the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Printable Version
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the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Beowolff - 27.08.2013
yeah... lol, the good ole days, before graphic cards and cpu's became major 'had to have' items... when everything ran in DOS, when if you had 1mg of memory you were a powerhouse and likely worked for NASA or the Air force, when we all had to make 'bootdisks' to play our games, and so on.
my first 'real' computer (besides the piece of shite Tandy with the tape recorder it used for a hard-drive) was a Packard Bell 286. they should have been called, Packard Hell's, for it was a hell-driven device straight from the Devil's playpen sent here to earth to torment me with it's crap-tastic pure shite performance. it would run nothing other than a few simple games like pong and such. now some 286's from some makers were fairly good, but the Packard I had was junk. then a year or so later I got hold of a 486... wow...it was like comparing day to night even if it too was a POS of the highest order. sure...it stayed broken all the time (being a Packard) and was wonky to use but by God at last I could actually play a couple of games!
one of them being... the original Red Baron! oh wow...was this SOB cool or what? man...I was in 'the' air in a (to me then) realistic looking bi-wing fighter!
haha!
all I had to do to actually PLAY was to figure out how to make that mysterious Boot Disk...
which would give it more DOS memory...enough to run the game anyways.well...like about three months AFTER I got the game, I FINALLY got a book disk to work, and dear God but I was playing! well, sort of. as the game wouldn't recognize the cheap joystick I had. so, off to the store and got a new one. it didn't like that one either. I took it back, and at last got one that worked. and yeah, THEN I was IN THE GAME, dudes! :lol:
I have to hand it to the original creators of Red Baron... this game was BIG. I mean BIG. sure, by today's standards it was a hokey piece of shite, but for it's time it had pizzazz, it had class, it was fun...and very high tech even in it's simplicity. man when you played that game you REALLY felt like you were really IN THE GAME. the makers put FUN things in there that almost NO modern game designers ever even try to put into their games.
sure the graphics wasn't much to look at, nor were the dorky sounds, but man the PLAY was amazing. and the background feeling they put into it was realistic. listen... after a few kills... suddenly on my screen pops up this message telling me that Albert Ball was wanting me to join his squadron, or the Red Baron was asking me to join him and be his wingman... or I got promoted and got a new plane and could even paint it if I wanted to. plus...the medals you got were accompanied by officers with stiff upper lips, in full dress uniform and with a regimental band playing as you got your medal pinned on! wow, now how cool is that?
war progress reports came up as I played... and sometime if I got shot down I was sent to the hospital to recover, or maybe got captured and if I didn't escape i'd have to sit the war out till it was over. ha! (usually they let you escape though.)
sometimes the dishonorable brother of the Red Baron would offer me a challenge to meet him in single combat... but, being the dirty dog he was, he'd ambush me with three or four of his lackeys... the bastard! :x
see this game was FUN.
I have no idea why they can't do things like that today.
:evil:
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Deutschmark - 27.08.2013
Good post I like it!, I will post about the Red Baron game as I did much work in the last one Red Baron 3D, I had all 3 of the games, Red Baron, Red Baron2, Red Baron 3D and even the off shoot of it called Knights of the sky's, it was a great game for its time and played very well.
Deutschmark
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Beowolff - 27.08.2013
yeah another game I got after that was PAW. oh wow... (Pacific Air War Gold) War in the Pacific! at last! man I could fly WW2 fighters. hell, there was even a connection so you could call up another guy and play him (if he had it too) over your telephone line! (which I did manage to do several times with a friend of mine.) this was it! fantastic!
DUDES! I was leaping into my P-40 Warhawk and roaring into the sky to challenge (tiny white specs) that were supposed to be Jap Zero's... what the hell if I could barely see them? made no difference...I was in a P-40! ha-ha!
this was of course AFTER the mandatory two months or so of trying (once again) to figure out how to make a proper boot disk so I could boot up with more DOS memory to play the game.
well to hell with the worry, the cursing, the yelling, the hair-pulling, the threatening to drive to California (where the game company was) and gut-shoot all of the game employees and blow their corporate headquarters to kingdom come, the heavy smoking, the drinking, the shaking and chills and feverish agony... yes, to HELL with all that for when I 'finally' got that sorry-assed boot disk working ...I WAS IN THE AIR IN THE PACIFIC! 8) and I couldn't be happier!
haha! those dirty Japanese were going to pay for Pearl Harbor...I was going to shoot them down in droves and personally strafe Tojo's lily pond. hahahaha!
only I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. heck, the enemy Zero's were mere flashing 'white' specs in my gun sights. by the time I hit my firing button...SWOOSH they were past me and on my tail! oh wow...disaster!
but I persevered, I persisted, I slaved at it...dawn till dusk on my days off, dusk till dawn at other times... until finally...finally...YES, I got a kill! :twisted: ha-ha! I got a KILL! oh what a happy day, I danced a jig in my computer/office room...my wife almost called the guys in the funny white suits to come get me but I didn't give a rat's arse.
these were the days of legend.
how I miss them so.
:mrgreen:
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Deutschmark - 27.08.2013
I have most of the Sierra games even in the original box's still, I went on a collecting spree for old games some time ago, don't ask me why I just did... :lol: I even have pacific air war.
Deutschmark
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Beowolff - 27.08.2013
PAW was a kick ass game for it's time. I mean once you got that bleepin' boot disk working, the game was rock solid. I don't think it ever crashed on me or gave me any trouble other than it being somewhat picky playing co-op over a phone line (would drop the game connection or lockup sometimes while playing over the phone.) single player it was faultless. as I said, my only problem being mainly that the enemy aircraft were just too darned hard to see.
there was an European Air War version too...not the later, more advanced EAW, but one of the same time and similar to PAW. oh wow, it had a TON of planes in it! it was set up much like Red Baron with you being able to transfer squadrons, get medals and promotions, get hospitalized or captured...plus it had these 'neat as hell' cut-scenes where in between missions your mechanic or armorer might jump up and start giving you 'scuttle-butt' about maybe the war would be over by Christmas, or how the Huns were losing the war, or perhaps warning you to be careful on your mission....things like that. VERY cool! and really made you feel like the game was real.
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Deutschmark - 27.08.2013
Red Baron is still being played
hock: on and off line.Even European Air War still has a forum and people are still playing it :OO
I even know a few guys that get together on Friday nights USA time and still play CFS1 WW1. :
) Did you ever go to this place;
http://www.old-games.com/
Its full of the games we all used to play and they are all free to download.
Here you go :
) http://www.old-games.com/download/7134/ ... ic-air-war
Deutschmark
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - LeBigTed - 28.08.2013
For me it was SWOTL : Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe.
Of course I remember Red Baron, RB2 and RB3D, but the greatest one for me was SWOTL.
1990: a lot of playable planes, thanks to this game, I learned a lot of things on WWII planes and aerial battles (Schweinfurt...). Me 262, He 162, Go229, Me 163, Do235... a lot of great planes were playable, and in the B17 you could play as a pilot or a gunner !!!
I get a lot of victories in this games, musics were cool... I remember, I was too young to know what a rocket is, so I thought a rocket was this little white cloud which explodes near an ennemy plane. You can see it in the video above at 0:07 (innocent I was;o) I also like to fly under the bridges... You couldn't see the ground as there were no details (only a green / black / or blue color), but you could land to it. Once landed, I shot the houses to explode them. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
I remember I had to calibrate the joystick each time I wanted to play. I launched the game thanks to DOS, by taping:
'D:' and 'go'
C:\D: (Enter)
D:\go
...
Ted
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Beowolff - 28.08.2013
yes...I had forgotten but many of the old DOS games required a re-calibrate of your stick EVERY TIME you played!
an yeah, same for starting the game...hahaha...you booted into DOS with the boot disk and typed in the letter of it and hit the name of the game a lot of times... i.e. PAW.exe (example)
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Texx - 29.08.2013
Beo, you made me waay back in time!!
I use to have a lot of fun on the Red Baron, the same observations you made were the ones I still keep if someone ask me about immersion.
PAW was really something when it was released! I loved it! European Air War was the one I played most, but my first one was F-15 Strike Eagle, back in 1991...I flew the Gulf War so many times in my trustworthy F-15E!!! That´s one of the reasons I am into jets for Il-2.
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - poncho - 30.08.2013
Red Baron was the first fight sim I had where planes were more than stick figures. I agree about the immersion of Red Baron, from CFS 1, 2, and 3, and including IL2, I have never played a sim where I actually cared about my ai squadron mates like in RB. I'm not sure exactly why.
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - ton414 - 30.08.2013
Yes, the good old days...
, really I can not remember which was the first flight simulator I tried, but I remember well that I was very bad playing with it. :lol: I think it was F-15 Strike Eagle or F-19 Stealth Fighter, and the computer: I remember it very well, it was a IBM PS/2. :wink:
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Beowolff - 30.08.2013
poncho Wrote:Red Baron was the first fight sim I had where planes were more than stick figures. I agree about the immersion of Red Baron, from CFS 1, 2, and 3, and including IL2, I have never played a sim where I actually cared about my ai squadron mates like in RB. I'm not sure exactly why.
well I think we don't care about our more modern AI fly mates because the more modern games simply don't allow it. they're meant to be mere cannon-fodder from the get go and that's how we think of them because of that. in modern games they're more concerned with kills/score of the player (and how photo-realistic it is) and there's no real immersion of connection to your fellow AI flyers. if your AI buddies speak it's only a highly repetitive 'you've got one on your tail'... or, 'white 3 return to base' or something similarly 'non-personal' and obviously canned and repeated over and over.
out of the flight there's no cut scenes usually to show 'skuttlebutt' or rumor mill, there's no out of flight/mission interaction or very little, you never see (or hear) your armorers or mechanics, you never see or hear directly from your CO, the pre-flight/mission information is cut and dried and gives no 'feel' for being in a real mission brief... and so on. the enemy is predictable and so on and so on.
all makes for an unbelievable play in the game.
Re: the 'good' ole days of flight sims - Serpiko - 02.09.2013
out of the flight there's no cut scenes usually to show 'skuttlebutt' or rumor mill, there's no out of flight/mission interaction or very little, you never see (or hear) your armorers or mechanics, you never see or hear directly from your CO, the pre-flight/mission information is cut and dried and gives no 'feel' for being in a real mission brief... and so on.[/quote]
This makes me think of the "Wing Commander" saga... even the FIRST one (which, back in the '90s, came in just 3 FLOPPY DISKS) had all tht you said above and more, IMO making a decent space combat game simply GREAT FUN.
Once you had attended at your fallen wingman's funeral, you'd swear you would never let that happen again!
