F29 Retaliator

The Good
This was the first full-priced I ever bought, so excuse me if I wax a little lyrical.

F29 boasted impressive graphics -- nice, fast, solid 3D -- with (for the time) well-defined models and good cockpit graphics. The battlezones were just as detailed (down to the palm trees in the Pacific!).

Two planes were provided -- the F-22 and the F-29 -- which could carry a wide variety of modern weapons, including some really fun ones to use, like the AGM-109H cruise missile and (my fave) the AIM-9X Backwinder, which was a nasty surprise for any MiGs on your tail!

The arcade flight model made it very easy to get into, and the missions got progressively harder, but not impossibly so -- a gentle learning curve. The aircraft handled well, and it was relatively easy to fight the enemy.

Each campaign (Middle East, Pacific and Europe) had a large number of preset missions, and you would have to complete a certain number to get the next "War Update" (the next set of missions). There was also a set of 10 training missions set in the Arizona desert.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the game's simplicity was also one of its biggest weaknesses.

Both planes handled exactly the same, and could carry the same amount of weaponry, so the only difference between them was in what your plane looked like from the outside!

The weapons didn't behave anywhere near like they were described in the manual. The cruise missile couldn't be fired from its maximum range (370 miles): you just got the target in sight (about 10 miles), pointed the crosshairs and fired. Most of the air-to-ground weapons were fired in a similar fashion, and the air-to-air missiles were little better.

The manual was incomplete and poorly written and/or proofread (something the team would repeat with Epic).

Finally, the bugs: there were plenty of them, though they were ironed out in later releases. There weren't any horrendous "bring-the-game-to-a-crashing-halt" bugs, they were mostly annoying ones (like the "why-didn't-my-cruise-missile-dent-their-battleship?" one).

All-in-all the game felt like it was rushed out the door without being properly polished (not that that's unusual these days).

The Bottom Line
A quick, easy-to-learn, easy-to-play arcadey flight sim that's a good introduction to the genre. Prettier than Interceptor, and a heck of a lot of fun.

The Good
I remember it was very fun firing tons and tons of AMRAAM missiles at enemy planes. Limiting the missile supply seemed to make things a lot harder. The basic dogfighting was very entertaining back then - though I'm sure it will seem too dated to hold up to flight simulators of today.

The Bad
The old 3D graphics made it difficult to understand what was going on sometimes. Though the dogfights were fun, it wasn't a very deep game beyond that. Back in its day, it could be seen as a very complex simulation of jet flight (compare it with galaga) - but today, it is hardly worth playing, since its value was largely in its level of realism (which has been far, far eclipsed)

The Bottom Line
It's an old flight simulator game that employed futuristic jets with smart missiles. You can get into dog fights with enemy jets and fire at the ground. The graphics will look remarkably blocky to someone looking back at it these days. I'd play it again for the sake of nostalgia, but I can't see why anyone who hadn't played as a kid would feel inclined to start playing it now.

The Good
This game really has one of the most beautiful soundtracks I've ever heard in a game from the pre-digitized sound era, almost as good as in Wing Commander. Even if the game is not too realistic it is pretty fun to play. The graphics are all right, and the airplanes are easy to control - a little too easy perhaps. But they put some reality in it, such as if you turn too fast you end up unconscious, flying around with the gears down damages them and such.. You have two airplanes to choose from, a fictional F-22, fictional in the sense that the real F-22 looks nothing like the one in the game, and the F-29, an interesting airplane that in reality - at least as far as I know - is nothing but an experiment plane, named X-29.

The Bad
Not much, really. There are some bugs in it. Some times the sound doesn't work until you enter the multiplayer menu, press F7 and go back to the main menu, you can hit things you thought you where pretty far away from, and sometimes the gears and flaps gets damaged directly after take-off.

The mission areas are also far too small, it takes less than a minute to fly from one end of it to the other.

Apart from that and the bugs I really can't think of anything I dislike in the game.

The Bottom Line
A fun, but buggy, arcade flight simulator with two airplanes - the F22 and the F29, and four scenario areas (US desert test and training sites, pacific conflict, middle east conflict and a european war) each with several missions. It also has wonderful music (only played during the menus though, nothing in-game), and good sound effects.

A pretty good game for it's time - and still worth playing. I'd even recommend buying it if you ever see it in a shop!