Redefining the State of the Art
Published by Hasbro Interactive. Reviewed by Cat91
on 8/25/00
Article
Discussion Forum
First
Impressions:
1.
The Beginning, and Where We Are Today
Hi, combat flight junkies! With the lull in combat flight titles,
your ace reporter has been looking over some of the hot titles of
the recent past, and no look at the hottest flight sims could possibly
be complete without Falcon 4.0. Yes, I admit it. I'm a Falcon fanatic.
I first encountered F4 during the run-up to its release in November
1998; I had followed Combatsim.com's wire-to-wire coverage and read
every article Len "Viking1" Hjalmarsson (Len, I apologize if I misspelled
that) put out. As much as I enjoy Total Air War, Flanker, Comanche
v. Hokum, and all the rest of the awesome titles we can fly, I keep
coming back to F4 every time a new tweak happens. The combat jet
community built F4 up into the Daikatana of its day- no sim could
have measured up.
Naturally with this sort of build-up, F4 failed, and miserably.
The release was buggy to the max, and its on-box system requirements
didn't even come close to what you REALLY need to keep your Falcon
flying bug-free. Memory leaks abounded. Unexplained crashes proliferated.
And the flames were hot and heavy. Microprose maintained its own
forum at www.falcon4.com back then, and it was just going nuts.
Patches began coming out within two months of Falcon's release.
I'd been flying it, when my then-Diamond Monster Fusion could handle
it without locking up unpredictably, and got wind of a Glide fix
in the upcoming version 1.04. Back then, MPS had good technical
support, and I got into an email communication first with Leon Rosenshein,
the lead developer, and then Gabe Turk, the forum moderator, about
the fix. I wasn't a flamer and backed into the public beta group
for version 1.04 after I drew the team's attention to an art oversight
(BSU-49 parachute-retarded bombs...without PARACHUTES). I stayed
with the group until MPS contracted out all beta testing to a multiplayer
support group known as iBeta LLC, with version 1.08.
Version 1.08, released one year after F4 hit the shelves, was the
end of the official road for the wild Falcon ride. It was the definitive
bugfix, taking down some of the game's most prevalent and longstanding
glitches. Upon its release, Hasbro Interactive pulled the biggest
bonehead move possible: It fired the entire Falcon development team
without giving cause and ended technical support for the title,
alienating the entire Falcon community (The Cat will review Gunship!
later, Falcon fans-we won't go there yet) in the process. But was
the ride over? Well...no. The iBeta group became something of a
funnel for progress, first for multiplayer improvements alone with
two patch releases from a just-fired team member, fixing multiplayer-specific
bugs for the most part. Then, it teamed up with an online squadron
in California whose members had beta-tested the original F4, and
they, along with other Falconeers (too numerous to name here) with
computer skills, opened up their hex-editors and began a patch series
of hex-hacks called "Realism Patches." These are ongoing today,
and a French Canadian named Sylvain Gagnon has risen head and shoulders
above the rest to become the king of hacks, with fixes to several
problems, including a Direct-X crash that even MicroProse couldn't
fix.
And then, depression set in; for Hasbro Interactive, that is. Some
disaffected soul stole the very valuable source code for the Falcon
4.0 program. And to add insult to injury, this nameless (choose
one: hero or villain) posted his/her ill-gotten gains on the Internet.
Hasbro moved to stop it, but you and I know the rest of that story.
In minutes-literally, minutes-the code had proliferated to so many
places around the world that no one could ever stuff the genie back
into its bottle. Hasbro fulminated and raged, then threw up its
corporate hands in disgust and walked away, at least no one's heard
from them for a while. And then.... some nameless German calling
himself eRazor entered the picture, claiming that he (eRazor is
definitely a dude - we know that about him) could bring F4 into
the world of Direct-X 7. The pundits laughed. And then they became
amazed believers; and this is where we are today. What is Falcon
4.0? I'm aiming this at people who don't know us, fellow Falcon
nuts, so go easy on me.
2. Falcon 4.0: What It Is
Simply put, this is probably the most audacious undertaking in the
combat flight genre, before or since. This title broke ground on
several fronts, does a lot of things very well, and some poorly.
It fielded the first true dynamic campaign that included a ground
war, and modeled it over a vast area (the whole Korean peninsula).
Its flight modeling is among the most realistic out there, and covers
the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon better than any other
F-16 simulation. For this review, I used my own system; this is
eRazor's latest release with iBeta's Realism Patch 3.0 installed
and no other tweaks. One could go nuts trying to keep up with them
all; I heartily recommend a utility called F4Patch, by a Falconeer
named Joel Bierling, to keep track of them all. Get it at www.bierling.net.
F4Patch version 2.1.1 has both the latest eRazor executable and
iBeta's realism tweaks as well. Know that eRazor's work is not compatible
with the vast majority of hex hacks out there.
Graphics:
Even
after two years, F4's graphics aren't dated in most respects.
As you can see from the shots at right, taken from an actual air-defense
suppression mission I ran just for this review, the terrain looks
sharp, though it is tiled and somewhat repetitive. Its major weaknesses
are in clouds, which are flat and 2d, and in explosions, which
are weak even with T-Bone's explosion pack-seen in the shot of
the CBU-58 explosion at right. T-Bone's explosions are part of
F4Patch also. The sky you see in the shots is also courtesy of
T-Bone; the original game sky is a washed-out perpetual yellow
haze that many Koreans have stated isn't what Korea looks like.
The F-16 is well modeled, but the other aircraft in the game lack
detail and their flight models are sloppy (that last is an iBeta
fix priority). There are both 2d and 3d cockpits, which is the
way most gamers seem to want it (though I can't understand why).
The 2d cockpit is where the pilot spends most of her time; the
3d pit is more tactically useful, but looks awful and requires
total use of keyboard. And most control panel indicators are not
supported in the 3d view. Third party 2d cockpits abound. The
one you see in my screens is courtesy of an Australian who styles
himself "Xis." As far as I'm concerned, this is the one to have.
Get it at www.ozemail.com.au/~xis/.
Another great place to get add-ons and cockpits for F4 is with
my French friends at CHECK-SIX, you can find them at http://spower.free.fr/.
They have a wide-view cockpit in beta that's going to be awesome
to behold. Both owe one to Paul Wilson, who came up with a rear-view
that is indistinguishable from MicroProse artwork; very good stuff.
The eRazor executable enables several Direct-X functions not in
the original game, but does so at the cost of removing all Glide
support. You may want to keep this in mind if you choose to fly
that patch. However, in Direct-X, it brings volumetric smoke and
primitive dynamic lighting to the table and looks mighty fine
on a GeForce card. With nVidia's latest Detonator 3 drivers I
got frame rates of 20 or better even over the forward line of
battle.
Sound/Music:
Even
in the original MPS form, the sound is among the best in sims,
in my view. One needs sound to compensate for lack of situational
awareness in the flat-screen view that we fly in. F4's sounds
are good; there are several, and they are varied. There are several
aftermarket sound packs, and though I am not using any at present
there are some sounds that come from actual military bases and
are as authentic as Mom's Apple Pie. Awesome stuff. The Falcon
community is one of the most vibrant in sims.
Gameplay:
F4
was aimed at the hardcore flier. In its most realistic modes,
it models almost every radar mode out there, plus three different
bombing modes in air-to ground. Precision-guided munitions are
present, and I swear that you can plink tanks with GBU-12s just
like they did in Desert Storm, if the anti-aircraft guns don't
get you first. It looks like a CNN shot! In air-to-air mode, the
pilot gets AIM-120 AMRAAMs and AIM-9M Sidewinders, along with
the rear-aspect only AIM-9P (which doesn't always work as advertised).
The AIM-7 Sparrow is present but lacks the home-on-jam facility
of the actual Sparrow and is more like an AMRAAM that isn't fire-and-forget.
Depending on the patch variants you use, AI ranges from very stupid
to incredibly lethal at higher skill levels. Without third party
patching, the MPS stock AI are dumb as stones on both sides of
the ball. Verdict: patch this game, partners. The game is scalable
all the way to Total Air War-style ease of use and situational
awareness, if the user so desires. There is a powerful mission
editor that allows design and trading of missions both for single
and multiplayer play. And of course, there is the dynamic campaign.
Most single players like me spend most of their time in campaigns.
This is where the game's biggest accolades as well as its biggest
flames have come. The campaign AI ranges from prescient to downright
incomprehensible-I swear, it is like fighting for real generals!
One commonly cited irritating thing its the AI's insistence on
bombarding Pyongyang when the North Koreans are massing for an
attack just across the Han River from Seoul itself (I still haven't
any idea why it does that.) Missions do tend to be the same, and
I must admit that in over two years I have never finished a campaign;
I tend to use campaign as a mission generator and pick good missions
to fly. When no decent, close in air-defense suppression missions
are about, I tend to pack it up and go to a new campaign - One
can win. I've seen players on the Falcon boards at Delphi crow
about it.
Enjoyment:
The
bottom line is that unlike many sims, Falcon truly has something
for everyone. From the neophyte, to the weekend warrior (like
me), to the grognard who has real USAF jargon and technique down
pat, F4 still delivers better than any other competitor.
Multiplayer:
Falcon
4.0 has a full multiplayer suite and there are many online squadrons.
I don't fly multiplayer, as you know. But if you want to know
more about this feature, step in to www.delphi.com
and go to the Falcon 4 forum-you'll find more Internet and LAN
squadrons than you can shake a stick at!
Overall
Impression:
F4
was a sim before its time. Only now, through the dedicated efforts
of those who love it the best, is the game beginning to reach
its potential. It requires an investment of time and effort to
learn its advanced features and get the most fun from it; however,
it does not turn off the casual, beer and pretzels gamer that
just wants to get into the game and "frag some Commies."
Marketing
Efforts Towards Women:
F4
broke ground in one other important place: It was the very first
flight sim that allowed users to choose a female voice for the
lead pilot. Falcon will always have a special place in my heart
for that, as it was the first flight sim I ever flew where I felt
included and not like an interloper in the guys' locker room.
Leon and team, I think I speak for many virtual pilots in saying
"thank you" for including us in, and not leaving us out like so
many of your competitors continue to do. You got it, and I hope
the rest of the developers out there learn form your example,
like the Jane's team did with F/A-18. They, and F4, get the Cat's
Meow for friendliness. Women, strap on that Falcon!
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