F-29 Retaliator
MiGMan’s Combat Diary
The innovations seen in F-29 Retaliator matured in later DID sims.
The graphics were detailed by the standards of the day, with cities, bridges, roads, islands, mountains and moving vehicles.F-29 Retaliator was released in 1991 and ran very fast, even on a 386 25Mhz which was a typical machine of the day. I remember trying again and again to strafe a train whilst travelling at about mach 1.2.... it never occured to me to slow down!
Flyable aircraft were the F-29 (X-29) and the F-22.
F-22The cockpit was pretty exciting for the time, with 3 MFD's you could set up in a number of configurations.
The Heads Up Display in F-29 Retaliator | MiGMan thanks Richard Leszcynskifor the scan
The Multi Function Displays in F-29 Retaliator | MiGMan thanks Richard Leszcynskifor the scan
Looks like trouble! This monitor is on the fritz!F-29 was one of the first combat sims to model gradual systems degradation due to combat damage.
Weapons Loadout | MiGMan thanks Richard Leszcynskifor the scan
Missions
Campaigns were waged over several battlegrounds against what was an impressive variety of enemy targets for an early 1990's flight sim. I do remember that the tanks seemed to move about very fast! They must have been driving round at 100 mph plus! The maps could be flown over in a minute or so.
The in-cockpit moving map display, Europe Theatre.
Europe Theatre mapAir to Air Combat
The Atari ST version even had digitised speech! The enemy aircraft were MiG-29's, and for some reason referred to as "Lizards" I don't know whose voice DID used but he sure got annoying after a while!
The MiGs were very frustrating to dogfight, turning on a dime and "flipping" left and right in a most peculiar way.
Flight modelling was shall we say "simple" with the aircraft flying on rails most of the time, but still capable of entering a stall or deadly spin.
In 1991 it was difficult enough for me!
Hitting the silk was all too frequent an occurence for my taste, but, par for the course really.
The graphics were detailed by the standards of the day, with cities, bridges, roads, islands, mountains and moving vehicles.
A real city! I spy a skyscraper or two, roads.
This number of polygons was pretty ambitious in 1991. Nonetheless the sim ran very smoothly.
The innovations seen in F-29 Retaliator matured in later DID sims.
MiGMan, 1998