Hey friends, welcome to this episode of Retro Dogfight! In this episode, Chase, Denny and I tackle something a little bit different. Back in 1997, Digital Image Design released F-22: Air Dominance Fighter, the much-anticipated follow-up to my personal favorite jet sim, EF2000. There was a bit of a hullabaloo at the time as this game shipped with static missions, whereas EF2000 had a lovely dynamic campaign. It did, however, lead to the lovely Total Air War, a year or so later.
Now, all that said, you can imagine our surprise when F-22: ADF, out of the blue, popped up on Steam a few months ago, published by none other than the new folks at MicroProse themselves. Furthermore, this wasn’t just some barely-emulated cash-grab like so many other classic releases. Oh nay nay. This was a fully reverse-engineered, modern Windows program, with new features like head tracking!
So, we have a unique situation here. Not only are we talking about a classic flight sim, but we’re also kind of treating this as a review of a current product, something we’ve not done before. I therefore hope you’ll enjoy this change of scenery, as it were, before we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Speaking of which, next time, as we’re no longer sticking to a chronological format, we’ll be tackling our favorite sims, starting with mine:
Which you can find on Steam and GOG.
Thank you so much for listening! We just love doing this, and we hope you’re enjoying it as much as we are. See you next time!
*Cover provided by MobyGames
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:49 — 45.2MB)
Good listen, though I have to interject on few things.
1. Base F-22 ADF (without RSO expansion) still had good chunk of campaign missions – along all the training sorties from the “simulator” menu you still had 3 Tour of Duty campaigns with plenty of missions. RSO added another 3 Tour of Duties.
2. You could jump right into any F-22 from the AWACS mission since the ADF, it wasn’t exclusive to TAW – just double click on any of the F-22s on the AWACS map.
Best Regards!
Well consider us educated. Thanks, mate. Didn’t even think to try double clicking an F-22.
Yes and no. ADF did indeed come with three tours and AWACS could jump into F-22s.
BUT there was a version that didn’t have that – and it’s the early betas handed out to reviewers and testers. I believe Roger Godfrey explained that when the dynamic campaign was canceled for ADF, they scrambled to make tours manually, and had to teach their testing team to do this because the devs had no capacity left. (Plenty of such comments in the mission files too.) Also, you can see screenshots of the beta AWACS mode in the CombatSim.com reviews, and it’s very unfinished.
So I believe Denny’s memory is correct, but he reviewed a beta version before the public release.
Thank you so much for the insight!! Oh and the keys! 😉
I really enjoyed listening to your podcast guys, it took me back to days when real flight simulators was fun. Back then I was a Amiga user, so I played TFX, all the Microprose flight sims on the Amiga. I the game that did it for me was F-16-Combat Pilot by Digital Integration, the planning process was amazing; then Tornado again by Digital Integration, another great came. Many of these came on PC, I then bought a PC as the Amiga games development slowed down.
Keep up the good work, would love to hear you do a podcast on EF2000, Tornado. 🙂
Thank you so much, that’s the reason we made this. I’ve not yet played F-16 Combat Pilot but I can’t wait. And do not worry, we HAVE to cover EF2000 because it’s my favorite jet sim, and Tornado is amazing.