Article Type: Preview
Article Date: October 15, 2001
Deja Vu All Over Again
You may recall the article from Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson, way back in 1997, reviewing the newest hot-shot flight sim to come from the Graphsim stable, F/A-18 Korea. Now, roughly four years later and several evolutionary upgrades later, this sim, re-titled as F/A-18 Precision Strike Fighter (F/A-18 PSF), is making a re-appearance. In July of this year, Xicat Interactive dusted it off, added some new sparkly stuff and offered it up for our attention.
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Cruising  |
Having read Len Hjalmarson's review and played the review copy myself, it wouldn't be too long before I started to cover old ground if I treated this like a new sim. To be fair, however, I’ll return to a few of the fundamentals and gently stir in the new ingredients to see what fun can be had in this re-vamped sim.
Installation
Upon opening the box you'll find the CD-ROM jewel case and a new and improved manual (more about that, in a moment). Installation was extremely quick by comparison to today’s heavy weights and it occupies a tidy 107MB of space on the hard drive. The newer manual is concise and goes through the specifications of the aircraft, the abilities and functions of the various onboard systems, and introduces a beginner like me, to the fundamentals of modern ACM.
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| The ready room! |
After firing up, you'll find yourself at the initial user interface. Options here include Mission Editor, Load Mission, Play/Replay, Training, Debrief and Enter Cockpit. On selecting Enter Cockpit a second interface greets you. From here you can select a mission, tweak the graphics and difficulty settings, and browse a whole host of weapon. You can fit-out your Hornet for a specific mission or make it look like a flying porcupine.
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| Selecting loadout |
The first thing that you’ll notice, if you’ve played the previous incarnation of this sim is that the graphics engine has had a refit. I supports both OpenGL and Glide and produces some very pretty results. The overall effect of the graphics reminds me of the environment in the online game called Aces High, but it is a good few notches higher in the eye candy department.
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| Eye candy |
The cockpit sports both snap views and the virtual cockpit, though as in the original version the virtual ‘pit only has the helmet mounted type displays running.
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| Virtual Cockpit |
Sounds by comparison are adequate by today's standards, but I can't say I was overly impressed by the sound of gunfire hitting the airframe. When you hit the afterburners though, you're rewarded with a good meaty/tearing sound. Damage modelling is at about the same level of complexity for just about every encounter I've had so far: it's been a case of 'good-bye' engine 1 and then 'good-bye' engine 2 and game over. I think maybe the option of independently selectable engines, in a survival scenario might help the playability a little.
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| Game Over! |
Training
What a gem!
I think this may be the first training utility that I’ve really warmed to. The topics are well laid out and an audio monologue/videos accompany the subjects on a mini view screen. Here you can flick from the principles of flight training sections all the way up to the monster APG-65 pulse-Doppler radar training. The instructor will explain precisely what you need to know and you can rewind/fast forward the instructor narration and video at any time. When you’re ready, you click on the jet on the bottom of the screen to try out what you’ve been learning…Simple!
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| Lesson time |
Now as I was saying about that manual. In the middle of my first ever attempt at a deck landing, I was hunting through the book, looking for the key to select ILS and trying to maintain glide slope at the same time—as one is expected to do—but where’s the damn key card? Err…key command reference pages? Umm…
The missing keyboard shortcut page, it seems, is on the Xicat web page and is there for the plucking in .PDF format.
Getting Dirty
Okay, let's get down to brass tacks. F/A-18 PSF comes with a selection of single missions, a tour of duty (Korea) and a brand new heap of user-made missions. The missions themselves can be quite challenging and terrain masking is necessary to avoid those pesky SAM sites and enemy aircraft. You can alter/scale the difficulty settings in the cockpit user interface before each mission. The lowest setting will give you a laughably easy ride and the highest setting will make the mission nearly impossible.
Also included (I've yet to discover the conditions to use it) is the B-57 nuclear weapon. Although the reality of using of this weapon in real life, is not an avenue I'd ever pursue personally, but the impish desire to create an artificial sunrise in the safety of my PC is something else ;-) At the end of each mission you are given a virtual printout of your performance and the option to save the action as a video-replay. I found the replay feature quite useful in order to critique myself on a given mission.
Should you fancy trying your hand at creating the action, the sim also comes with an easy to use mission editor. Given the power of modern PCs these days, I suspect you could create some truly spectacular air battles and some serious mud moving missions. It’s something I might hesitate to try with a more heavy weight sim, given the overall performance of my somewhat aging rig, but in this sim's case it's far less daunting. Online gaming buffs will be pleased to know that F/A-18 PSF also supports both LAN and TCP/IP multiplay, though only 4 players are able to battle it out at a time. Comms is handled via a text-based chat function.
First (and Second) Impressions
Well, for some people it would be easy to stick their noses up and walk past this title as it doesn't do this or hasn't got clickable that. Perhaps that fact alone, in and of itself, might be a part of its attraction as far as someone like me is concerned. Flying modern jet sims can be, in the initial stages, a horribly intense affair with incredibly steep learning curves as you wade through doorstop-sized technical manuals. An experience that more often than not just turns me cold. If you are like me, one of the things you'll like about F/A-18 PSF is its simplicity in its approach to the overall subject.
As far as I can see everything is where it should be: the radar/weapons systems for instance are modeled in their correct form and have the various modes and sub-modes. Having played it quite thoroughly for a few days I can say that there's quite a lot of subtle detailing that I wasn't aware of at first glance. Given the limitations it has, for a sim of its size, I would definitely recommend it to someone that was taking their first steps into modern air combat simulations. For those of the hardcore persuasion, take a day off, relax and have some good old fashioned fun.
