🚀 go-pugleaf

On 02-Sep-09 22:24:14, Henry said
>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).

Sounds like one to avoid - but I mean, you might laugh at Warhead if you
didn't take into account the context of being essentially a one man
project, that could fit on to one floppy disk - from around 1989, I think.


>> 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.

Well on the Amiga, Star Crusader used basic polygons and Wing Commander
used scaled sprites, which just didn't really cut it for me, but I
completed the CD32 version and thought it was actually pretty darn good.


>The aspect of these games that I find the most fun are the challenges
>of
>getting and staying on the enemy's tail,

You and me both!  :)


> 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.

Not here... there was a predictive aiming reticle, that worked pretty well
- for my money Star Crusader was one of the best dogfighters, maybe the
best on the Amiga, I speak of a fan of The Hunters with Robert Mitchum!
:)

The thing to remember was not to be too gung-ho in the initial head to
head of any engagement as this was likey to lead to a collision fatal to
both parties.


>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...

Thanks Henry, I'll keep an eye out for these. If anyone's interested, the
Amiga games mentioned are reviewed on my wensite below - along with a few
others.

Cheers.

                  All the best,
                        Angus Manwaring.       (for e-mail remove ANTISPEM)

I need your memories for the Amiga Games Database: A collection of Amiga
Game reviews by Amiga players http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/AGDB.html