Megafortress

Title		Megafortress
Game Type	Flight Sim
Publisher	Three-Sixty/Mindscape
Players		1
Compatibility	All 1 MB Amigas (ECS, no cache)
HD installable	Yes
Submission	Tommy Engfors

Review
Megafortress is a flight simulator with heavy emphasis on the simulation
part. You are in charge of flying a stealth modified B-52 bomber deep into
Iraqi airspace to deliver your share of destruction in Operation Desert
Storm. Before you get to do that though, you will have to spend a few
hours learning your trade at the USAF Red Flag traning area in Nevada.
There are numerous things to learn as this is a complicated flightsim. The
layout consists of 5 different 'stations' and all need to be attended by
the player. Every station has its own screen with various controls
relevant to a particular part of the aircrafts operation. The five
stations are Pilot, Co-pilot, Navigator, Electronic Warfare and Offensive
Weapons. A 100 page thick manual explains how to use them together with
hints and tactics.

So how does the game play? Quite well actually. It takes time to learn how
to operate all the different gadgets, but once that is second nature the
game starts to flow quite nicely. I might add that actually flying the
aircraft is mostly done by autopilot as the player is usually busy
attending the weapons or the electronic warfare equipment. Even though
that makes it a bit unusual among Amiga-flightsims it makes perfect sense
since the B-52 never was very acrobatic. Other unusual things include
windscreen-wipers, inflight-refuelling and navigation lights (which look
quite cool when flying at night).

The grapichs are standard 3d-vectors and move at about 7-8 frames/second
on an standard A500. A1200 owners will get fluid motion (must turn off
cache and degrade to ECS-chipset to get it running). Compared with other
flightsims I would say the graphics are about as average as average gets.
Buildings are various sized blocks, mountains are pyramids, explosions are
bitmap etc. The sound too is quite 'standard'. The engines say "Woosh" and
the various alarms say 'beep'. Other than that the game is mostly silent.

Apart from the Desert Storm scenario, MegaFortress also offers a special
mission called "Flight of The Old Dog". That simply because this game is
based on a novel with the same name by Dale Brown.  PC owners actually
recieved the book with the game. The mission takes the player deep into
Soviet airspace in an attempt to recreate what happened in the novel. All
in all a pretty well designed piece of flight simulator with the weight put
on simulation rather than pretty visuals.

Alphabetical list.