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- Falcon -  
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Flight simulators have been
around for ages and at one time they were extremely popular on home systems.
One of the earlier true simulations is Falcon by spectrum holobyte, a simulation
of the F-16 fighting falcon which later spawned several sequels which were
incredibly ambitious but with varying levels of success. The main difference
between this and other games of the time was that Falcon was very detailed
in it's simulation of the plane's electronics, radars, hud's and flying
characteristics.
You start the game as a 1st lieutenant and some of the earlier missions
have a low degree of difficulty to get you into the game. The difficulty
level indicates the number of enemy airplanes, primarily Migs, and ground
missiles etc. but you can also change how realistic your plane reacts to
damage and flight. For instance on the lowest settings you can land the
plane by simply pointing the nose downward until you hit the ground which
ofcourse would be a sure way of killing yourself. You can do some acrobatics
that are actually part of some real training manouvres like a barrel roll
and scissor all of which the enemy a.i. can perform as well when you are
dogfighting. Obviously on high realism these things aren't easy to perform
but they are explained in the 150-page manual which gives an indication
of how complex the game can be.
The graphics look a bit dated by todays standards especially the ingame
vector graphics as they are flat vectors and don't have things like bitmapping
or lighting effects that are so common these days. When it was released
they very good though and some of the still graphics are pretty impressive
like the arnament selection screen and the cockpit itself is very detailed
as well. The Amiga version added extra's like digitized sound and voice
samples which gives it that bit of extra realism.
Personally I haven't played too many flight simulators in my time simply
because they take so much time to get into for you to really get something
out of it. Altough Falcon was hailed as a masterpiece of simulation it did
so at the cost of complexity considering it's huge manual which you had
to go through. That put off a lot of people dispite the fact that the first
falcon game was actually the most tame of all the falcon simulation series,
the later ones were so complex that they failed almost completely as far
as sales were concerned. I recon Falcon is a very good simulation but the
difficulty of it means it's mostly for enthousiasts of the genre.
Overal rating: 8/10
Erde Kaiser
Falcon was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga |
Released
in 1989.
The last released version but also the very best. |
| Others |
These
versions are not available.
Atari ST released in 1998, graphically on par with the Amiga but lacking
the sound effects.
Apple released in 1987.
DOS released in 1987, the graphics use an EGA format which wasn't
very spectacular. |
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Date added |
Feb-22-2008 09:04 |
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Name |
Falcon |
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Developer |
Spectrum Holobyte
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Publisher |
Mirrorsoft
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First released |
1987 |
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Genre |
Simulation
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Download |
Commodore Amiga, filesize: 1039 Kb
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Links |
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Manual |
Download manual for Falcon
, filesize: 13727 Kb
This is the fully scanned 150-page manual! |
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Solve / Docs |
No solve available
No extra docs available |
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Sitestats
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09-Sep-2010
Games: 405
Utils: 30
Manuals: 194
Solves: 83
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