64 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
64 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
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FIRST OVER GERMANY
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In FIRST OVER GERMANY (FOG), you command a B-17, the famous "flying fortress"
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bomber of World War II. The game offers several training missions, starting with
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gunnery practice and formation flying, and ending with a transatlantic flight to
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England. Once in England, you and your crew will perform 25 combat missions, all
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taken from the actual missions of the 306th Bomber Group. (This review is based
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on the IBM-PC version.)
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FOG is without a doubt the crudest simulation of flight in a commercial game
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today. The only "three-dimensional views" in the game are those that depict
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attacking aircraft, and they're laughably reminiscent of simple home arcade
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games of 10 years ago. The most common screen display is an overhead view of the
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B-17 or B-17 formation above an ugly approximation of the local terrain.
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While FOG does support EGA graphics, the images are so poorly drawn, and the
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color choices so terrible, that you'll suspect you're playing in CGA mode. For
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example, most land appears as solid yellow, dotted with sporadic black V's --
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perhaps to represent wheat fields? The sound quality is awful as well,
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consisting of a constant engine drone, an occasional warning tone, and a muted
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"brat" when you fire on enemy planes.
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The action itself is terribly dull and mechanical. The bombing missions, though
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directed at different targets, share a monotonous similarity. On each mission,
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you take off, join formation, fly to the target, shoot at enemy fighters, bomb
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the target, return to base, and land.
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Shooting at attacking planes is particularly frustrating. First you must select
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which of the flying fortress's seven machine gun positions you'll use. Should
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you select a position from which you can't see the plane, or should the chosen
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gun be out of commission, you're out of luck: The fighter gets a free attack.
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(Apparently, the rest of the crew is asleep.)
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Fortunately, selecting a gun from the attack angle (i.e., 9 o'clock high)
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becomes fairly automatic after a while. On any of the guns, though, the
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crosshairs move incredibly slowly, eliminating player skill entirely. Either
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it's very easy to line up the gun before the fighter attacks, or it's
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impossible. Most of the time, your fire will have no effect, even if it's
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perfectly on target. While this is fairly realistic (since the B-17s relied for
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protection more on massed formation firepower than individual gunnery skill), it
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makes for a terrible game.
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Flight isn't much better. Without the cockpit views of other flight games,
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flying degenerates into watching your current X,Y position, heading, and
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altitude. Bombing is largely a matter of waiting for the bombsight to read 0,0
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and hoping the flak doesn't blow you out of the air. Landing is the only
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difficult part, since 70 MPH crosswinds seem to be common at the airbase. Of
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course, they only apply to the approach, not the actual landing.
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The IBM version of FOG relies on an off-disk protection scheme that's invoked
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only once per game. The program requires DOS 2.0 or higher and 384K of RAM. It
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supports CGA or EGA graphics adaptors, but no sound cards. My copy of the game
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was supplied on 5-1/4" disks; there was no indication that 3-1/2" disks are
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available.
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In short, FIRST OVER GERMANY lacks excitement, and asks for no hard decisions
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or arcade skill. Not recommended.
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FIRST OVER GERMANY is published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. and distributed
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by Electronic Arts.
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*****DOWNLOADED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253
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