I remember years ago, it must have been a good 10 years or more, when my father bought me copy of F19 Stealth Fighter. It was in the days when our home PC was 386sx 20mhz, 1mb ram and 40mb HDD. The game itself, only just fit on the Hard drive what with Windows 3.0 running and Wing Commander 2. It still ran ok, my only fear now is that when I put it on a new machine that the machine will run too fast for the programme.
That happened last time I put Wing Commander on my P4. The characters mouths moved too fast for the audio. Very dull.
Although now the graphics and flight models can be considered somewhat below average, at the time I thought that they were great. Hours were spent playing it. I tried to play with a joystick that I owned, but I could never get the driver working properly for it. It was one that needed you to write out you own calibration program for it, supplied on an A5 piece of paper. So I used the arrow keys instead, and found it just as good. The only annoying thing with that was using the backspace button for the Cannon trigger. It made manoeuvring and
shooting down a Mig rather difficult at times. I like the option of being able to change navigation waypoints mid flight, enabling you to bypass an annoying SAM site or gain a few precious pounds of fuel for those long distance missions, where one took an extra 3 Maverick missiles and not an extra fuel tank as suggested by the default weapons load out.
There were so many options of game play, weapons and theatre of warfare. I particularly enjoyed cruising though soviet airspace, using every trick in the book and electronic counter measure to elude the numerous radar sites. All too often I was hit and shot down by the SA-12, if my memory serves me right. Although not entirely correct as far as the actual Stealth Fight (F117) goes, I thought it was a pretty good guess on behalf of the programmers.
I have been trying for some time now to track down old school flight Sims from my child hood. Great games such as F19, F29 Retaliator and Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe all rated highly with me. Once I’ve finished this I hope to download it very soon, so I can relive those good old days.
