Video Game-A-Day #24: F-19 Stealth Fighter (PC)

[bratwurst]

The 3rd in the Sid Meier series...

Game:

You must be registered for see images

Genre: Combat Flight Simulation
Platform: PC
Released: 1988

From MobyGames.com
Rule the night! Take the pride of American Stealth technology and take on the best the Warsaw pact technology can offer! Dodge between radars, sneak under enemy fighters, and take out your primary objectives and secondary objectives with your limited weapons onboard, then make your way home. Can you survive all the way to general and win the Congressional Medal of Honor?

From CivFanatics.com
A minority of vocal hard-core flight sim fanatics will try to convince you that anything prior to Falcon 3.0 is closer to a jazzed-up arcade experience than a true simulation. How ironic it is, then, that MicroProse's later F-117A flight sim hasn't held up nearly as well as F-19 Stealth Fighter, which was published before the government's announcement of the real-life F-117 stealth fighter. As with his later Red Storm Rising, Sid Meier showed in F-19 Stealth Fighter that he could make a simulation - using declassified data augmented with a sound physics model and some shrewd guesswork - that was accurate enough to please the enthusiast and a great enough game to make flight sim fans out of everyone else.

F-19 Stealth Fighter hearkens to an earlier age when a 1MB PC (notably the Amiga) was the hottest gaming machine on the market, and though its gloss is somewhat faded now when compared with more recent Gouraud-shaded simulators, F-19 Stealth Fighter still offers one thrilling ride.
Although the F-19 was adequately armed (free-fall and guided bombs, Vulcan 20mm cannon, and over a half-dozen missile types for land, sea, and/or air), the electronic profile and stealth elements were so well done that it was often more fun to avoid a dogfight than to engage in one.

So, even considering the holes in the simulation - keep in mind that the real stealth fighter wasn't yet built - the game took on the nature of a "thinking man's sim," a real departure from the reflex-heavy simulators of the time. The missions in particular were especially well-designed, as they involved sneaking around through a variety of enemy defenses. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the game was how surprisingly similar it was to actual Desert Storm sorties years later.

I had a friend in middle school who had this game, it was before I had a computer at home. Every time I went over to his house I pretty much ended up flying some missions. The graphics weren't all that great, although better than anything you would get on the NES (anyone play Top Gun on the Nintendo?), but the depth of the gameplay was amazing. You could make your own fictional pilot and run through a career. We'd come up with stupid names "Lieutenant I.P. Freely" I think was my pilot. Wow 7th grade was fun times.

There were missions in Libya, remember this was a little after the whole bombing of Qaddafi thing, Iraq, and Europe if you imagine the cold war just turned hot in Germany. Kind of crazy, that back in 88 we were already bombing Baghdad, if only virtually.

This was also the first game I ever noticed copy protection on. When the game launched, you had to identify a plane (see screenshot below) which were all in the manual. of course, my friend didn't have the manual so we quickly learned a lot of planes.

Easily, even with the crappy graphics compared to today, the most fun I've ever had with a flight sim game. It doesn't have to be ultra realistic to be fun as hell.

Screenshots:

Title screen:

You must be registered for see images

Copy protection:

You must be registered for see images

Briefing for Libyan mission:

You must be registered for see images

Arming your plane:

You must be registered for see images

On the tarmac, ready to take off:

You must be registered for see images

This game also had external cameras, so you could see your plane flying, and also a "missile cam" that was really cool where you could watch your missile fly to and then hopefully hit the target. I couldn't find any screens of that.

Download the game here, might need dosbox or something to run at the proper speed:http://www.the-underdogs.info/downloadfile.php?file=games/f/f19/files/f19.zip&id=2229

 

[Ryanwb]

I ran this on my Pentium 60 MHZ PC and it was blazing!

 

[boisesuns]

This game was awesome.

 

[CardinalLaw]

I hated the aircraft identification thing. I lost the book, and that was the end of it.

Good game though.