šŸ³ Moby v2024.04.07

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.

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

21 People

Lead Design
Lead Programming
Programming
Graphics / Artwork
Music
Sound
Art Director
Documentation
Producer
Project Manager
Technical Director
Writing / Dialogue / Story
Playtesting
Quality Assurance
Package Design
  • Zimmerman Crowe Design
Package Illustration
Documentation Layout
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 Yeagerā€™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 ā€œAir Combatā€ 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 1990ā€™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

My definition of "early air combat game".

The Good
I'm a huge fan of air combat games and flight simulators - as I am training to be a pilot (hobby, not career) and I can safely say that this is a brilliant game. The main aspect of its brilliance is the sheer customizability included. You can make your own missions with a large amount of different parameters, aircraft, etc. Also the historical missions are very good and definitely make a great attempt to capture Chuck Yeager's experiences with help from the man himself; which brings me onto the fact that the game has accurate physics, due to Yeager's input on the subject.

The Bad
What I didn't like were the graphics - OK, this is a 1991 game, but still not a huge fan of the blocky textureless planes we have and I also find the sound to be quite depressing - Either internal PC speaker drones which are arguably BETTER than the sound blaster racket that you could get. Also would like there to be more planes - half of the aircraft you see in Chuck Yeager's Air Combat are not playable!

The Bottom Line
Good game for its time and this is my definition of "early air combat game" - It paved the ground for all the upcoming games based on this genre, and is still a great game to experience now, 15 years later! Get it!

DOS · by Quackbal (45) · 2006

This Game Rocked!!

The Good
This was the first flight sim I ever played. It was the thing that got me intrested in flight. I had just got my first computer a Pentium 75 8mb of ram and a SIS video card. I played that game so much the floppy i had it on broke. I got to say it was one of the best flight sims I have ever played, not because of the accuracy but because it was fun. I also liked hot it had lots of the WWII fighters you all know and love I was a little disapointed by not getting the opratunity to fly the P38 though. The missions made you feel like an air borne rambo a one man army.

The Bad
Nothing except the graphics.

The Bottom Line
I would describe it to others as a trainer for other flight sims.

DOS · by Arlo Mabary (1) · 2001

[ 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 ā€œ150 Best Games of All Timeā€ list

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

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator
Released 1987 on DOS, Commodore 64, Apple II...
Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0
Released 1989 on DOS, 1990 on Amiga, Atari ST
Air Combat
Released 1995 on PlayStation, 2005 on BREW
Air Combat
Released 1976 on Arcade
Air Combat
Released 1993 on Arcade
Air to Air Combat
Released 1992 on Atari ST
Chuck Rock
Released 1991 on Genesis, 1992 on SNES, 1993 on Game Boy...
Caveman Chuck
Released 2016 on iPhone, 2018 on Windows, 2020 on Nintendo Switch...

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 108
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

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.