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Hell yeah. I'd been thinking of doing these games myself, but between nobody making the basic effort to save loose game disks from our last house after it caught fire a few years ago, no working capture card, and an inability to get Fraps and emulators to get along, I haven't been able to. Count me in as up for tagging along for guest commentary. And also, since I was planning to LP these games myself I've already got mostly-complete Databases™ for the planes in these games (for 2, 04, and Zero) kind of like what I did for my SWAT 3 LP a year ago, if you don't mind I could put those up on lpix and expand it as more planes are available/let people tear me a new one for getting things wrong or forgetting things. Rorahusky posted:Also, no, there were no fans of Electrosphere, because the English release was a horrifically gutted piece of trash with most of it's story and content removed, because whoever brought it over thought that English audiences were dumb and wouldn't get it. Dr. Snark posted:The story I heard was that the Japanese fanbase (apparently) hated Electrosphere when it came out, so the devs thought it would be better to gut it for the American release, and then the American fans hated the gutted version. As I understand it, the problem with the international version of 3 was that the original cost the dev team a shitton of money. Along with voice acting for 50 or so separate missions, it had cutscenes animated by Production I.G., which wouldn't come cheap. I seem to recall reading that's at least the reason why 04's cutscenes are all basically still images with narration, because they didn't have the money to even approach what they did for 3. nine-gear crow posted:I also accidentally call Pixy's F-15C and F-15E in the video Actually, yeah, the F-15E does show up later in Zero.  One thing you only really notice after killing your PS3 through playing Infinity is that Project Aces has the biggest hardon for the Eagle and Flanker families. Even in this game, where basically every other plane family that showed up in 5 got cut down to one plane in the transition, those two got three planes each. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 19:58
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Psion posted:PS2 emulators on PC could not handle Ace Combat a couple years ago, which led to some funny problems. The "best" bug was enemies like the B-52 in this mission did not have proper hitboxes somehow due to how they were coded, so you could fly right through them no problem, you could shoot down fighters no problem, but your weapons went right through the B-52s like they weren't there. This made winning the mission somewhat difficult. I remember trying to emulate AC5's arcade mode just to see if I could a few years back and having all those issues. Textures on the ground were all sorts of hosed up and the fifth enemy was completely invulnerable. I don't remember that being that long ago, though. Maybe I just forgot to update my emulator.
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Nov 20, 2015 19:10
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If anybody wants more stories about the F-117, I found a small handful while putting together that database I mentioned. Probably my favorite was that some F-16s doing a night patrol managed to come across one during a test flight, spotting it silhouetted against the moon, and thinking they saw a UFO because it was completely invisible to their radar. They had to be told what they saw back at base, then sworn to secrecy because it was still a black project at the time. On a more game-specific note, your Ace style changes a lot of things, even in this first mission. There's the first three aces being specific to one style as you already see, but dialogue is changed too. Most notably is Pixy talking about the reputation Cipher's apparently already made for himself, but also the other pilot talking about treating themselves to a little hot whiskey once they get back - if you're a Knight ace he suggests "hot wine" instead, and if you're a Mercenary he suggests "hot rum". Also, Crow didn't really mention it but there's a few fictional "BM-335" bombers alongside those B-52s. They're kind of like a B-52 if it had a second fuselage welded below the first one. When you hear an ally claim "that bomber looks ancient" halfway through the mission, that's the one he's referring to - according to the wiki those things were around since 1951 in the game's timeline.
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Nov 21, 2015 01:26
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Sard posted:Was Electrosphere really that bad? Of all the old titles it's the one I've wanted to find the most, entirely because of that It's really only the (total lack of) story that gets everyone for that one. The actual gameplay is as good as you'd expect from the series, in fact it's the game that introduced the concept of alternate weapons to the series, even if in a more convoluted way (you don't get a second set of missiles to complement the standard ones, you replace them entirely, same with guns). For the actual missions they did their best to make sure that we got some of the best in the game, even if it made no loving sense whatsoever in the bare-bones story. If you've heard of its most famous mission Zero Gravity? It's in the international version. And that's after you already go to the edge of space once in a Blackbird and shoot down bombers, which was pretty drat cool.
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Nov 21, 2015 07:47
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I never would have guessed Eagle Eye was voiced by Daran Norris, even though I'm pretty sure I looked it up myself once or twice before. I mean, I knew his voice sounded familiar, but when I think of Daran Norris, this isn't the kind of voice I think of. I think of voices like G0-T0 from Knights of the Old Republic II and Jack Smith from American Dad. The briefing guy being Patrick Seitz makes sense, though, after hearing his voice in the last two or three of Feinne's LPs. Fun story, my first time playing this game, I didn't know what exactly I was supposed to do for the takeoff at the start of this mission. I just followed Pixy without realizing I had to reach a specific altitude. How exactly I didn't already know when I'd beaten AC04 before getting Zero, I will never know. Maybe I just skipped the takeoffs and landings all the time because I was terrible at carrier landings. And, yeah, off the top of my head Pixy's note about civilian buildings being in the AO is the only dialogue change depending on your ace style in this mission. Here in Soldier he leaves it up to you how to respond; on Knight he'll comment that he's unsure if Cipher wants to go through with the operation, and on Mercenary he says to just blow them up too. For those who don't want to do that, those two SAMs right in the middle of a bunch of yellow targets is exactly the sort of situation that the boresight was introduced in this game for. Also, this is the fastest I've been namedropped in an LP out of two times that's happened now. 
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Nov 22, 2015 02:09
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Also, totally forgot to mention earlier, that last ace from this mission, "Harpune", I'm pretty sure he's using a paint scheme from an aggressor squad in the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. I think they're called the "Hiko Kyodotai" (which apparently is basically "Tactical Fighter Training Squadron" in Japanese), they're rather well-known for having all sorts of unique paint schemes on their F-15's. In particular, one of their paint schemes was the inspiration for the default F-15C in this game and in Ace Combat 04, it's like the fourth or fifth image result if you look their name up on Google. If you've ever played a freeware flight sim called YSflight you're probably familiar with them, it includes like eight F-15DJ's in some of their colors.
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Nov 22, 2015 05:50
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Cangelosi posted:
If anyone's curious, the acronym on the bottom is short for "Ya Gotta Be Shittin' Me". Supposedly adapted from the response the co-pilot of one of the first Wild Weasel craft gave to his mission description. There was a jokey definition for Wild Weasel in the back of the manual for an old combat medic-based game I never actually played but read through a bunch of times, if I can find it I'll post that too.
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Nov 25, 2015 18:42
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quote:Vector Thrust stuff Yeah, Vector Thrust is a nice idea stymied by slow, sometimes ill-advised development (the game recently zoomed out of early access through beta then to full release in like a month, solely on the whims of the publisher, and especially since that included a price hike absolutely no one thought it was a good idea). I think it's been two months since the last patch, and multiplayer refusing to work properly if anyone uses a custom skin anyone else is missing or the mission editor crashing to desktop while trying to do pretty much anything with it is a pretty big dealbreaker when a major selling point and 90% of the reason I got it was to make custom content. There's a reason this LP is inspiring me to shell out for replacement copies of the PS2 Ace Combat games rather than play more Vector Thrust. Gameplay at the very least got better with that last patch, since they added a "full arcade" option for skirmish mode that makes every standard missile equally effective (about equivalent to the F-22's AIM-9X they added a patch before that, fixing the issue of my missiles just plain refusing to track targets half the time) and removing countermeasures (fixing the issue where AI countermeasures are 100% effective while mine are only 1%). Verdafolio posted:Speaking of knifefights and the bayonet. It still gets use. At the risk of completely derailing the thread until the next update: the way I understand it is that the British army still trains with and even actually uses bayonets for the dual facts that A) they were always feared for it (even the Japanese in WWII, who keep in mind were the army that put bayonet lugs on every loving gun they used, would refuse to charge the British with bayonets while fighting in Burma), and B) now that nobody else really uses them, nobody really knows how to deal with the enemy using them either.
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Nov 27, 2015 06:54
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The F/A-18C in this game is an odd thing because it's like the one plane in this game where the devs gave a poo poo about whether it actually existed or was in use at that point in time in the real world. Even then it's a token gesture at best because they still included the electronic-warfare variant of the Super Hornet that's even more anachronistic than the normal Super Hornet would have been. Most of the dialogue differences in this mission were handled in the video itself because of how it's set up, but one thing I recently read about it is that even the altitude you start at is different depending on your ace style - apparently it's 390 meters for Mercenary, 1171 for Soldier, and 3906 for Knight. A kind of silly thing about how the game handles aces is that the SP paint schemes aren't really that special anymore. They're still tied to shooting down a named ace but the magic is kind of diminished when no less than five of those aces are forced encounters. It also means that the progression for unlocking planes is kind of hosed, because unlike other games in the series, you're getting half the planes yourself by shooting down people using them. As possibly the quickest and most obvious demonstration as to how hosed up the system ended up being in this game: crow here as a Knight player will unlock the F-4E about five missions after he's had access to the motherfucking Su-37 Terminator. Also, missiles still being live after the mission's over is nothing. Half the time in Ace Combat 5 the AI bugs out and continues trying to fight you even as the mission is considered complete and you can't see or lock onto them anymore. Speaking of AC5, Lunethex mentioned how good Pixy is at staying with you even when you give him different orders and noted that the wingmates in 5 weren't that good at it. It could be that I just always set them to Disperse rather than Attack, but yeah, they definitely spread out a lot more than the others. I know more than once in my current playthrough only Chopper actually came to form up with me at the end of a mission because Archer and Edge were stuck clear on the other side of the map for some reason. Definitely hoping I'll be able to guest for the next mission. The ones like it where you get to flat-out pick what mission you want to do rather than it being determined by your ace style are some of my favorites in the game. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Dec 1, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 07:19
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Cooked Auto posted:The F/A-18 Hornet does something similar in this case. The fun thing about that multirole capability was that it was mostly an accident. When they were first developing the Hornet out of the YF-17 Cobra there were supposed to be four variants: an F-18 fighter, an A-18 attacker, a TF-18 trainer and a non-carrier-based F-18L for export. Then improvements in avionics and multi-function displays happened, so the fighter and attacker versions got combined, and the F-18L never happened either because every foreign customer that chose the Hornet over the Fighting Falcon preferred the multi-role version.
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Dec 1, 2015 19:02
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Dead Reckoning posted:I remember playing one of the really early Playstation Ace Combat games, but I had no idea what I was doing back then. Do all the aircraft roll and turn at the same, but with different radii? Honestly, I might be remembering wrong but I'm pretty sure that's how it works in AC04 for some reason. I know for a fact late-game planes could barrel roll like a boss (Su-37 actually did so too fast for me to handle, ever since then I've mostly preferred the Su-35 if a game includes it over the -37) but they didn't seem to actually change pitch any better than the early-game stuff I had; the only one that had noticeable difference on that front was the F-14 turning so very, very slowly when I took it out for Comona.
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Dec 2, 2015 03:42
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nine-gear crow posted:FYI: I’m trying instigate a “One of you LP Electrosphere so I don’t have to” feud between him and Lunethex. It doesn’t appear to be working… To be honest I have considered it, probably the Japanese version with that Project Nemo translation because I'm insane enough to think I could pull it off, but the same thing's keeping me from actually recording it that's also kept me from doing Ace Combat 2 at any point. If Lunethex or someone else ever does it though you can bet I'll be doing everything I can to help them with it. my F-15 obsession has turned into a general-series obsession, just wait until next week when I can afford a new PS3 to get back into Infinity and then it'll be both  Also, I forgot to mention it during the video, but there was a promotional thing that came out with this game called "Confession of a Soldier", which was basically a Belkan soldier's journal detailing what he was up to as he ended up crossing paths with the Galm team at various points; the action here in Futuro was the focus of the fourth and fifth entries. Unfortunately I can't find the text, since the only source I can find that hasn't died and lost everything two or three times now (electrosphere.info  ) only has half of it and in the original Japanese.
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Dec 6, 2015 19:49
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Finally able to watch the video a couple hours later and I got a wall of text (apologies in advance no i'm not actually sorry) The first thing is that, in the briefing the Osean paratrooper regiment you're assisting was accidentally called the 101st Airborne Division. That's not what they're called (it's apparently the 122nd), that's actually a US Army paratrooper unit most famous for its operations in World War II. As The Casualty hinted at, this game's going to be getting into quite a bit of WWII stuff. Also, calling the MiG-29 the "Russian F-15 knockoff" is actually somewhat appropriate. Like you mentioned in the post, it and the Su-27 Flanker were developed in response to rumors of the F-15's development (which was in turn inspired by development of the MiG-25, you could go in circles all day if you wanted). The fun thing is that the Federation of American Scientists determined the MiG-29 could actually beat the F-15 in some areas like short-range aerial engagements. When German aggressors in MiG-29s went against American pilots in joint aggressor training after the end of the Cold War, the German MiGs won. The main advantages were their R-73 missiles which could track targets 40 degrees off the centerline, and the Shchel-3UM helmet-mounted sights that let them lock onto a target simply by turning their head to look at it. It's also one of the few Soviet-era craft to see use in NATO states. At the moment Poland has about 44 MiG-29s, 22 they received as a Warsaw Pact member and another 22 sold to them by Germany back in 2004, who gained 24 from East Germany after reunifying (one crashed and they kept another as a museum exhibit, I think); they're planning to keep using them until 2028, last I checked. Lastly, that A-10 ace is using the same paint scheme as another ace in AC5 was using on the YA-10B. I didn't see you shoot him down in the video, but I don't blame you either; he only shows up after you destroy all the non-yellow ground targets. Hell, I only just now shot him down two days ago now that I have a new copy of the game to play along with the LP. Assuming I'm incorrect in assuming SP paint schemes tied to non-boss aces don't require owning the plane to unlock, I think this is the only mission where you can unlock a plane and its SP paint scheme at the same time. bunnyofdoom posted:041 is implied to be a charcter in ac04 iirc Yeah, I think the implication is he's supposed to be the unnamed uncle from AC04's story. I've read other theories that number 43, Schwan, is also supposed to be another returning character based on what it says in his record. I won't name what character the theory claims he is but suffice to say we'll be getting acquainted with him relatively soon. JcDent posted:I watched one video, and the game seems to marry Star Trek menu, lovely soundtrack, boring missions and BULLSEYE I think the issue with Electrosphere, at least the international version, is that it's just not memorable. I mean, sure, I played it only the one time, but ask me about any of the missions and at most I'll be able to name four: the mission to drop bombs on some sci-fi nanoshrooms that were growing in a forest for some loving reason (which required me to change my ePSXe settings because the visual effect you get from flying too close and getting damaged from them was presented as a completely black screen), the mission where you fly at the edge of space in an updated A-12 Oxcart (don't ask me to remember what you shoot down with it), the other mission where you fly in space to shoot down satellites, and the complete slog of the last three or four missions that were particularly grating because I decided to test out the XFA-36A I had just received for the first mission of that set and ended up having to take a goddamned flying brick through the obligatory tunnel flight level. Twice. It looks cool (part of the reason I want to get back into Infinity as soon as possible is to get the R-101 for its sweet AC3 HUD, y'know after grinding a few billion credits for it and the other superfighters), there's some parts of the soundtrack that are good, and as I think I mentioned earlier it was the one to introduce a lot of the concepts to the series that AC04 and later perfected, but it's just not memorable. That said, as I mentioned before, anyone who does have the ability and/or insanity required to LP it, count me in.
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Dec 10, 2015 00:56
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Also as a more general note, this game continues surprising me. Not just in aces I'm still finding even after like my eighth playthrough, either; in my last two play-sessions I discovered, respectively, that there are even more brevity codes for weapons than I thought (I used the LAGM for a late-game mission and Eagle Eye properly called it with "Magnum"; 04 and 5 just used the "Fox" codes for every type of missile even though that's meant for air-to-air weapons only), and that even the missions like Juggernaut where you choose which variation you play have some differences in dialogue depending on your ace style, despite any implications otherwise with what I said in the videos for that mission about there technically being 52 missions (Pixy will say something about how he's guessing you want to protect the Kestrel in Operation Gelnikos as a Knight, but in my current new-game run through as a Mercenary he said something entirely different about killing everything). Also, as I mentioned, I'm playing along with the LP now. Doing a new game as a Mercenary ace on Hard difficulty, and not upgrading to any new planes until I save up enough for a certain late-game fighter the game gives you a third of the way through. Taking 78% damage from one missile  Despite that I'm not having a lot of trouble actually killing things. Hell, I took down next ace encounter coming up in the LP with just two volleys of missiles, one each for both planes involved. EDIT: The Casualty posted:But the MiG-29K is carrier capable, and the F-16 can't do that Yeah, I figure I can post some stuff about that since Crow's not getting the F-16 in this playthrough (you get it for beating Operation Costner in the last mission, Crow got the MiG-29 so he's going on from Gelnikos). After the Lightweight Fighter program ended, the Secretary of Defense ordered the Navy to look at the two competitors (the YF-16 and the losing YF-17) in 1974 after their own Naval Fighter-Attack, Experimental program failed to produce a replacement for a bunch of earlier craft that would be cheaper than the F-14. So, the Navy did consider a naval version of the F-16 at one point, but they ended up picking the YF-17 instead because they were skeptical as to how cheaply and effectively the YF-16 could be converted to the carrier role, being a single-engine fighter with narrow landing gear. This isn't the only time some aspect of the F-16's design made it deficient in an alternate role it was considered for, either, but we'll get to that at a later date. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 22:09
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GhostStalker posted:From last page, but I could've sworn I've heard AWACS Thunderhead calling "Magnum" before on an air to ground missile special weapon use before in Ace Combat 5. He might, for all I know. It could be how you use the weapon, since I only ever used the LAGM for a sea-based mission, and only one early-game plane gets it in that game anyway so I never thought to use it in something more land-based. Alternately, I may not have noticed it in 5 simply because nobody ever shuts up long enough for the AWACS to get a word in. And while we're at it I still need to check if the LASM also gets a proper brevity code rather than just sharing Fox Three. Also, yeah, the Terminator is expensive. I was able to get it only three missions after I unlocked it, but I still had to stick with the F-1 for one more after that since I couldn't afford any SP weapons that I really needed for that one.
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Dec 14, 2015 18:02
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ninjahedgehog posted:Yeah, he definitely does. I can't remember if Skyeye or Eagle Eye do the same. Yeah, like I'd said I'd discovered Eagle Eye does. Sky Eye, though, is definitely a case of every missile-based special weapon just getting a Fox code. And usually not even a correct one, since I recall XMAAs and/or XLAAs being called with Fox One even though only the SAAM from 5 and later would actually fit that code. The hosed thing about it though is that he definitely does have a line for calling Fox Three, since he uses it in 5's Arcade mode. 
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Dec 14, 2015 23:36
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The Casualty posted:as well as the A-4 Oh, you're in for a bit of a treat once we finish this game.  But yeah, classic jets seems to be a recurring missed opportunity Aces seems to have no interest in rectifying. Like, we get two or four WWII prop fighters in some of the later games, then it skips entirely over everything between that and mid- to late-Vietnam. Also, had a little AC-related coincidence yesterday. First, story time: twice a week I donate plasma at a nearby place to make a little extra money. Anyway, went in to donate yesterday, after playing some Infinity that morning with the old Wardog emblem, and I wasn't even in the building a full minute when their radio starts playing none other than Blurry.
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Dec 17, 2015 20:37
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Okay, finally back after doing things! Time for another wall of text regarding the video and planes and poo poo.anilEhilated posted:I'd like to think that the A-10's development went less along the lines of "we need a plane" and more of "how can we get this gun airborne?" My one regret about doing research on the various planes in this game (and I guess about watching Lazyfire's LP of Battlefield 3, since he mentions it in the posts for a video halfway through) is that I learned that this is not the case, and that makes me sad. It's at best a half-truth. The A-X was meant from the beginning to carry a 30mm cannon, but the Avenger's design was finalized after that of the Warthog's. The prototypes that competed in the project, the YA-10 and the losing YA-9, both carried an interim M61 Vulcan. Also, what hasn't really been brought up yet is that the plane is insanely hardy. According to Wikipedia half of the plane can fall off and you'll still be good; it can stay in the air after losing one tail, one engine, and even one of its wings. Also, there's a story about how it didn't have FLIR systems during the first Gulf War, but it didn't matter since the pilots just used a repeater image from their Mavericks' seeker sent to a tiny screen in the cockpit. Its future I'm not sure about, some sources say the F-16 and later the F-35 will take over its role following development of better close-air support tactics for the former and actual deployment of the latter, others say wing replacements and avionics upgrades are in order to keep it flying until 2040 where the surviving fleet (which will probably be the vast majority of them) will be converted into UAVs as the UA-10D. The Su-37 is, as mentioned, going to be our first real introduction to the series' love of taking tech demonstrators that weren't armed or mass-produced, and giving them weapons and handing a million of them out to everyone. The gist of it is that there were 15 Su-27s converted into tech demonstrators for a possible upgrade, the Su-35 Super Flanker (we'll be seeing that a lot later on), and then the Su-37 was born when two of those were modified to utilize thrust-vectoring engines. And, as a note, one of those two prototypes crashed in 2002. Phy posted:The Su-37 is a monster in Ace Combat. It really is an endgame plane, it's deserving of its nickname. It's got more missiles than God, locks up targets quicker than blinking, can fly directly up its own tailpipe, and its SP loadout is quite useful. And yet Gelb always seems to go down so easy. What's really annoying to me is that they're another special ability squadron: they can fire missiles backwards as well as forwards, to gently caress with you if you're on their six, so they ought to be a fun challenge. But again, they pretty much seem to go down boom, boom. What the heck, guys. I took them down in two salvos in my most recent playthrough while using the loving F-1. They really are easy as poo poo. There's an in-universe reason for it we'll hear later. But I'll leave it up to you if it makes sense. Also, dialogue changes! Pixy's first line changes depending on ace style, which I'm sure people could guess based on his use of the word "pride". As a Soldier he instead notes "the battle's going in our favor", and as a Merc he claims "I know you've got what it takes". Also, that line from the clockmaker guy at the end is another change - as a Mercenary the line is from a florist saying she'll fill the town with flowers, and as a Soldier it's a bread-maker who's glad he doesn't have to make bread for the Belkans anymore.
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Dec 20, 2015 05:49
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Lunethex posted:edit: I actually just remembered Kadorhal would do something with AC3. Maybe he can play the Western version for the thread! Possible. I could pick up Dxtory for myself over the holidays so I can actually record it without horrific framerate drops. It'd also let me do stuff for Ace Combat 2 to make things slightly easier on Crow when we get to that game.
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Dec 20, 2015 21:47
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Cooked Auto posted:The more you read into the F-35 project the more you start to realise that the Marines is the cause of a lot of those issues. Funny, that. The one horror story I know about the F-35 is that thanks to "commonality" being a goal, both the Air Force and Marine variants had to have been unnecessarily strengthened and made heavier, which goes completely against everything either of them want from it, simply because the Navy version needed to be so it could handle taking off of or landing on a carrier. Which is funny in and of itself because the location of its landing gear means the F-35C actually can't land on a carrier properly anyway.
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Dec 22, 2015 09:51
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Cythereal posted:It's possible but never been confirmed that the Navy was interested in the -22 as a potential Superbug replacement but that never materialized. Yeah, that was part of it. The F-22 was seen as more capable of being adapted for the Navy's version of the ATF program, according to a quote from the then-Secretary of the Air Force on Wikipedia that was the deciding factor in picking the YF-22 over the -23. 'Course the NATF crashed and burned like a year after the F-22 was picked, so. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Dec 22, 2015 |
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Dec 22, 2015 22:41
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I guess that means it's time for another wall of text. Don't know when I'll get around to recording the Western version (or if I even can, Dxtory apparently has the same kinds of issues with ePSXe that Fraps does. Still, it's otherwise apparently better than Fraps in every way so I won't mind upgrading to it regardless). The main things I can think of are involving two of the planes. First up: Lunethex posted:
Fun thing, the MiG-33 isn't entirely fictional. There were two separate attempts at making an upgraded "Super Fulcrum" for export purposes that would have initially had the designation MiG-33 (it's since become MiG-29M), much like with the Su-27's upgrade in the aborted Su-35/Su-37 and successful Su-35S, but the MiG-33/29M overall saw little more than a few demonstrators and some currently-unfilled orders. That said, a lot of the tech went into creating China's JF-17 and the more successful MiG-35. Second, I don't think the F-15 S/MT Eagle+ is really meant to be the Silent Eagle as you claimed. That thing's first flight was nearly ten years after this game came out, so any similarities are more than very likely unintentional. If anything it's meant to be a futurized version of the F-15 S/MTD/F-15 ACTIVE every game in the series since 2 has had in some form; being basically a regular F-15B with canards and thrust-vectoring engines, it certainly fits in with the theme of a lot of General Resource's craft (see also the Gyrfalcon and the later Sakerfalcon, which are essentially a standard F-16C and F-16XL with slightly different wings and attached canards). Also, that bit where you have to shoot down crates with your guns in the third mission? Keep that in mind, we'll be seeing that in another game later. And finally, yeah, carrier landings are a horrible thing. It took me years of practicing in other flight sims before I could finally find out how to do it properly in the PS2 games without just flying over the carrier then stalling down onto it.
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Dec 23, 2015 04:00
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The Casualty posted:I suppose it's really up to the OP, but it couldn't hurt to contribute your writeups to the thread, right? Yeah, that's what I'm figuring. I mean, most of the poo poo I've been posting in the thread has been taken from various text files I wrote up through doing some historical research on all the planes in the various games, and at worst I've only had people (read: you, concerning some A-10 stuff earlier) correcting things I got wrong, which is half the reason I'm actually posting them anyway, rather than having people go "no stop go away". Personally, I think someone else doing that sort of thing for the thread has the potential to make it even more interesting. I'd probably learn even more than I did on my own. Unrelated, for the Steam sale I just picked up some game called SimplePlanes. I'm not going to make a definitive statement on whether it'd be worth your time or not given I also had high hopes for Vector Thrust before its development slowed to a near-standstill, but I will say the challenge of making an actual working aircraft under realistic physics, even if I'm just recreating a real thing like the F-5E (or I guess F-20 since I only gave it one engine), is strangely alluring. My ultimate goal is to make superfighters from Ace Combat, in particular I'd like to make at least one of the two from Ace Combat 2 and maybe something from Electrosphere just to see if any of them would actually work under real physics. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 04:07
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Cythereal posted:I like the idea of this mission, but it feels like it needs... more. You're pushing back into enemy territory in the counter-invasion, the Allies' seeming good intentions are starting to turn sinister, and you're attacking the not-Maginot Line's doom fortress on a dark and stormy night. That's a good recipe for an ominous and exciting mission, but a few clusters of AAA and SAMs feels underwhelming even if there are a few borrowed Nazi flak towers in the mix. Either the mission should have been far more tense or far more chaotic, I think, and probably end with a boss fight. I think the real issue with this mission is that they went back into the AC04 book for creating missions. Okay, here's a metric fuckton of targets you can't possibly destroy all on your own simply for the amount of ordnance that'd require, and a ton of NPC allies who do nothing except occasionally lob a missile at something. Okay, now here's a return line so you can return to base and resupply to kill more things. Alright then, now here's a minimum amount of points you have to score within half an hour to succeed. Go nuts. What makes it worse is that, as crow noted, you can only get two or three of the areas the targets are focused in before you gain the points necessary to win. Not that bad a thing when the alternative is slowly slogging your way through all five, right? Except the first two you have to take out are set in stone - the targets in Areas B, C and D don't activate until you've taken out A and E. That means a supposedly wide and varied mission where getting actual variety requires artificially making the mission a chore to play by spreading out your destruction across the three areas instead of focusing on one then getting three or four targets in the next just to get it over with. There's one more mission pretty much exactly like this later on, but even with the increased amount of points you need owing to how much further into the game it is, I find it much more tolerable simply because everything is pretty much in a straight line, and the amount of points you need versus the amount of points that are available are a bit closer to each other. It feels less like an AC04 mission where the game keeps treating you as just another pilot among a million despite the fact that you are repeatedly proving yourself two million times better than any of the others, and more like an AC5 mission where the game knows exactly how badass you are and is letting you go all-out to show it off. Cooked Auto posted:You sure about the bunkers requiring three missiles to kill and they just don't have a weakspot at the front as your bunker knockout at that point seemed very inconsistent with one of them requiring two and one requiring at least four. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a weakpoint to pillboxes and the like. If there is, though, it's pretty well-hidden. Then again, I'm the guy who somehow brute-forced his way into making a ton of gun kills despite being too dumb to realize how the gun crosshair actually worked until his third playthrough, so it could actually be really obvious and I just never noticed it. I'll have my own write-up about the Mirage and other stuff after crow gets all his  posted. I will say though thanks to Infinity I like the Mirage 2000 series, they're pretty cool. The 2000-5 in particular is a decent early-game multirole, was my mainstay for the first month or so until I was able to upgrade to the Strike Eagle.
Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 21:23
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Dr. Snark posted:Do you have bombs? Do you have targets to be bombed? Drop your payload anywhere and don't worry about collateral damage if you carpet-bomb a city; only the bad guys get hurt by the gigantic explosions covering multiple city blocks. I find this especially funny because I recently played the next mission with... a certain fighter we'll see around the end, with a certain special weapon. Suffice to say there was a heavily-bustling airfield one moment, and then nothing left standing except a pair of hangars at the very edges that the game happened to classify as yellow targets the next.
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Jan 3, 2016 10:12
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Oh right, stuff about the videos I promised to have out after crow had his words. Blame/thank AGDQ and I guess the Freelance Astronauts for this being so late. I already covered what needed to be covered about the mission itself and why it's probably the closest this game has to a bad mission (barring some other level I'm suddenly repressing all memory of) so instead I'll be going on about the planes. As crow mentioned, the Mirage 2000D is an upgrade from the old 2000N model that was meant to be a nuclear bomber, though I guess "bomber" is sort of a misnomer because the N's primary weapon was meant to be the Aerospatiale Air-Sol Moyenne Portée ("medium-range air to surface missile"), which wasn't a nuclear bomb but rather a nuclear cruise missile that was to be the last-resort "warning shot" the French Air Force fired at approaching Soviet forces before everybody threw nukes with reckless abandon. The 2000D was brought about because of budget cutbacks thanks to the sudden end of the Cold War meaning that Dassault's newer Rafale wasn't going to be ready in time for 1996 as originally planned; the D is short for "diversifie", denoting that the plane is a multirole variation. Its primary upgrades over the N are improved controls and a modernized navigation system that included GPS capability. The EA-6B meanwhile is a relatively ancient plane, first flew in 1968 and has in some form or another still seen use exactly as it was meant for to the present day. It's a flying brick that seats four people at once, designed to replace the earlier EKA-3B Skywarrior in the electronic warfare role. The last unit was produced way back in '91, so it's really starting to show its age and is getting pretty expensive to keep flying. The Navy performed its last deployment of a Prowler in November 2014, and last I checked had planned to completely withdraw it from service early in 2015 now that they have the EA-18G Growler to perform its role. The Marines meanwhile are still using it, planning to keep it in flight until 2019. They're looking at the possibility of using the F-35B in its role, owing to its more advanced avionics and the like, but then again the Marines were the ones who declared that the F-35 has met initial operational capability despite actual testing showing it's far from ready, so I'm going to take everything I've heard about those "currently-unmatched" avionics with a grain of salt until they actually get a chance to be proven as such (which is currently looking to happen in 2037 at the absolute earliest). The Harrier I didn't look up much about because it's only flyable in Infinity, where it's apparently one of the most useless early-game craft available. I vaguely remember a guy in the thread in Games having fun with it back when the game first came out, but I think I've seen one whole person use it since I got back into the game about three weeks ago and I'm pretty sure he didn't score all that well. All I know is that it's apparently one of the hardest jet aircraft to fly in the world, and is notable for having killed an impressive amount of trainees. Given the kinds of issues I've had with losing control of it in a freeware flight sim I play every now and then, I can believe that. I do know that an earlier version, the Sea Harrier, was used by the British in the Falklands War. They initially used it as a fighter-bomber, but between it performing horribly at the job and the British Navy's retirement of all conventional carriers leaving them with no other carrier-capable fighters, they equipped some Sea Harriers with air-to-air missiles and sent them to fight Argentine fighters. The rest is history.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:31
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Not much I can say about this mission, crow already covered most everything I could think of in the video or the post, but I think this mission's debriefing really goes along with his mention back in mission 4 that the three-part missions seem geared towards specific Ace Styles even if your style doesn't affect nearly as much for these missions. Alpha Team he's talking about how "the best defense is offense" which sounds like a Merc thing, while Beta team he goes on about how "you've fought nobly" which is obviously Knight, and Theta he's saying that you need to end the war otherwise "the war will put an end to us", which sounds more like Soldier to me. I do however want to make a note about referring to the MiG-29 having a "gatling gun" in the Alpha team video. The MiG-29's gun is actually a single-barrel design. The Soviets never really used multi-barrel stuff for aircraft - they did try back in the 70s or so with the GSh-6-23 and GSh-6-30, but they decided to make them differently from American guns. Rather than electric motors to spin the barrels up, they decided to make them work by their own firing gases. This made them ridiculously fast both to spool up and to actually fire, but the problems come from the fact that they were adapted from naval CIWS guns. They worked just fine for ship-based mountings because those are much bigger; on the smaller aicraft, stress breakages from the recoil were practically guaranteed. They had to install powerful floodlights on the airstrips because the landing lights on any plane using the cannons (primarily MiG-27 and one variant of the Su-25 before they switched back to twin-barrel guns for the 30mm version, Su-24 and MiG-31 for the 23mm version) were practically guaranteed to break on the first firing, and that's not even getting into less-minor systems would break from the vibrations like the landing gear doors cracking and preventing regular landing, the avionics and radio systems breaking, and even the loving instrument panel falling off in one case. There was also the fact that anything within 200 meters of the target - including the firing craft - would take shrapnel damage from the detonations of the shells. Not to mention they exhausted their entire ammo supply in less than two seconds of sustained fire, and it could only be fired ten times in total because they had to use pyrotechnic charges to spin it up. About the only practical part of that was the pyrotechnic charges, which modern Russian single-barrel aircraft cannons have repurposed to let them cycle themselves in the event of a dud round or a jam. Also, the comments/complaints about the visuals in the game are spot-on. Infinity, as mentioned, even running the game with an HDMI cable now I can still notice a lot of blurriness on the textures on close-up. I just bought the ADF-01 -Osea- special aircraft from the supply store, which comes with a pre-placed version of the Wardog emblem that's drat near unrecognizable versus the version I can put on the tail of regular aircraft. Fun note on the map, too: this game was the one that introduced the now-standard switch between the map and weapon-switch buttons. The default control scheme has expanding the map on square and switching weapons on select, but there's an option to switch them. Problem is, though, they didn't think to keep the whole variable-size map thing for that control scheme, so you just press select once and it's zoomed out fully and you can't tell things apart. no worries about mind-train having no rails, as long as you're not propelling it via nuclear explosions Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 22:30
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I'm pretty sure you can change the units of measurements the game uses in the menu. I think it defaults to feet and miles (I remember a guy on TVTropes referencing the missiles' range said it was 900 feet, I paid attention and saw that was the distance the HUD gave me). Not that it matters anyway, the only speed you really need to know is "fast enough to stay airborne" (which the game reminds you of by giving you a stall warning when you get too close to it), and the only distance you need to know is "how far your ridiculously-short-ranged missiles lock on" (which the game also shows you via the bar on the right side near the altimeter, with the horizontal bar for the lock-on range and the arrow for how far the target is).
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Jan 7, 2016 00:45
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Obligatory: "The sun used to make our flight deck and refueling space so hot and uncomfortable, we couldn't use it!" Also Belka R&D chat, Belka has ridiculous superweapons because they, like all video game bad guys who aren't the Russians or Chinese, are based on Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany too had plans for a metric boatload of ridiculous superweapons, up to and including a loving space-based death ray by way of mirrors on a satellite. Fictional inspired-by-Nazi bad guys also have the dual bonuses of "game never goes into detail about where the enemy gets their resources, ergo they have infinite resources" and "they don't have that whole Aryan supremacy thing leading them to kill or banish everyone smart enough to actually make a working superweapon", so, laser death ray with attendant satellites to extend its range out of loving nowhere right when they need it.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:36
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Nanomashoes posted:Ulysses asteroid only got spotted a year ago in-game time. Laser was built for missile defense in the 80's under Belkan Ronald Reagan. Yeah, I guess it's kind of a spoiler but most of the other superweapons we'll be seeing were meant for destroying the Ulysses asteroid. Thing is, its impending impact wasn't actually announced to the masses of the Strangereal world until another year after this game. Excalibur is as mentioned meant for missile defense, but just like the later superweapons it shoots down planes just as well. Also, something else I just learned, the V2 that was also mentioned in the briefing for the last mission? Was apparently developed under a "Project Pendragon".
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Jan 8, 2016 08:02
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Okay, finally able to watch the video after everybody else already posted words. Time for my own words. Ace style differences for this mission that crow didn't already mention, I got nothing. Supposedly PJ's response to Pixy's suggestion on where to crash if he gets shot down changes but that's complete bullshit because I ran through it on Mercenary in my most recent playthrough and his response was exactly the same as it always was whenever I went through as a Knight. Course my source for that was TV Tropes, who I don't think have ever gotten a quote right unless I was the one who put it there, so I really shouldn't have expected anything else. F-16, I got more things. I mentioned some stuff about how its design wasn't good enough for the Navy after they looked at it and the YF-17 to procure a cheaper replacement for their older aircraft, but I didn't mention a lot of the good things about it. There's excellent visibility from the pilot's seat because of a frameless bubble canopy; the control stick and throttle are both on the sides of the seat, rather than one being between the legs, which along with the controls put on the sticks themselves aids in controlling the craft without having to remove one of your hands from either of them; the ejection seat is reclined at 30 degrees (compared to 13-15 for previous American jets) for better G-force tolerance and accomodation for slightly taller pilots; and it was one of the first production fighters to utilize a fly-by-wire system. Overall it's a pretty sweet craft, too bad crow won't get to use it in this playthrough  .As for Excalibur, from a gameplay/superweapon standpoint, Zero was probably the best game to start with for the series because Excalibur is probably the weakest of the superweapons in the series. As has been mentioned it was much improved when it was added to Infinity two months ago. Laser network to chase UAVs through, the railway TLSes are also much more accurate and deadly, and the fact that the last phase is just dumping as many bullets and missiles into the thing as you can is much less annoying when you've got upwards of seven other players all helping you do so. Also, that first shot it takes here, where it destroyed the tanker, is weaker than the later ones - you don't get hit by it unless you deliberately fly into the laser, and even then it deals half the damage it does at any later point in the mission according to the wiki.
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Jan 11, 2016 01:01
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I think guns actually have better range than the HUD suggests. I know in Infinity you can hit targets from just a tiny bit farther than your missiles will lock on from even without a part to give them better range; I've stolen a few low-priority kills by blazing away with the gun instead of firing a missile and hoping I have a better propulsion-enhancing part than he does. I won't be surprised if the range is shorter in the PS2 games, but since 5 pretty much every game gives you infinite ammo for the gun below Normal difficulty so you won't be wasting much more than a few seconds of time trying to determine the actual range. Also the rocket pod before 6 is terrible and inaccurate and terrible. I won't hear anything differently 
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Jan 12, 2016 01:22
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Yeah, I don't think the actual plot was really the strong point that the devs were focusing on here. Remember they put this one out in just less than a year, so it makes sense that an actual compelling story on the level of 04 or 5 took a backseat to justifying all sorts of encounters with enemy ace squadrons with as flimsy a rationale as they could get away with. Excalibur is, as I mentioned, essentially the encapsulation of that. They needed an early superweapon that the bad guys could kick some rear end with before the player comes in and destroys it to make a name for themselves, but that wasn't the priority... so we got a slow, easily-avoidable laser tower where the difficulty lies in just throwing as many missiles, bullets, and SP weapon of your choice into it for five minutes until it finally comes down. Like the last phase it can't even shoot back at you anymore but it still goes on for a while, that's how terrible a superweapon it is. Also, the earlier discussion about Infinity is pretty funny given that in about four hours they'll be rerunning a TDM event to give Ace Combat Zero-related prizes. Hopefully my PS3 won't kill itself two days into the event this time.
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Jan 13, 2016 01:10
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Probably not a surprise as I'm sure everyone else thinks the same thing, but this is my favorite mission in the game. Biggest wall of text yet incoming. Fun note, the enemy spawning is somewhere around the rate of one plane at opposite points every ten seconds or so. Most of the time I play this mission I end up clearing everything then constantly zooming between those two points to keep spawnkilling those two. As for the bosses, I think Schnee is the one I have the most trouble with simply because they can launch from longer range than anyone else in the game. Dialogue changes are mostly confined to the debriefing for this mission. The main changes are the aces, specifically named ones that a returning player is supposed to recognize. I'm not going to name names here because they're kind of massive spoilers we're far off from at this point in the LP. I will note on the "people theorizing identities of other aces" front, though: try to remember Reiher there. The whole "Demon Lord of the Round Table" thing is interesting because it's one of the many, many cases where a pun in Japanese doesn't work in another language. In Japanese the words for "Knight" and "Demon Lord" are pronounced near-exactly the same (kishi vs. kishin), so that's where that came from. Also plane notes! The main thing, of course, is the F-15. Interesting thing is that it was meant to counter the MiG-25 "Foxbat"... or, rather, it was meant to counter the crazy stuff that the USAF thought the MiG-25 was capable of. The result is heavily-armed, heavily-armored, and one of the fastest aircraft in the inventory. Only a small handful (I think two) have been confirmed shot down by another aircraft, and every one of those has been a training accident within the JASDF; legit combat losses to anti-aircraft fire have only been in the low double-digits. Most actual combat use has been with the Israeli Air Force; in particular, they got the first kill with the craft. Some of the best IAF pilots were chosen to be their first F-15 pilots, and while on patrol of the northern border in June 1979, Moshe Marom-Melnik scored the first air-to-air kill with the craft against a Syrian MiG-21. There was also the training accident in May of 1983 that we all know about and I think at least one of us already discussed, when trainee Zivi Nedivi's F-15D accidentally collided with an A-4N, destroying the A-4 and shearing off its own right wing; due to smoke and leaking hydraulic fluid Nedivi had no idea he'd lost his wing, even after he temporarily entered an unintended spin when he reduced speed on the way back to base (he was planning on ejecting at that point, but decided on returning to base after he noticed going afterburner gave him back control). He ended up getting back to base, landing at about 260 knots (twice the Eagle's recommended landing speed), shearing off its tailhook and only stopping about 20 feet from the end of the runway. He's apparently gone on record saying that if he had any idea that he'd lost the wing (he didn't notice until he turned around to shake his instructor's hand once he was safely on the ground), he would have just ejected. Here's an article plus video I found about it if you're interested. The MiG-31 is also interesting because it's essentially the actually-usable upgrade over the MiG-25. The Foxbat was an incredibly fast aircraft, but that was because it was meant to intercept the American XB-70 Valkyrie. When that project was cancelled, a plane with four missiles and no gun started to look pretty useless. It did get some use as a recon plane, and it also had propaganda value (in particular the stuff I mentioned above that lead to the F-15, but there was also an incident where a Soviet MiG-25 in Syrian colors sauntered up to an Israeli F-4 running full-speed at its operational ceiling, let the crew get a good look, then accelerated and climbed away) but for the most part it wasn't a very good aircraft. The MiG-31's upgrades were a better radar (the first passive electronically scanned array radar put on a production craft) with a second seat for an officer to utilize it, more armament (two more missiles and a gun), and a strengthened fuselage so it could go supersonic at low altitudes. A "drawback" is that the top speed is dialed down from Mach 3.1 to Mach 2.8... but it's not really a drawback, because that was about as fast as you could take the MiG-25 before it either ran itself out of fuel trying to further accelerate, or killed its own engines from overuse. It's also a really tough plane according to this series, it's one of the only fighter craft that can survive two missiles in Ace Combat 5 and it's annoying as gently caress and The F-14 is the world's first and only "homoerotic" fighter jet thanks to Top Gun. It initially came about from the F-111B project crashing and burning thanks to changing requirements; the F-14 used the same Pratt & Whitney TF30 engines and AIM-54 Phoenix radar-guided missiles the F-111B was supposed to use. The Phoenix did well, but the engines had all sorts of problems - in particular it was prone to turbine blade failures and compressor stalls, with its own missiles' exhaust being able to produce a stall at specific altitudes (this is probably part of why the similar-looking Tornado houses its armaments on swinging pylons under the variable-geometry wings). Around 1987 there were tests on an F-14A Plus with improved General Electric F110-400 engines, which eventually birthed the F-14B, and then with an improved avionics system the F-14D Super Tomcat. Plans to continue upgrading the craft past about 1995 saw no success, though, thanks to the expense of keeping the thing flying; the last combat mission carried out by an F-14 in USN use was in February 2006, when a pair of them dropped a bomb over Iraq then returned to the USS Theodore Roosevelt. That October every surviving American F-14 was flown to a boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona, with all but eleven of them promptly being scrapped as of 2011 to keep Iran, the only other country to still use the F-14, from getting components of them. Second required Top Gun joke: apparently, USN battle doctrine after the movie came out stated that any F-14 pilots caught singing "Highway to the Danger Zone" over the radio were to be shot down on sight. Any caught singing "Take My Breath Away" were to be shot at more if they ejected. The F-4 I'll wait until a game where it's actually used as the starter craft it is. This was what I was talking about earlier with this game's sort of schizophrenic difficulty and plane-unlocking, Crow just got the Eagle and had access to the even better Terminator for four missions and this is when they choose to give you the goddamned Phantom II. You don't get the F-16 instead simply because you already got it for one of the operations from mission 4. Materant posted:Zero, for me at least, is where Ace difficulty actually becomes fun. Definitely. I know it's the only game in the series I've tried a run on Ace difficulty in, so far. Although, I don't think I actually beat it before my last house caught fire and I lost track of all my PS2 games in the process of moving; when I got a new copy about a month ago now I noticed the most recent save was only on Expert.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:11
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Phy posted:Just as a question about the Mig-31; One thing I've always heard about the MiG-25 is that HAHAHA when Viktor Belenko defected with it, we found out that its crazy powerful radar was built with HAHAHA vacuum tubes, which was hilarious until we realized that HAHAHA it would still work after the EMP generated by a nuclear strike, so HAHAHA turned into "Those Sneaky loving Russians!". Is there any truth to this, and if so, is the MiG-31's radar as nukeproof? Yeah, the MiG-25 was designed to run on vacuum tubes to save on insulating the electronics, so it's pretty resistant to EMPs. I can't find anything saying the same for the -31, though. nine-gear crow posted:but I for one don't buy that theory for a second. Mostly because it takes away from the mystique of the character in question by boiling him down to yet another bloody tie back to the Belkan War. I take "detailed information about this pilot is unavailable" in this case to mean "this is an easter egg you crazy theorists". We have enough gratuitous callbacks to the Belkan War in this series, we don't need to be retconning earlier poo poo into even more of them. It's essentially a case of what TV Tropes calls a Plot Tumor. The series since 3 is supposed to be showing us how the world got into the state it was in that game, where super-powerful corporations apparently replaced most governments. What we got instead were the combined 20-year aftermaths of both the Belkan War and another event; hell, AC6 happens because of both. Like they don't even mention how Neucom came about in the games, there's just a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference in some side- material about how they used to be a specific company that also didn't really show up in the games.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:55
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I'm gonna have to agree with Aces here, the F-5E is actually pretty sweet. I think it's the twin revolver-cannons in the nose. There's something about them I just really love.
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Jan 18, 2016 09:22
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Regarding Lunethex's videos, fun story on Broken Truce: the export version of the mission, "Scramble", has you on the complete opposite side. You're there to destroy those eight R-201s. The Mission Accomplished requirement is to destroy all of them before they take off in the same time-frame as for this version, which is kind of loving ridiculous when you only get planes half as often as you do in the original game and every single one of them is changed to be a useless flying brick. Ghosts of the Past is now the tenth mission in the export version, as simply "Maze". As usual, no AI allies accompanying you, therefore no Rena having a minor freak-out and making the whole experience kind of uncomfortable. You just follow the Nighthawk which apparently can't see you until it leads you to the base, then you blow everything up. I don't think there's any actual penalty for breaking stealth by flying above the canyon. There could be a new missile defense system added for all I know, I actually replayed this a few weeks ago and I'm already forgetting everything important in favor of the goddamned worthless planes god damnit give me something useful already No Clearance didn't make the cut, too much actual interesting plot. Fragile Cargo actually gets to keep its name, but there's another mission from halfway through a completely different story branch between it and Broken Truce/Scramble. It's mostly the same mission, although I seem to recall there being other targets added to shoot down. I could be remembering wrong, though! All I could focus on was how much better the game would get when it finally gave me something actually flyable like the F-22C or its version of the Su-47. Oh how much better indeed. (Poor me from three weeks ago.) Scylla and Charybdis is now simply "Escort", and occurs immediately after "Maze". Again, it's basically the same mission as in the original version, except, of course, minus the whole plot-decision thing where you get the option to shoot your buddy down afterwards. I will note this is the mission that introduces the F/A-32C Erne, which is actually a fictional update to the Boeing X-32, which was the losing competitor in the Joint Strike Fighter program to the Lockheed Martin X-35. It's kind of a bastard in this game. Enemies piloting it are fast and mobile and it took me a solid ten minutes to shoot a bunch of them down in a later mission even after the game finally gave me a craft that was slightly better than what I already had, but I distinctly recall getting it in the endgame, testing it out for the final stretch of missions, and ending up being stuck with what was essentially the exact same sort of flying brick I started out with but with a few extra missiles. Long story short is, don't play the international version. Just get the Japanese one, the guys doing the translation patch even have a full text dump for every mission so you don't have to wait for them to finish the second disk. And regarding the paint-scheme discussion I had with Aces, I mentioned everyone's favorite Jolly Rogers F-14, but I completely forgot to mention something else I learned recently: VF-1 Wolfpack, another former F-14 squadron whose rather simple paint scheme was the inspiration for that of the F-14 in one of the original arcade games that lead to Ace Combat. Also I probably should have increased the volume on my commentary track like I do for my own LPs but oh well learning for the next time I guest commentate. Also, talk about the order in which characters get shot down: I don't think it's actually scripted. I know at the very least Gelb has two sets of dialogue depending on which of the two planes you shot down first; one where you hit Altman and his captain orders him to bail out, and the other where you hit the captain and Altman wonders aloud if he got shot down, and another specific famous encounter later on in the game where number one is distinctive from the rest of the flight has the same situation. I also know in the fourth game they could have dialogue play depending on the order you shoot down specific enemies in (won't get into that yet if only because it needs to be experienced properly to highlight the ridiculousness), so I wouldn't be surprised if they expanded on that for this game.
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Jan 20, 2016 09:05
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Cythereal posted:The Marines shouldn't be operating fixed-wing aircraft anyway. They shouldn't, but there's no way in hell they're going to give them up. Not since a Navy carrier task force pulled out of Guadalcanal like two days into the campaign, thus causing the supply ships to leave because they had no air cover, thus causing the Marines to be left with less than half the supplies and equipment they needed, and also no air cover. Anyway, not a whole lot to say about this mission that hasn't already been covered. There's not much difference in dialogue between Ace Styles and F-35 chat has covered the vast majority of the thread so everything I've got has already been gone over in great detail. I will note (I think reiterate actually) though that the Marines have claimed the F-35B met initial operational capability as of July 31st 2015, but the trials actually showed shortcomings in night operations, communications, software and weapons carriage capabilities; apparently to the Marines "expectation of meeting IOC by <date>" means "we will declare it to meet IOC on <date>, actual results be damned". EDIT: I will agree with the mention in the video that this is basically Mercenary's Paradise, too. In my recent Merc playthrough, this was the point where I was able to finally afford both the Su-37 and an alternate special weapon for it. In case you're unaware, one of the Su-37's special weapons in this game is the FAEB, aka the biggest and baddest bomb available. Dropping one then turning away, hearing the giant explosion start up about half a second before an entire city block disappears from radar is intensely satisfying. EDIT 2 a while later: Regarding the "low production cost" thing this game claims about the F-35, it kind of reminds me of the old Delta Force: Land Warrior where the XM29 OICW was an available weapon, and its armory description specifically noted its light weight (actual OICW was about 18 pounds, three heavier than the requirement and six heavier than the existing M16A2 with M203) and effectiveness (actual OICW had a nine-inch barrel so had poo poo accuracy and stopping power, and used wimpy 20mm grenades that didn't fragment properly for airbursting to actually be lethal). Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 20:51
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I've still been considering picking up Airforce Delta Strike simply because what I hear of it makes it seems like the missions would be suitably crazy. Like, flying into the eye of a tornado to destroy the machinery causing it. Taking off from an airborne aircraft carrier by being thrown out the back and hope your engine can start up properly in mid-flight. Making a plane space-capable by jamming extra thrusters onto it, and flying up a space elevator as it's falling apart. poo poo like that. The original game's problem is that it was basically a straight ripoff of Ace Combat 2. All it tried to add on was one certain mission (which I won't discuss because Ace Combat ended up doing the same thing five years later and it's kind of a massive spoiler there) and some bullshit in the ending about how the enemies you were fighting at some point were apparently formerly comrades of yours or something which came completely out of left field even if you noticed mention earlier that a certain mission had you taking out an airfield that had apparently been used by your group at some point (because apparently the people still there just joined whoever took them over, no questions asked? No attempted rebellion on their end or a rescue mission from your side?). HAWX's problem is that its gimmick has way too many camera issues. The thing is that it wants to be "dynamic" so every time you start up OFF mode it's facing you pretty much entirely head-on, and then it very, very slowly pans over to the guy you want to shoot, and doesn't really get that much faster if you press the target-change button again to tell it to knock off the poo poo, so haha gently caress you if you wanted an edge over an opponent in a timely fashion. ERS is also bullshit because it only works properly when it's the only option given to you, read: whichever mission forces you to fly through the cloud of AA fire three times. They had the gall to add challenges for killing certain amounts of targets in ERS when nine times out of ten it kicks you out halfway through the path it set out for you and you have to immediately try again to actually get through the path and kill the thing in a way that actually counts for the challenge. I basically had to use ERS to use ERS when I went for those challenges (unlocking planes got very, very tedious when there's Battlefield 2-esque requirements for ranking up and nobody plays competitive multiplayer where I'd like to presume the amount of experience gained per flight was a little bit higher). It was basically wasting a full goddamned minute on a single target when I could easily kill 15 or more on my own in that same time frame. I refuse to believe there's anyone who would actually be playing a two-bit Ace Combat clone when they're that bad at flight sims that they need the game itself to hold their hand to get them to hit their target rather than the building they're hiding behind. Psion posted:AH's dogfight mode is fine in multiplayer, a statement I've made before and will make again, because it's true. This is really a much better way to say what my problem with DFM was. The devs originally said Dogfight Mode was optional, didn't they? Well... they're half-right at best. I mean, it is technically optional, but that's in the same manner that your missiles and special weapons are "optional". Have fun trying to kill anything with them when even the basic MiG-21s suddenly have an endless supply of flares.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:17
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Kal-L posted:If you're referring to the EMP that affected their avionics, then I dunno. I think some planes have back-up systems for exactly this kind of thing, but I don't know much about it. This is a discussion I've seen pop up in other places regarding this mission. The thing about Strangereal is that nukes exist, but nuclear proliferation doesn't - I think this is the first in-universe detonation of a nuclear device outside of testing. This is a world where even unnamed terrorist groups can get their hands on enough air vehicles to rival a real-world superpower's air force; given that it descends into large-scale armed conflict every five years or so, nukes existing in similarly-exaggerated numbers would very quickly turn it into Fallout multiple times over sooner than it would be the grand stage for ace pilots to perform. (as a note on older stuff I love Pixy's mention of air superiority in the intro to mission 3, the way he puts it makes it sound like a state of mind rather than a result of a mission and it's just so silly) So then why are the planes built to survive distant nuclear explosions like in the real world? How did Cipher, Pixy, Crow team and the remaining Belkan planes survive the nuke with nothing more than slightly-fuzzy HUD and communications? As for the mission itself, there's not a whole lot of differences other than, you guessed it, dialogue. The primary thing is Crow 1 teasing PJ at the start; as a Mercenary he asks if PJ and his girlfriend are getting re-married (PJ protests they're both getting married for the first time), and as a Soldier he asks if PJ's current girlfriend is his first (PJ claims he had one in high school). The interesting thing is that some dialogue once you're actually in the thick of things changes, too; where Eagle Eye told you not to hold back in the video, as a Soldier he instead advises you to ignore the fighters and focus on the bombers. As a Merc I can't exactly remember what changes, even though I had just replayed that version of the mission a couple hours before the video went up, I double-checked with someone else's videos but the only thing I saw different was a line I'm pretty sure is in every version (where PJ asks Eagle Eye to confirm which bomber is carrying a nuke, and Eagle Eye says you'll just have to destroy them all). Also, one thing that didn't get brought up in the video for obvious reasons is that none of the planes left over from the first half of the mission de-spawn for the second. They do, however, turn into yellow targets if they weren't already one. It's a good way to shift your ace style in one direction or the other while still making money by taking them out first thing or waiting until after you've hit the bombers. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 01:46
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