A-10 Attack!
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MacPack Sneak Attack
(1997)
Description
A-10 Attack! is an air combat flight simulator. The game features the A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft, affectionately known as the "Warthog," with a very comprehensive and realistic flight model for its day.
In addition to a detailed cockpit and fast 3D polygonal graphics, A-10 Attack! features a map overview where the player can command a small squadron of aircraft including F-16's, F-15's, and C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft. The scenario is a fictional invasion of West Germany by Soviet forces and because of that the actual combat missions take place over Germany (the training missions are set in a desert arena).
A wide variety of weapons are available for air-air and air-ground combat, including Sidewinder, Hellfire, Maverick and HARM missiles and free-fall, laser-guided and cluster bombs. Created by Eric Parker, writer of Hellcats Over the Pacific, the game offered features never previously seen in air combat simulations for the Macintosh.
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Credits (Macintosh version)
13 People (10 developers, 3 thanks)
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 80% (based on 3 ratings)
Players
Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 4 ratings with 1 reviews)
Excellent, but late to the market
The Good
A-10 is the natural follow-on to Parsoft's earlier Hellcats. Hellcats was graphically amazing, but lacked realistic flight controls and had a hard-coded missions system. A-10 addressed these issues, building what was at that time by far the most realistic flight dynamics system, including solid-body modelling, and combining that with the "VBE" system for plug-in objects and missions.
If you measure A-10 in comparison with Hellcats it is a major success; it fixed the problems in the original producing a simulator that was very realistic while still being easy and fun to fly. But A-10 was also late, by about a year. By the time it was released in 1995, the PC market had surpassed its flat-shaded graphics and it looked very dated. On top of this, the release was so delayed that Apple released their PowerMac machines, and A-10 was dog-slow, leading to yet more delays while this was addressed. On top of all that, the promise of the VBE system was left hanging by the company's failure to release any of its details.
What might have been one of "the greats" was thus forever flawed by its release, and it never had the chance to really shine.
The Bad
The only major problem with A-10 was its lack of missions, as was the case in Hellcats before it. If you were used to something like Red Barron with it's hundreds of missions, A-10 is a serious disappointment.
The Bottom Line
A technical tour-de-force marred by creeping featuritis.
Macintosh · by Maury Markowitz (266) · 2018
Trivia
A-10 Cuba!
Version 1.5 can also play the missions bundled with A-10 Cuba!
Development
Eric Parker originally developed A-10 Attack! on a Silicon Graphics Indigo workstation with a MIPS R4000 CPU. It took him weeks to convert the floating-point math operations to fixed-point for speedy execution on Motorola 68k and Intel x86 machines.
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A-10 Attack! on Wikipedia
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by SiliconClassics.
Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.
Game added August 5, 2007. Last modified January 23, 2024.