Back to Baghdad

The Good
Back To Baghdad (B2B) is a military F-16C sim made by MSI in 1996 as a 'Hard-core' alternative to the selection of flight sims that were around at the time and it was ahead of its time seeing as Falcon 4.0 wasn't released until a year later. As the name implies, B2B takes place in an alternate story where the Gulf War was won, but somehow Saddam is back in power. So you go "Back To Baghdad" to take him out.

B2B models the F-16C's avionics and flight model really well. Somewhat comparable to, say, Falcon 4.0's FM as it also models drag and weight depending on what your F-16 is carrying. The avionics are also modeled really well, again being ahead of Falcon 4.0 a year before its prime-time.

Graphically it's dated, yes, but at the time this was IMPRESSIVE to see in DOS, especially in the year Quake was released, as B2B had a large map to fly in and rendered the deserts of Baghdad as much as the Pentium could handle. All this in software mode WAY before 3dFX cards were the norm.

The Bad
However, as good as the gameplay of learning B2B's modeling of the Falcon is, it seems like MSI took the game out of the oven too soon. The game never really had much support (MSI was contracted out to a real military firm in 1997), so most bugs still exist in the game. A 1.03 patch was released but all it did was add 2 more missions and update the radar system modeling a bit. Missions are hard in B2B, like REALLY HARD at times, expecting you to do most of the missions yourself and only yourself (plus all the missions in B2B are not dynamic like Falcon 3.0, there was talk about a mission editor but it never came to the light of day). You do have wingmen but mostly they just follow you like a lost puppy and only fire upon enemies when they feel it's just to do so. You also cannot command them like in Falcon 3.0. It is strange that MSI never added commands to wingmen in B2B.

The manual that came with the game was good but it wasn't as large as Falcon 3.0's manual, as it only went into the basics rather than go into the nitty gritty. MSI did release a revised and extended version of the manual that came with B2B that was a hefty 200 pages, but it was released when the game was then overshadowed by the then new Falcon 4.0.

The Bottom Line
Back To Baghdad is definitely not a game you can jump in and play, it was marketed for the hard-core flight sim market for a reason. You need to know what the basics are to military flight sims in general to get a grasp of what B2B has to offer.

If you enjoyed Falcon 3.0, 4.0 or BMS and want to try out an obscure, rough yet underrated flight sim, B2B is definitely something to check out.

The Good
There's no doubt that the authors of this game were trying to give it a good shot. In theory they had a great idea - buy terrain imagery from one company, 3D models from another, the best of the best out there. And then just wrap that in a great engine, which they'd write, and off you go, slight simming perfection!

But they didn't actually do any of this.

Now some parts they got right. The graphics for the interior of the plane are excellent and wouldn't be matched until Falcon 4 shipped some time later. The realism of the cockpit was likewise modeled, complete with various radar modes, buttons that lit up, etc.

And indeed, they did manage to map out most of Iraq using sat imagry (hand colored I believe) to provide a reasonably realistic terrain to play in.

But that's all they got right. No really, everything else about this game was terrible.

The Bad
Let's start with the flight model, which they claimed was the best ever created on a PC.

It isn't. You can sum it up basically this way, "engine on? don't stall. engine off? crash". Takeoffs and landings? No problem, just point nose at ground, keep it pointed down… perfect three-point landing! The flight model is so painfully hard-wired that you aren't flying a plane at all, but a missile with a pilot. It's not so much that it's bad, but more like they didn't really have the first clue how to write one.

Then there were the weapons. Again, the reviews claimed that every weapon was carefully modelled and realistically simulated.

Hogwash. Try as I might I was never able to get the HARM to hit anything, and the instructions for using it appeared to be wrong. I even tried charging a SA-6 site once to get the damb things to lock on and hit, but it just flew off on a nice parabolic arc into the ground. Nice.

Meanwhile in the air-to-air portions of the game were just as bad. Here I am sitting in a plane with a 360 degree view of the world (thanks to AWACS sending me info) out to some unreasonable range, facing 1960's vintage MiG-21's which were still sitting on the ground when I flew towards them. Invariably the MiG's would take off, lock on, launch and start hitting me before I could get even an AMRAMM to pick them up. And of course their missiles never seemed to miss, while mine flew off in nice parabolic arcs into the ground.

And the vaunted terrain? Well I applaud them for trying, but they just didn't get it right. You could see the join marks in the terrain tiles for one thing. And I don't know, it just looked bad, largely featureless with these flat cities kind of floating in the middle of nowhere.

And then there's the manual. You could tell all they did was cut and paste lines from various text files they downloaded for the weapons descriptions. The text described things that didn't happen, didn't describe most of what did happen, and in fact most of what it said was just plain wrong. Details of how to use the radar, how to use the missiles, it was all just wrong.

Eventually they released a huge text file of errata. This one it appears they actually wrote themselves. Well guess what, it got all sorts of things wrong too! It finally described how to use the HARM, but I must have tried it a dozen times and it just never worked. I could never tell if the missile simply didn't work, or the manual was wrong. Eventually I gave up.

And to top it all off, this game has to be one of the most over-hyped since Outpost. The box, ad materials, reviews, everyone said that this was the more realistic flight sim ever made. It isn't, it's almost certainly the worst.

To put this all in perspective I'd like to quote a few reviews:

"Still, the manual is well written and to the point, giving you quick, informative descriptions of each function" - yeah, with the exception that the descriptions were WRONG!

"I tried many ways to describe how accurate and detailed this program was, and failed." - indeed, failed just like the program. And this reviewer should have known better.

It's the Outpost Effect all over again. A game that is so bad it's unplayable, but that mutates in the brains of the reviewers into meaning it must be good! Or maybe it was the ridiculous $99 price tag causing so much cognitive dissonance.

In any event, I heartily recommend this for the title of Worse Game EVAR.

The Bottom Line
Don't even bother, you have better things to waste your time on.