textfiles/games/REVIEWS/bluemax.rev

 BLUE MAX

 BLUE MAX, a World War I air combat game from Three-Sixty Pacific, tries to
cover a lot of different bases and misses the mark pretty badly on one of the
main elements: the air combat simulation used for Action Dogfights and
campaigns. The other two game modules might find a niche in the current market:
a two-player split-screen version of the dogfights and campaigns, and a
boardgame-style strategy game in which you plot your moves one at a time against
another player or the computer. Air combat simulation enthusiasts will want to
avoid BLUE MAX for reasons exlained below in the description of how the planes
fly. (This review is based on the IBM-PC version.)

 The game opens with a nicely designed sequence, including a digitized animation
loop from what looks like an old silent movie, in which a pilot (grinning like a
maniac) pulls the firing handle on his machine guns. At the main screens, you
set up the various options in the game. On the registration menu, you create a
pilot, determine his side in the game (Allied or Axis), his control device,
whether he uses "realistic " or "direct" flight, and whether bullets go where
the crosshair points, or have realistic trajectories requiring you to lead your
target.

 On other menus, you can set different levels of world or cockpit detail, and
choose sound and VCR recorder options. You can set weather options that will
give you wind or clouds.

 There are four planes for each side in BLUE MAX, and they can be selected from
a series of full-screen views showing a 256-color digitized bitmap of each
plane, with the performance specs. The German planes available are: Fokker Dr1
(Triplane), Albatross DIII, Fokker EIII (Eindekker monoplane), and Fokker DIII.
Allied planes are: Se5a, Sopwith Camel, Nieuport 17, and Spad SVII.

 Here's a breakdown of the available game modes:

 One-Player Games: Practice Flight -- just like it says, and you can't be
killed; Action Dogfight -- an unstructured air combat flight; Practice Strategy
-- a boardgame-style game against the computer; and Campaigns, a series of
Action Dogfights with different mission goals. There are three campaigns
available, each with a different scenery layout. You'll encounter an enemy ace
on campaign missions, and before each mission, there is a screen with
information about the ace and mission goals.

 Two-Player Games (Note: This is split-screen play on the same computer, with
each player using different controls; it's not a modem hookup): Cooperative
Dogfight -- where two players fly the same side in an unstructured air combat
flight; Action Dogfight -- the same, except going up against each other;
Strategy -- a boardgame-style game against another player; and Campaigns -- two
players flying the same or opposite sides in a series of missions within a
campaign format.

 The strategy game is described later; all the other modes rely on the Action
Dogfight as the main game element, with a smaller screen used for the
split-screen two-player modes. Here's how it works:

 What you see when you climb into the cockpit looks pretty good. The cockpit,
and view of the wings and tail, are nicely rendered in 256 colors (in VGA). Each
of the eight planes has a different cockpit and view of the wings and tail. In
the case of a plane like the Fokker EIII, this is really interesting, since it's
a small monoplane with an A-frame strut over the cockpit as an anchor for the
guy wires that support the wings. On the other hand, there are no functional
gauges or indicators in any of the cockpits; instead you see a small digital
readout of altitude, airspeed, and damage at the bottom of the screen.

 You can switch to an unusual "instrument panel" view that reduces your cockpit
view to a window in the top center area of the screen, and displays four
rectangular panels with various kinds of information beneath it. The reason this
screen looks strange is that the information panels and cockpit window are
borrowed from the two-player split-screen and Strategy game modules. However,
it's the only way to see the compass, fuel, and damage indicators. When you're
hit, you take a percentage reduction in one or several areas of your plane's
performance; for example, you might lose the ability to turn to the left.

 Ground detail is sparse, with a small number of polygons representing low
hills, a river, roads, and a few buildings. There are four very small maps in
the manual, with labels on the wrong pages and hard-to-read symbols. The "world"
you fly over is small, but there is a different arrangement of the standard
elements for each of the three campaigns.

 Wind can be set to one of two levels, or turned off, and it's more like
turbulence than wind: The view jumps around when it's turned on. Clouds are
interesting: They're 3-D solid polygons that you can fly into and be surrounded
by white until you emerge. It's a nice feature, but since they're solid 3-D
objects, it really slows down the frame rate if you keep them turned on.

 The simulation falls apart once you start flying. There may be some appeal in
using the "direct" flight mode as an arcade game, but for the most part, the
planes in BLUE MAX fly as if they were programmed by someone who has no
understanding of airplanes. To take the most extreme case (and all these
examples are in "realistic" flight mode), you can take any plane in BLUE MAX,
stand it on its tail, and go ballistic. That's straight up at roughly 1,000 ft.
every six seconds, for as long as you want -- pretty good for a WWI biplane.
With just a little nose elevation over the horizon, you can climb 1,000 ft. in
three seconds. This is better climb performance than a Lear Jet!

 When you dive, airspeed tops out at your plane's maximum speed in level flight,
no faster. There's a strong self-righting tendency if you bank and then let go
of the stick. Enemy planes will do evasive maneuvers in which they dance on
their tails and spiral forever upward; apparently they've never heard of a stall
either. The time it takes to close with an enemy plane is completely off: You
can swerve around, firing shots at a plane approaching head-on at close range,
for what seems like forever before he passes you. When you roll the plane one
way or the other, the axis for the roll isn't based on the plane's center of
gravity, but is instead located in the center of your forward view, which feels
very strange, like swinging on a pendulum, and makes the plane hard to control.

 These characteristics might make sense in an arcade game, but oddly, a few
realistic elements have been included, such as losing lift in turns, "realistic"
bullet trajectories (if that option is chosen), and collisions: Collide with an
enemy plane and you both go down.

 In two-player split-screen mode with flight realism set to "direct," BLUE MAX
works fairly well as an "action" or arcade game, although because the cockpit
window is reduced to a smaller size, it can be hard to make out details
regarding which way an enemy plane is facing. If one player uses a joystick or
mouse, the other player must use the keyboard. The game supports two players on
the keyboard, but not joystick plus mouse, and not two joysticks.

 The AdLib sound has good and bad qualities. The machine-gun fire and explosions
are very good; the engine sound is a little too much like a VW Beetle, but it's
not bad. There are some sound effects (such as getting hit by enemy fire, and
hearing planes zoom past) that have a science-fiction, "arcade-ish" quality.

 The strategy game is based on planning out a dogfight one step at a time, using
a hex map board and the two-player split-screen view. Each player sees a reduced
cockpit view in which you can look around in different directions while your
plane's position is frozen, and you can cycle through the information panels
described in the "instrument panel" view above. For movement, the cockpit view
is replaced by the hex map, and depending on your plane's limitations, you can
use up your moves turning or changing altitude. There's a time limit for moves,
beyond which the computer will move for you.

 When both players have programmed their moves, the computer will animate the
move, with the players watching on each of their screen's cockpit views. If one
sees an opportunity to fire while the planes are moving, he or she does so, and
the computer tallies the damage, applying it as a reduction to the plane's
performance for the next move.

 The BLUE MAX manual specifies an IBM PC with 512K of RAM as a minimum
requirement. For the "Action Dogfight," an AT-class machine would be better, but
the strategy game will work well on a slower machine. There is no copy
protection. Graphics supported are Hercules, CGA, EGA, and VGA. Sound support is
for AdLib and Sound Blaster. The game refused to run at all under QEMM, so I
booted from a clean DOS 4.01 floppy. At one point, the game crashed with a
"Memory exhausted: 2702" message (with 580K of RAM free at the DOS prompt), but
this only happened once.

 I feel that BLUE MAX has little to recommend it as a WWI air combat simulation,
and should only be considered if the two-player split-screen arcade dogfight or
strategy game appeals to you.

 BLUE MAX is published by Three-Sixty Pacific and distributed by Electronic
Arts.

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