Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!noao!mcdsun!sunburn!gtx!edge!doug
From: doug@edge.UUCP (Doug Pardee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: Request for game reviews/comments
Message-ID: <1007@edge.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 87 22:55:08 GMT
References: <1001@edge.UUCP> <475@nuchat.UUCP>
Organization: Edge Computer Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ
Lines: 157
Summary: GUNSHIP -- Initial Impressions

I asked for reviews/comments on helicopter simulations, and you guys all
recommended I get Gunship, so I did.  It is indeed an excellent game.  It
lives up to my expectations (and is well worth the $24 I paid for it),
but it's not *quite* as perfect as I'd heard :-)

Here are my initial impressions.  This being Christmas-time and all, I'm
going to play Grinch and concentrate on what appear to be flaws.

>There's real terrain to look at (and fly into) including hills, rivers, roads
>and buildings, displayed in clean-looking 3D line-graphics. (No solid shapes.) 

I think that the hills are the big advancement compared to previous C64
"flat earth" flight simulators.  They do stick up, and they do block your
vision.  (And more usefully, the enemy's ability to see you).  Although the
hills appear at first to be line-graphics (they're the same color as the
ground), when they stick up above the horizon they can be seen to be fully
colored in.  Also the other objects which are obviously line-graphics don't
block your vision (they seem transparent).

The graphics aren't nearly as slow as Flight Simulator II, but on the other
hand they're not "so quick you don't notice them updating".  I would say
that they're right on the edge of the "acceptable" range for a game which
requires this much hand/eye coordination.

What is more disturbing is that it appears that the joystick is only read
once during each update, which means that the speed at which the chopper
reacts varies depending on how fast the image can be updated.

Overall, the graphics speed is not perfect, or even great, but I still would
rate it as acceptable.

There are a couple of quirks of the simulation that I can't believe that the
real chopper pilots put up with.  One is that every time the automatic
targetting system loses track of a target, it shuts down.  You have to turn
it back on again when that target (or another one) is trackable.  When you're 
sneaking up on an Anti-Aircraft position at low altitude, it's really a pain
to have to keep punching the targeting back on every time it loses the target
for an instant.

Another is that the Inertial Navigation System does not provide a readout of
the distance to the destination.  This can be gotten around by looking at
the map and guesstimating by eyeball, but I think it's a technical oversight.

>This simulation comes with an excellent 84-page manual, complete with diagrams
>and hints.  There are sections on avionics, so you can understand the how and
>the why of things -- not just that it is so.

Ah, the manual.  How do I put this...  the usual documentation that one gets
with a game program is so awful that Gunship's manual looks like paradise.
But it still isn't perfect.

First off, the cover smears.  Practice safe reading; wear a condom on each
finger :-)   Okay, no big deal, but my manual looked positively yucky before
I'd even loaded the program for the first time.

In a less frivolous vein, the manual has a big weak spot: data you need for
flight planning.  If your mission occurs during a heat wave, you can't just
load the chopper up with everything in sight; you've got to be selective if
you want to get off the ground.  But the manual doesn't tell you how much
the various items weigh.  You have to experiment, and just to make things
more difficult you aren't allowed to overload even momentarily during the
ordnance selection phase.  So you have to play around offloading stuff, and
then adding stuff back on, and repeat until you've got a usable balance.  It
doesn't help that offloading and reloading fuel or cannon rounds is a slow
process.  It didn't take me long to decide to make up my own chart showing
how much each item weighs.

Oh, be sure to make a note of your selection, because when you stop land to
refuel you'll have to set up your armament choices all over again.

Another flight-planning shortcoming: nowhere does the manual say how fast the
chopper burns fuel.  That turns out to be important; it's somewhere between
20-25 gallons per minute, and since your tanks hold only 376 gallons your
flights are limited to about 15 minutes each.  Another reason it's important
is that I've found the fuel gauges to be easily damaged in combat, and I want
to be able to continue fighting until my watch says the fuel is running low.

A really big problem: the description of the map isn't anything like what
you see on the screen.  Apparently the description is for one of the other
computers (the manual is a one-size-fits-all for C-64, Apple, Atari ST,
Amiga, and PC).  This makes things rough in the beginning; the book says
your gunnery range targets are an enemy base, enemy depot, and enemy HQ.
Good luck finding them on the map.  I finally figured out the enemy HQ;
the symbol matched but the color was wrong.  With a lot of experience I
can now recognize most of the map symbols, including all of the important
ones.  (It doesn't help that I'm using a TV, not a monitor, so I get some
color smearing in critical places).

Oh, remember I was complaining about having to guesstimate the distance to
your destination by eyeballing the map?  Well, the manual doesn't tell you
what the scale on the map is.  You get to figure that out for yourself too.

Another shortcoming becomes apparent once you've gotten out of training and
gone to a war zone.  Many of the mission descriptions leave you scratching
your head, and the manual doesn't mention them at all.  Sure, anyone can
figure out "Destroy enemy depot at map coordinates 8,3."  But what do you
do with "Clear LZ at 5,2" or "Support friendly base at 4,7"?  You go out,
you destroy everything in sight, and still don't get a Mission Completed
message.  You refuel, make another trip out to the area, spend 15 minutes
flying around finding nothing to blast, and *still* no Mission Completed.
Frustrating.

It turns out that in the SouthEast Asia war zone -- the usual choice for a
first tour -- enemy targets are often difficult to find (that *is* mentioned
in the manual).  After you've *found* and destroyed everything in the area
(*and* for some distance around), then you'll get your Mission Completed
message.  It would have helped a lot to be told that I was on the right
track, to just hang in there and keep looking, maybe over a wider area.

The bottom line of this is that the beginner is left wondering where he's
supposed to go, how far away it is, what he's supposed to do when he gets
there, how much time he's got to do it in, and how much of which weapons
he can take.  Once you've got some experience, it's no problem (but then,
manuals are *supposed* to be mainly for the beginners, no?)

>There's a blindingly fast quick-loader employed to boot _Gunship_, and I'm
>happy to report that it seems to work equally well on 1541 clones.

I wouldn't call it "blindingly fast"; it looks like a garden variety double-
speed quick-loader to me.  Unfortunately, the quick-loader apparently has a
very simplistic error-recovery algorithm: retry until it works or until Hell
freezes over, whichever comes first.  And it's apparently based on some kind
of checksum in the data; it reads in a bunch of stuff and then rereads the
whole file if it failed.  After I'd watched it load and load and load and
load for almost 10 minutes, I finally caught on that something was wrong.

Obvious guess: drive alignment (my 1541 has given me fits about alignment
on a regular basis for over 5 years).  But there were none of the usual
symptoms -- no flashing light, no clickety-click as the drive tries coming
at the track from the opposite direction, no head-banging as the drive
makes sure it's got the correct track.  Just the steady red light, and the
drive going click-click-click-click as it stepped from track to track, and
an occasional whirrrr as the head moved to a new spot.  All normal!

So I pulled out my most hard-to-load diskettes, and one by one they all
loaded without trouble.  As Murphy's Law dictates, on the very last one I
got a solid failure to load, and set about to align the drive yet again.

I usually align the drive to match the most recent troublemaker, since
that's usually the disk I'll be using a lot right away.  Guess what?  The
Gunship disk's copy protection is such that the 1541's DOS can't read it
at all.  So I had to align to the one disk I had that did fail to load.

The anticlimax is that I can now load Gunship without trouble.  But I'll
be keeping an ear out for anything that sounds like repeated reads.

Oh, and speaking of the copy protection.  Chris Lishka noted that you can
get a backup diskette from MicroProse for $10.  Unfortunately, the order
form is part of the registration card.  I don't know if you can actually
go back and order one later if your disk dies.  Sounds to me like they're
"selling insurance".

All of the above notwithstanding, it's still a *great* game and I would
definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested.
-- 
Doug Pardee -- Edge Computer Corp., Scottsdale, AZ -- uunet!ism780c!edge!doug,
{ames,hplabs,sun,amdahl,ihnp4,allegra}!oliveb!edge!doug,    mot!edge!doug