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F-29 RETALIATOR The balance between flash and simulation realism is always a tricky one in the design of an air combat game; F-29 RETALIATOR clearly moves in the direction of flash. Not particularly realistic in terms of either weapons usage or aircraft performance, F-29 RETALIATOR nevertheless proves to be an amusing, if radically oversimplified, futuristic arcade-style simulation. (This review is based on the Amiga version.) You begin play at the "Enrolment [sic] Data Bank," where you get a chance to choose the level of difficulty. While the manual indicates that the higher rank you select, the more missions will be available, I found that the number of missions listed always remained the same; the only difference the ranking seems to make is in the number of points scored for successful completion of a mission. One can enter a name for one's pilot, which, if the uncopyable disk is write-enabled, will be stored on disk for future reference. If the pilot is killed during a mission, entering a new name starts a new career. The Pilot Log cannot be backed up, so like most arcade games, if you get killed somewhere along the campaign, you have to start all over again from the beginning. Once you've enrolled, it's on to the planes, missions and weapons selections screens. You have a choice between a relatively fictional F-22 or F-29 (the latter apparently based on a Grumman design). The planes do perform differently in the horizontal, simply in terms of roll-rate; the F-29 rolls faster. Both accelerate at completely unbelievable rates, and climbs and dives take nothing into account in the way of inertia, drag, or lift. Point the plane up, and it goes up; point it down, and it goes down; faster or slower depending on the angle of climb or dive, but that's it in the way of flight modeling. F-29 RETALIATOR includes 99 missions spread over four different areas of play: the Arizona Test Range, the Pacific "Solomos" Islands, the Middle East, and Europe. The areas prove progressively difficult, with the European area functioning typically as the Final Test for your air combat skills. You can begin in any area, but must complete one set of about six to ten missions in that area before gaining access to the next set. Success in one area has little effect on success in others. In some missions, you can choose from a couple of different airfields to take off from; choice is based simply on which airfield proves closest to the identified target. There are a wide range of armaments, including 5 air-to-air missiles and 4 air-to-ground missiles. In each category, a few fictional items are included. The "Backwinder" is included as a rearward-firing air-to-air weapon, useful for the pilot who simply doesn't want to pay much attention to the six o'clock position. The AIAAM long-range (130 miles, according to the manual) air-to-air missile can supposedly just be fired off if any targets are visible on the long-range radar, but it's not possible to target and lock on them, so firing off the missile doesn't buy much of a thrill during play (since at long range there are usually a host of targets approaching). Some tactics are involved in choosing the right air-to-ground missiles for a particular mission, but they only amount to consulting the manual to see what kind of missile is likely to hit what kind of target, and then to see what kind of targets are available in the upcoming mission. This serves more as additional copy protection than as anything else in F-29 RETALIATOR. While adding on missiles and extra fuel and so on adds up in terms of the weight of the plane calculated in a box in the lower right hand corner of the armaments screen, it seems to make little difference in the actual performance of either jet (extra fuel does extend the range a little bit). The only tangible effect is on the rate of fuel burn, which seems more fitting for an M-1 Tank than for a futuristic jet in any event, no matter how the plane has been loaded. Enrolled, plane, area and mission chosen, weapons loaded up, you finally get into the seat of the plane and start off. The preferred interface can be chosen on the fly with the press of a key (J for joystick, M for mouse, K for keyboard), and can be changed anytime during flight. Joystick control seems more digital than analog in the Amiga version, and the steps between responses to joystick input are rather few and large. Since there is little in the way of control surfaces simulation, the plane flies quite simply, more like something in an arcade game than anything else. The keyboard provides slightly finer control, but not much. Once in the air, you get to witness the main strength of F-29 RETALIATOR, its really fast graphics. Large, complex objects are effectively modeled in 3-D solid-fill, with an unusually large number of surfaces represented for each object. When approaching things like SAM sites, trucks, or tanks, enemy ground targets are often animated as well as nicely drawn. The tanks go scurrying around at blazing speeds in the desert, for instance, and the trucks roll along in a well-formed convoy on the road. Unfortunately, not very many objects are represented onscreen at a time, and they have a rather unpleasant tendency to "pop" into appearance at the last moment upon approach (sometimes one can detect an object as a moving black dot in the distance, but there are no intermediary steps between that representation and the full-scale 3-D drawing and animation). This is particularly disconcerting with stable ground targets (and one's airfield), as it becomes difficult to determine one's approach with any accuracy based on visual sighting, and radar targeting is extremely limited in the design (there is none for ground attacks). Sound effects are rather limited, unfortunately. There is a single sound sample for all explosions and missile launches, and while they're both at least somewhat appropriate, they prove rather irritatingly repetitive after a brief amount of play. The reputed various warning tones aren't all fully installed in the design, which doesn't matter much, as they usually occur only brief microseconds before a hit upon your plane occurs, leaving little time to initiate countermeasures. Missile locks are easily broken with one push of the flare or chaff key, though, and one simple sharp turn will also sometimes break a missile's lock. F-29 RETALIATOR comes on one, uncopyable disk, and must be write-enabled to save pilot and progress information. Only one pilot log is allowed on the disk at a time. The game will play on all A1000s, A500s, and A2000s, and requires only 512K of RAM to run. Mouse, keyboard, and joystick interfaces are supported. No hard disk installation is possible. All in all, F-29 RETALIATOR remains pretty much a disappointment. Apparently enough improvements in the IBM version have been included to give the game a little more play value (a head-to-head option allows one to skip eighty percent of the design and just concentrate on shooting a friend out of the skies), and some of the limitations of the flight model have been addressed. The original F-29 RETALIATOR released about a year and a half ago in the UK was notoriously buggy on both the Amiga and ST, and the US release has the decided advantage of being relatively bug-free. But other than that, there's not a lot to recommend F-29 RETALIATOR, unless you're an arcade game enthusiast with no patience for the more complex air combat simulations. F-29 RETALIATOR is published and distributed by Ocean Software.