🚀 go-pugleaf

On 21 Aug, 21:12, "Angus Manwaring"
<angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On the Amiga, Warhead is a bit of a forgotten masterpiece

Never tried the original Warhead; a game on the PC that claimed to be
"inspired"
by it was the dire Mantis X57000 which I've moaned about before: 1st
person fighter
combat but with Newtonian physics. Just flying about was quite fun but
combat
didn't really work (and some of the worst cut scene scripts/acting
ever).

> and a game I really liked from the mid nineties was Star Crusader.

IIRC that appeared on the PC a bit before Privateer came out. I played
through it,
but I never found it as involving as the Wing Commander or X-Wing
series.

The aspect of these games that I find the most fun are the challenges
of
getting and staying on the enemy's tail, and of aiming at and leading
a
target by eye (rather than depend on the various predictive aids that
appeared
in later games). With the pitch/roll control scheme that X-Wing and
Star Crusader used, I was only able to track targets along the
vertical, but
the landscape format displays and cockpit art along the top and
bottom
of the screen tended to mean that if I got too close on someone's tail
I'd end up trying to track something that I couldn't actually see. At
least in
X-Wing the aiming reticle changes colour as a guide; my recollection
of
combat in Star Crusader is that it involved far too much pulling hard
on the
stick and blasting away blindly whilst trying to get a blob centred on
some
crosshairs in a small display in the corner of the screen.

Wing Commander of course finessed this problem by using pitch/yaw
controls and setting up most of the encounters on a "horizontal"
plane.

My nominations for unfairly ignored games are Backlash (in which
you're
the tail gunner) and Star Rangers (simple combat, but with competent
wingmen and the beginnings of a strategic thing from having to jump
around the map without knowing what's going on). Both are quite short
and no real plot though.

Then there's Darker, which isn't really a space sim and more a
category
of it's own...

Hth

Henry