Falcon

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 Macintosh version features interesting 3D graphics with nice terrains and aircraft models, although it runs in black & white screens. The animation, though it runs on a basic Macintosh Classic running at 8Mhz, is a downfall and I suggest to play the game with at least a Macintosh SE/30 running at 16Mhz. The terrains, although they look a bit empty in details, do the job nicely and they include roads, rivers, bridges and some mountains. The MAC's sound is awesome and almost similar to the Amiga and Atari ST (later) versions! It offers tons of digitized effects like the aircraft's engine, the explosions and plenty of voice commands given from the airport and the AWACS.