Chuck Yeager's Air Combat

Moby ID: 108
DOS Specs

Description official description

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is a flight combat simulation. Fight over 50 missions with Chuck Yeager's advice on your side. You can use the mission builder to create your own missions if the history-based missions don't offer enough challenge. Replay modes let you fast forward and rewind through a recorded battle, including a 3-D "cube" visualization that helps analyze what happened.

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Credits (DOS version)

21 People

Lead Design
Lead Programming
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Music
Sound
Art Director
Documentation
Producer
Project Manager
Technical Director
Writing / Dialogue / Story
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Package Design
  • Zimmerman Crowe Design
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Manual Color Illustrations
Additional Illustrations

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 12 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 35 ratings with 5 reviews)

A classic in every sense of the word.

The Good
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat managed to squeeze an awful lot onto a few 5 1/4" floppy disks. It offered six flyable fighter planes, one from each side of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It made excellent use of a 256 color palette, with beautifully drawn cockpits and menus. It also made good use of audio, offering MIDI music and digitized sound through the relatively new 8-bit sound boards of the day. As the main menu loaded, Chuck Yeager's voice would greet you, and he provided pithy commentary at the close of each mission. For those who remember PC gaming back in 1991, this was all quite impressive.

The 52 prepackaged missions, which are based on actual historical engagements, are plentiful and varied. Though there is no real campaign mode, each war offers over a dozen discrete missions with diverse objectives: escorting friendlies, intercepting bombers, attacking airbases, combat air patrol, and so on. The player can also design his own rudimentary engagements, pitting any flyable plane against up to five of any other. Trying to take down a few F-4 Phantoms in an FW-190 is more than challenging!

In the air, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat offered a believable and nuanced flying experience. Planes climbed and turned at a realistic rate, speed and altitude significantly affected maneuverability, and combat damage was nicely implemented. Flying too fast could destroy your plane, while flying too slow would cause a stall (accompanied by a remarkably flatulent sound effect). Excessive G-forces caused blackouts and redouts. Pop-up windows offered useful information, like a graphical view of the flight envelope and helpful hints by Chuck Yeager. And enemy A.I. was competent, offering a challenge regardless of any performance advantages of your fighter.

Graphically, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat was by no means innovative, but it was reasonably attractive. Both the 2D menu illustrations and 3D game environments were colorful and nicely detailed. Gameplay graphics, though composed almost entirely of boxy flat-shaded polygons, offered nice touches like semi-transparent clouds and smoke, bitmapped explosions, and a wide variety of camera angles. Terrain was punctuated with hills, fields, buildings, and rivers. Missions could be recorded and saved for playback on a VCR-style replay system. And everything was coded efficiently enough to be playable on a modest 286 with 640KB of memory.

The game box contained a very nice spiral-bound manual that provided step-by-step introduction on the principles of flight, some historical background for the various conflicts and theatres, and full-color schematic illustrations of the flyable airplanes. As a bonus, the box also included a companion VHS tape called “Air Combat” which featured Chuck Yeager relating his experiences as a fighter pilot. The game's informational content alone justified its price tag.

But perhaps the best thing about Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is that in 2009, nearly twenty years after its release, it is still heaps of fun to play. In an era of high-resolution textured graphics and ultra-realistic flight models, its diagrammatic simplicity, cheeky presentation, and engaging gameplay offer a unique and memorable experience that will probably never be duplicated.

The Bad
A common grievance leveled against the PC version of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is the omission of multiplayer capability, which for some reason was only offered in the Macintosh version. With such engaging gameplay, it's a shame the sim didn't give friends a chance to blow each other out of the sky, though in its defense, networking was hardly a standard feature on personal computers in the early 1990’s. The game also lacks a mission builder, limiting its replayability since a devoted player could probably master all of the pre-packaged missions in just a few days.

Though air combat is set in three different geographical locations, no effort was made to graphically differentiate the game environments. Whether you're flying over Western Europe, Korea, or Vietnam, you're always staring at the same flat green landscape dotted with occasional hills and fields. There are no large bodies of water, the weather is always sunny, and the time of day never changes.

Realism fans might decry the generous quantities of cannon ammunition supplied with each plane, the lack of rudder controls, or the fact that planes seem to move in slow-motion (apparently because they were scaled-up by the game engine to increase visibility). There are also no enemy SAM or AAA sites to contend with - though they do appear on the ground, they are completely inactive. The cockpits, while attractive, don't provide very informative gauges, which are little more than black circles with red needles, thus forcing the player to resort to using an unrealistic full-screen HUD to see his actual airspeed and altitude.

The Bottom Line
As an air combat simulator, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat achieved a rare feat: it offered a compelling mix of realism, accessibility, and fun. For many proto-enthusiasts of the genre, myself included, it was a great introduction to what would become a lifelong hobby, and nearly twenty years after its introduction, it stands apart as one of the most memorable and enjoyable combat sims ever made.

DOS · by SiliconClassics (848) · 2009

If you can get past the plain vga graphics, this game is still a lot of fun 8 years later.

The Good
Everything. The action is fast-paced, and if you turn up the AI, the computer can really put up a good fight. Runs fine on a 286!

The Bad
Not much, looking at it now, the vga graphics and midi music are a little dull compared with what we have almost ten years later.

The Bottom Line
Great gamplay that runs on almost any machine.

DOS · by Aquaman (53) · 1999

One of the most perfect air-combat sims ever made.

The Good
CYAC is about air combat, pure and simple. You can quickly design your own missions to fly, or jump into over 50 historically-accurate missions across three war periods (WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), some of which were recounted by Chuck Yeager himself.

The handling of the planes is perhaps why CYAC is still played by die-hard sim fans today--it's accurate. Not perfect-down-to-the-last-detail accurate, but most planes just feel right. So "right", in fact, that your success at achieving certain mission objectives depends on knowing what you plane can and cannot do. (Not only are each plane's specifications listed in the manual, but you can bring up a window with a real-time flight envelope to see how and why your maneuvers are stressing the plane!)

Unlike most celebrity endorsements that are shamelessly used to sell a product, Chuck Yeager worked closely with the designers to make the simulation more accurate. His experience in actually flying all of the planes contributed to how they feel in flight and combat, and also helped design certain aspects of the simulation itself (the addition of clouds, for example, was something Chuck insisted on, since they can be used to a tactical advantage).

Speaking of which, the simulation was very well coded: Brent Iverson's graphics routines are extremely well-optimized. The game is perfectly playable on a 286 with VGA, and is mostly playable on an 8088 if the details settings are turned down. The 3D plane models are simple enough to be drawn quickly, but complex enough that they don't look like flying bricks. In addition, there is a VCR-like replay feature that lets you not only replay several minutes of action and save/load them to/from disk, but you can change the camera angle/zoom/viewpoint. For example, you can switch to the enemy's point of view during playback to see how he snuck up on you!

Finally, the documentation that comes with CYAC is exquisitly detailed, with over 150 pages of full-color plates, quick tutorials on air combat maneuvers, a quick-start that shows you the basics, and a full history of war in the sky. The manual significantly adds to the game's value.

The Bad
There are only two things wrong with CYAC: weak campaigns, and no multiplayer support. The lack of multiplayer support is a real shame, since not only does CYAC provide a great vehicle (no pun intended) for dogfights, but the Macintosh port does support multiplayer, even over a network! Come on, Brent, what happened?

The Bottom Line
Even today, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat has one of the best "feels" of any combat sim. Since it runs perfectly on any speed machine, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl.

Let's put it another way: I was not a fan of flight combat simulations until I played Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. I think that says it all.

DOS · by Trixter (8952) · 1999

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Cancelled Amiga version

The planned Amiga version was never completed, although Birds of Prey (also from Electronic Arts) did many of the same things on that system the same year.

OEM version

A special edition was bundled with the Gravis UltraSound in 1993. This version featured a whole new soundtrack intended to show off the capabilities of this sound card. The music used custom samples instead of the standard MIDI instrument set.

Speech

The starts with a digitized message from Chuck saying "Welcome to Chuck Yeager's Air Combat". There are other digitized lines by him such as: "Remember, it's the man - not the machine" which are played after a mission and give feedback about the completion and success rate.

But hidden in the game are some other digitized snippets from the actual game designers, such as:

"Welcome to Brent Iverson's Air Combat"

"Welcome to Paul Grace's Air Combat"

"Welcome to Cynthia Hamilton's Air Combat"

"Hi mom!"

"Oh my." (Spoken by Chuck Yeager)

These snippets were found by decompressing the sound library and picking at it. It is unknown if here is a legitimate way to get the sounds to play, however, such as starting up the game on someone's birthday, or a holiday.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue).- #35 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list

Information also contributed by Fire Convoy, Martin Smith, Olivier Masse and PCGamer77

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  • MobyGames ID: 108
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Macintosh added by SiliconClassics.

Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.

Game added May 5, 1999. Last modified March 4, 2024.