The hype with any F-16 flight simulators, starts right here! Falcon F-16 is the first and one of the best F-16 combat flight simulators ever developed mainly on the 16bit home computers. The game was initially released for the 8bit MSX computers in 1984 and for the Apple Macintosh (Classic) in 1987. It was later developed for the Atari ST/E, Commodore Amiga, PC (DOS) home computers and the NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 video games console!
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Falcon is the first and one of the best combat flight simulators I have ever played on the 16bit home computers. It's an authentic flight simulator and offers everything a player wanted to experience to its fullest, back in the days! So many players have invested plenty of flying hours (like me!) playing it. The missions provide dogfights and bridge bombings and they are designed for successive play, so anything you achieve on a previous mission will influence the outcome of any upcoming attempt! What is your final goal? Total destruction of highlighted ground targets and -of course- enemy MIGs! The ground targets vary from tanks, trains, amphibious landing crafts, trucks, bridges and ground-to-air missile sites! Sometimes the opposing jets make some very cool maneuvers while your plane's electronic displays and radars resemble the real thing with great success, giving you 4 different styles of HUD (Head Up Display). Not only can your plane barrel-roll and scissor; the enemy planes can too! Actually, the Artificial Intelligence recreates the moves of an actual pilot and the reactions of an actual F-16. This is one of the earliest games to offer a head-to-head gameplay by linking two machines. It comes with a massive manual, showing in details all those functions and maneuvers, mainly written by actual F-16 pilots! Note that the game supports head-to-head battles with another human opponent too (via direct computer link)! Well done Spectrum Holobyte! Your game is a masterpiece!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga version features detailed graphics with some nicely done terrains and aircraft models. But the aircraft animation (on the Amiga version) is a bit slower compared to the Atari ST, due to the fact that the CPU is mostly used in calculating 3D graphics and the ST has a higher clocked CPU than the Amiga (OCS). The Amiga's sound on this game is, in one word, awesome since it offers tons of combat, sampled sound effects like the aircraft's engine, the weapons' firing, the HUD's lock on sounds, the missiles' sound when launched the explosions caused and also the voice commands given from the airbase and the AWACS.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs