🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi

Let's see if I have better luck with Google's formatting this time.

On 3 Sep, 21:24, "Angus Manwaring"
<angus@angusm_ANTISPEM_.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Mantis only mentioned being "inspired by Warhead" in the manual - I
don't know if there was any formal connection. Mantis was an early 90s
10-floppy epic with digitised video cutscenes, so a budget that could
have stretched to actors and actual scriptwriter rather than a
typewriter and two monkeys...

> >> 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.

That was true on the PC too. I agree it's a bit disconconcerting when
a carrier instantaneously jumps through 45 degrees, but it's not as
though you need to line yourself up to land on it - I never found it a
gameplay issue. (The later WC engines seemed a bit more fluid, too.)

The graphics were quite good but Star Crusader never seemed entirely
finished... for example there was a hex-based map of the play area
that you could use to send the rest of your squadron on patrol or
attack missions - but success or failure at this didn't appear to
affect the flow of the game at all.

> >... 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,

Possibly my brain-cells going a bit after all these years then.
Unless they finished the game off whilst "porting" it to the Amiga or
some such stunt.
I definitely recall the occasional stealth missions, and I'm pretty
sure the predictive aiming had to be done through a small display at
the bottom left. You'll know if I get bored this weekend - I'll dig it
out and check the manual.

Hth

Henry