From: fishkin@parc.xerox.com (Ken Fishkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: B17 review
Date: 11 Sep 92 18:04:14 GMT
Organization: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Originator: fishkin@pan


Review of Microprose's "B17 Flying Fortress"
    by Ken Fishkin

GAME TOPIC
    "B17 Flying Fortress" is a new Microprose game of "World War II
bombers in action" [cover blurb].  Actually, you fly only a very particular
type of bomber mission: you fly B17-Fs for the USAF. Although the book
has pretty pictures of German, British, and other US bombers, they
have no part in the game.

COPY PROTECTION
    Manual word/paragraph lookup. First letter of answer is supplied.

DOCUMENTATION
    The usual excellent Microprose manual. Fully 50% of it is taken
up with a historical discussion.

INTRODUCTION/OVERVIEW
    You are the "patron", or "godfather", or something, of a particular
WWII B17. You will take it on a series of missions over Europe.
    What do I mean by "patron"? Your B17 contains 10 crew members,
performing 10 different jobs. At any time, you can be "in the shoes"
of any _one_ of these members. While you are acting for that member,
the other 9 do their jobs to the best of their abilities. You can
(and should) jump from one crew member to another. You need not be
in any crew members shoes: in this case, all 10 members will just do
their thing by themselves.  So you are no particular crew member,
but rather their overall "controller".
    In this way, the game is different from other simulators I have
seen, in which you fly a "ghost plane", where you run from post to post.
In this game, the posts really are filled by real crewmen. You can
help them (or not), and have them perform other functions as well:
repair damaged equipment, perform first aid, take over the job
of an injured crewmember (leaving their former post vacant), and so forth.
    The game has no "strategic" component: you have no control over
which mission your bomber will be assigned, let alone which missions
other bombers will be assigned. Your bombers performance does not affect
the course of the war, or anything like that: you just do your job,
and try to make it home in one piece.

SOUND
    The sound effects are good, but not spectacular.
    The background music is nice (a vaguely World-War II type music),
but, like most game music, it gets old very quickly.
    Unfortunately, turning off the game music also turns off the sound
effects. I get around this by turning the sound card volume to zero
until the mission starts.

GRAPHICS
    The static graphics and 2D animations of B17 are wonderful. Just
superb. I'll describe them in more detail in the appropriate section.
    The 3D graphics seen when flying the plane are fine, but nothing
ground-breaking. No Goraud shading, no texture-mapping: simple (but
fast) flat-shaded polygons.

STARTING A NEW PLANE
    The game starts after you hit "return" about a dozen times, and
then pass the copy protection check. Now you see a "roster" of 6 bombers:
the game can track 6 different bombers.
    To start a new plane, you enter the name for the plane, and select
a piece of "nose art". One minor nit is that I wish they would have
provided more possible pieces of nose art: the ones they provide
are pretty heavily loaded with scantily clad women. This may be historically
accurate, but something like 3 of the 6 pictures are of this type.
    Important bug: the "roster" is _not_ saved when the game exits. If
you fly 3 missions, leave the game, and then come back, there will be
no record of your missions. You have to remember to explicitly save/restore
your roster to a save file.

STARTING A NEW MISSION
    Once you have your plane, you fly a series of missions. If you
survive 25 missions, your crew retires: I believe this is historically
accurate.
    The mission briefing has several parts. First, there is a textual
description of the mission.
    Second, there is a wonderful feature called "recon". In this segment,
you are shown a beautifully drawn (and animated) rendition of a briefing
room. The lights dim, and you see a short (5 seconds or so) black-and-white
"flyby" over the target. I strongly suggest that you look at this flyby
several times, to note the configuration of roads/rivers near the target.
This part is superbly done: they even have a "trailer" segment to the
fly-by, with a hair in the lens!
    Third, you can decide to decline the mission. I'm not sure why
you would ever do this, but there you are.

TAKING OFF
    Once you accept the mission, you are plopped on the runway, and
are ready to take off.
    The take-off is basically an exercise in maze traversal: your
bomber starts in a side passage in the twisty little maze of runways
leading to the main runway, and you can guide it there. This is harder
than it might sound, because there are no runway markings indicating
which way to go! I finally did this by letting the computer pilot
the plane through several take-offs, and memorizing the route it took 
(thankfully, this is the same each mission).
    The take-off itself is also very unforgiving. You have to do
everything just right, or you will run out of runway.
    In sum, the take-off offers advantages, as it helps train you in flying
the plane. On the other hand, it's boring and difficult.
    Minor bug: if you choose to have the computer pilot the plane
through take-off, and watch the instrument panel, you will see the
pilot change heading/speed, but you will not see the flaps go up/down.

EN ROUTE
    Once you've taken off, let the computer pilot take over immediately:
the computer pilot will go through the long and complicated gyrations
needed to come into formation.
    Once you are in formation and proceeding towards the target, you
can "skip time" until you enter enemy territory.
    Alternately, you can spend some time helping out your navigator.
One nice part of the simulation is that your navigator is good, but
not great: his estimate of your position is not precise. When you are
not otherwise occupied, you can look outside the plane and fix your
location. When you pass over a certain landmark (a river, say), you can
give the navigator a precise fix on your position. This will help your
navigator get better, and also makes your bombing run easier, as the bombing
run is set up according to where your navigator thinks you are: the
closer this is to reality, the fewer gyrations you'll have to do during
the bomb run.

FIGHTING FIGHTERS WITH FIRE
    Eventually, you will enter enemy territory. The enemy will try
to knock you out of the skies through flak and fighters.  There's not much to
say about flak: it either hits you, or it doesn't.
    You will be warned of the approach of fighters by messages of the
form "Tail gunner: bandits at 10 o'clock low". If you move to the view
of the tail gunner, you will see tiny little dots in your field of view.
Each tiny little dot corresponds to one enemy fighter. If you jump
into the gunners shoes, you can manipulate the guns to pick a particular
tiny little dot, and try to keep him in your sights. One nice feature
is that the gunner will try, even when you are in his shoes, to keep
the fighter in the cross-hairs: the better the gunner, the better a job
he does at this.
    Eventually, the tiny little dot will make a pass at the plane.
Don't waste your ammo until the dot begins to get bigger. At this time,
you have a few seconds in which the plane will _rapidly_ expand in size,
as the fighter makes the pass. Try to lead the fighter appropriately,
and kill or be killed!
    This part of the game generally works very well, with only one
minor bug. With the keyboard interface, you shoot by hitting the "space"
bar, and move the gun with the numeric keypad cursor keys. Fine adjustments
on the gun are done by holding the "shift" key. Now, suppose you want
to fire at a fighter while making a small movement with the gun. Move it
a little to the left, say. This requires that you hold down the "space",
"4", and "shift" keys simultaneously. In this case, the "4" key will
be ignored: you cannot make small movements and fire at the same time.

DROPPING THE PAYLOAD
    Assuming the enemy hasn't shot you down, you will eventually
approach the target. When this happens, you can make your bomb run,
jumping into the shoes of the Bombardier. You look into the Norden
bombsight, make the appropriate adjustments, and drop the bombs
when appropriate.
    This part of the game also works very well, except that the
one-sentence documentation describing how to work the bombsight is woefully
inadequate: I spent an entire weekend just figuring out how to make
it work!  It's trivial but (very) non-obvious.
    One tiny bug is that if you decide to let the computer do the
bomb-dropping, and watch how it does it, you will never see the
bombsight adjust: this makes it impossible to learn by watching.

WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE
    Soon or later, Lady luck will frown upon you, and Jerry will
damage your plane and/or your personnel.
    You are alerted to an injury to a crewman by the crewman himself,
who kindly sends you a message of the form "Arrrrgggh.....gagghhhhh....
I'm hit". Sorry about that, old chap!
    This introduces a major part of the game: the allocation of crew
members to task. In addition to jumping in to a particular crewmans
shoes, you can look at his compartment. There are a series of compartments:
each is a very nice 2D rendering, with renderings of your crewmen in
their current positions. Your wounded crewman, for example, will be shown
slumped over. Now, you can take some other crewman (one in the same
compartment, if possible), and have them perform first aid. If the medic
is not in the same compartment, you tell them to move from compartment
to compartment until they arrive in the right place. Of course, while your
crewman is performing first aid, he's not doing whatever else it is
he used to do: if your pilot is injured, don't have your co-pilot
perform first aid, or nobody will be flying the plane!
    This part of the game, the first aid in particular, and the
compartment movement/task assignment in general, is excellently done.
    In addition to injuries to personnel, your plane can take damage.
You will get a message about it, but it's easy to miss this (messages
fly pretty hot and heavy when enemy fighters are around). There is a
"damage view" that shows you a graphic of the plane with damage highlighted:
again, the graphic is top-notch.
    Different types of damage can be fixed in different ways: you may
have to manually open the bomb bays, feather an engine, fight a compartment
fire, and so forth. This part of the game is also very well done:
no complaints here.

LANDING
    Finally, you make it back near your base. Yay! Ready to land?
Too bad! There is a major bug here which really hurts the program.
    First of all, the computer pilot doesn't know how to land the
plane: this isn't so bad in and of itself, but....
    Second of all, the computer pilot _loves_ to fly in formation:
if it is at all possible, the computer pilot will do whatever it
can to join formation. What's so bad about this? Two things:
    1) Suppose your engines are damaged. The only way to keep the other
engines from overloading is to reduce speed and leave formation. You can
do this when you pilot the plane. But if you _ever_ leave the pilots
seat for any reason, the computer pilot will promptly over-rev the
healthy engines to maximum speed, trying to rejoin formation. Your
engines will seize up.
    2) Suppose you are trying to land. You jump into the pilots seat.
You start to move towards the airfield, turning and losing altitude.
Again, if you _ever_ leave the pilots seat (to look outside and see
where the hell the airbase is, for example), the computer pilot will
promptly undo everything you have just done, and try to take you
back up to the (endlessly circling) formation. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!
    There is really only one way around this that I have found.
The game lets you set the difficulty of various parameters (enemy
fighters, enemy flak, and so forth). It lets you, thank God, set the
difficulty of "Landings". At the lowest setting, any landing, no matter
how awful, is fine. USE THIS SETTING! You can then manually land the
plane by aiming for the airfield and augering the plane right into the
ground: I aim for the control tower, myself. This extreme measure
is needed (at least for me) because it's much harder to land a B17
than other fighter planes I'm used to from other simulations: your
field of view is much more limited, the plane responds much more slowly,
and there's much more inertia to deal with.

REWARDS/PROMOTIONS/TRANSFERS
    OK, now you've landed. You step out of the smoking rubble of
your plane to the congratulations of the ground crew.
    Depending on how you did on your mission, you are now awarded
a certain number of promotions/medals. It is up to you to decide
how these promotions/medals are to be distributed to the crew members.
Medals improve a crew members morale: promotions don't seem to have
any effect that I could see.
    The assignment is done in a very nice way: you are taken to yet
another very well-done graphic, a black-and-white "group photo" of your
crew assembled in front of the plane. By clicking on different crew members,
you can see their current status, and award them goodies.
    Your crew can change over time, too: you may lose a crew member
to promotions/transfers, or to death, I guess. If this happens, you
will get a replacement crew member who, rightly enough, will not
be as good as your veteran crew at the start. It's in your own
self-interest to keep your crew healthy and happy!
    I have three minor nits with this generally very well-done
feature. First of all, you are not shown which gunners shot down how
many fighters on your trip: this would be nice, to know who deserves
rewarding. Second of all, it seems that they only have 10 canned faces:
different planes have the same faces, just assigned to different crewmen.
Third of all, you are allowed to _not_ award your
hard-earned awards: just hit the "exit" key before you're ready, and
kiss those medals good-bye! At the least, you should be asked to confirm
this.

SUMMARY
    I really like the way that you can jump from crew member to
crew member. This works very naturally, and has a very nice interface.
It has the secondary advantage that you need not perform any parts
of the simulation that you dislike. Don't like arcade shoot-em-ups?
Leave the gunners alone. Don't like navigating? Then don't. Don't like
flying? Let the pilot do it. Don't like any of these? Then why did you
guy the game?
    The game aims for the "middle ground" between fighter-pilot
shoot-em-up arcade games and grand-strategic bomber simulations, and,
in my opinion, suceeds admirably: I found myself gripped and engrossed
by the game.
    There is a _major_ bug, however, that severely flaws the game
(see above under "LANDING").  This is a real surprise for me in a Microprose
game: the host of minor bugs, and the one major bug, are not what I've come to
expect from Microprose. It's a tribute to the basic game system that despite
this major flaw, I still find myself wanting to play the game.

Overall rating: 10 without the bug, 7 with. Customer support told me
that a fix for the bug should be out by the end of September. Sure.
-- 
Ken Fishkin	fishkin@xerox.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games