppy discs lol. The remaster was cd-rom, original tie fighter I think was cd rom only.

I have TIE Fighter on five 3.5" disks.

 

[Arakhor]

I don't think I've used a 3.5" floppy in 17+ years. I think I even stopped using normal CDs ten years ago.

 

[Synobun]

What's a CD?