Well, sorta.

The "Falcon" series of flight-simulators have always held a special
place in my heart. Falcon 3.0 was the one of first real 'hard-core'
flight-sims I ever played (well... maybe... it depends on how 'hard
core' you consider MS Flight Sim). In many ways, its strict adherence
to realistic physics and flight (for its time) set the basis for what
I consider a simulator and what I see as just an arcade shooter. I
don't care how awesome the graphics are, if your game can't at least
match the fidelity of Falcon 3.0, you don't get to call your game a
sim.


(which, I suppose, technically means the first two Falcon games
wouldn't qualify... but shut up with your pedantry!!1! ;-)


Anyway, Microprose is announcing that they're bring Falcon back,
although what that means isn't exactly clear. In part, it reflects
that the company has (re)acquired the license to that IP. There are
suggestions that the company might be working on a new Falcon game.

Of course, the older games have been available - on Steam and GOG -
for years already, so in that regard there isn't any difference from
the end-user's point of view. They're STILL available, but are now
available under the new publisher's name. Not much of a difference.
And speculation about a sequel remain just that: speculation.

And it's not as if this new Microprose is the same as the classic game
company, even if "Wild Bill" Stealey - the founder of the original -
is involved with the revival. (And anyway, technically the Falcon
series was developed by Spectrum Holobyte anyway, which was a
competitor to Stealey's company until it purchased his baby out from
under him). So this new company having license to the game doesn't
mean that any of the old magic will be retained. The postulated
"Falcon 5.0" could be a mobile game with pay-to-bypass progress gates,
for all we know.

Regardless, it's good to see the Falcon series make the news again.
It's been too long a time since the series has been in the limelight.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 05/05/2023 15:05, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

The "Falcon" series of flight-simulators have always held a special
place in my heart. Falcon 3.0 was the one of first real 'hard-core' flight-sims I ever played (well... maybe... it depends on how 'hard
core' you consider MS Flight Sim). In many ways, its strict adherence
to realistic physics and flight (for its time) set the basis for what
I consider a simulator and what I see as just an arcade shooter. I
don't care how awesome the graphics are, if your game can't at least
match the fidelity of Falcon 3.0, you don't get to call your game a
sim.

The only one I played was the first one on the Atari ST and it was great
having a nice chunky manual with all that information in it like
dogfighting and how to drop bombs where you want. The problem I found
though, it was just a bit too hard for my liking and it got to the stage
that I just didn't bother even trying to land as I knew what the result
would be.

That's probably why I liked Gunship more. Still enough to get your teeth
into (I still remember learning the how to do an auto-rotate landing
after an engine failure) but playable for me. Possibly I also liked it
as was slower placed so use the terrain to your advantage, pop-up, and hellfires away!

The reboot, part of me says I should buy it for the nostalgia but the
sane part of me says, why would you do that when you never managed to
get into the first one. Now if the re-booted Gunship. Then I'd be tempted.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

That's probably why I liked Gunship more. Still enough to get your teeth
into (I still remember learning the how to do an auto-rotate landing
after an engine failure) but playable for me. Possibly I also liked it
as was slower placed so use the terrain to your advantage, pop-up, and >hellfires away!

The reboot, part of me says I should buy it for the nostalgia but the
sane part of me says, why would you do that when you never managed to
get into the first one. Now if the re-booted Gunship. Then I'd be tempted.

Ah, "Gunship" and the heyday of helicopter sims. I broke my teeth on
EA's "LHX Attack Chopper" so that personally stands out as the 'great'
of that era. I missed the original "Gunship" entirely*, and only came
to the series with "Gunship 2000". It didn't quite match "LHX" in my
eyes, but I was impressed by the amount of detail on its maps. I
vaguely recall following trains that disappeared into tunnels in the
side of the mountains; it seemed incredibly realistic at the time.

(My memory insists that I then followed the train into the tunnel, but
- having gone back later - that's obviously incorrect. Tunnels were
Wile E Coyote-style textures drawn on a wall and not actually
traversable. Funny how our memory can trick us)

Of course, none of these games could match up with later greats like
"Hind", "Comanche" or Jane's "Longbow" games. But for all the detail
and realism added to those titles, they lost a lot of the
pick-up-n-fly fun of the older games. "LHX", for all its primitive
sound and visuals, is still a really fun game to jump into; it takes a
lot more effort for me to get engrossed with "Longbow" these days...




* I picked it up later, of course.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I remember borrowing this game from a guy in high school. I couldn't
have sound card audio due to lack of EMS in my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
Mhz PC. :( I thought its videos were neat back then. Haha. I remember
its HUGE heavy manual and so many 3.5" disks!


Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, sorta.

The "Falcon" series of flight-simulators have always held a special
place in my heart. Falcon 3.0 was the one of first real 'hard-core' flight-sims I ever played (well... maybe... it depends on how 'hard
core' you consider MS Flight Sim). In many ways, its strict adherence
to realistic physics and flight (for its time) set the basis for what
I consider a simulator and what I see as just an arcade shooter. I
don't care how awesome the graphics are, if your game can't at least
match the fidelity of Falcon 3.0, you don't get to call your game a
sim.

(which, I suppose, technically means the first two Falcon games
wouldn't qualify... but shut up with your pedantry!!1! ;-)

Anyway, Microprose is announcing that they're bring Falcon back,
although what that means isn't exactly clear. In part, it reflects
that the company has (re)acquired the license to that IP. There are suggestions that the company might be working on a new Falcon game.

Of course, the older games have been available - on Steam and GOG -
for years already, so in that regard there isn't any difference from
the end-user's point of view. They're STILL available, but are now
available under the new publisher's name. Not much of a difference.
And speculation about a sequel remain just that: speculation.

And it's not as if this new Microprose is the same as the classic game company, even if "Wild Bill" Stealey - the founder of the original -
is involved with the revival. (And anyway, technically the Falcon
series was developed by Spectrum Holobyte anyway, which was a
competitor to Stealey's company until it purchased his baby out from
under him). So this new company having license to the game doesn't
mean that any of the old magic will be retained. The postulated
"Falcon 5.0" could be a mobile game with pay-to-bypass progress gates,
for all we know.

Regardless, it's good to see the Falcon series make the news again.
It's been too long a time since the series has been in the limelight.

--
"Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit... Repent and live!" --Ezekiel 18:31-32. May da 5th(also Cinco de Mayo) & 2morrow 6th B with U 4 da dark side. LAL lost their team's force last nite 2 beat GSW.
Wolf3D is 31 yrs. old!
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/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org.
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 05 May 2023 23:35:46 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

I remember borrowing this game from a guy in high school. I couldn't
have sound card audio due to lack of EMS in my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10
Mhz PC. :( I thought its videos were neat back then. Haha. I remember
its HUGE heavy manual and so many 3.5" disks!

Over the years, I've gotten rid of most of my DOS-era floppy disks.
More specifically, I've imaged the disks - first to ZIP disks, then
later moved those images CD-ROMs, then DVDs, and then external HDDs -
and tossed the original medium. It was a matter of storage; floppy
disks take up a lot of space and are just inconvenient to keep around.

But a few games were spared this culling. This included pretty much
everything made by Origin, but also a handful of other titles.

Falcon 3.0 is one of those lucky games. I still have all four of the
original 3.5" disks (3x 1.44mb, 1x 720kb). I don't actually use those
disks, but nostalgia makes me hang onto them. But whenever I want to
play the game, I'll just use the GOG version.*

The manuals I've kept too, of course. I've scanned and uploaded most
of them to archive.org (I still need to scan the rest of the
poster-sized maps, which is such a tedious chore that I've been
putting it off for years, but I'll get to it one of these days), if
you're interested in revisiting those old memories.

But getting the game to run always was a bit of a chore; it required a
minimum of 600K free conventional memory to run (620K to enable all
features), which could be tricky to achieve back when you had to worry
about mouse, sound, network and CD-ROM drivers. A dedicated boot
floppy just to run this game was often a requirement.



* Well, technically, I'll just launch my ultimate dos game collection
where the game is permanently installed... but the Falcon 3.0 files I
used came from the DOS install.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)