Italian review of Digital Integration's 1993 Tornado. Blast from the past.

[Frankie]

Simone Serponi is an Italian tech-blogger who has posted a review (in Italian) of Digital Integration's 1993 hit Flight Sim, Tornado. He contacted me after discovering my tribute website, requesting permission to use some of the screenshot images. I gladly obliged. The result is this nice review. You can use Google Translate to convert it to English.

[Asid]

Nice Frankie

Good read

[Frankie]

Here is the . Google Translate at its best still give some wierd output. Mostly readable.

[JudgeDredd]

I do recall that game and how good it was.

But my god - were games really that bad looking and we thought they were great!

[Lumituisku]

I do recall that game and how good it was.

But my god - were games really that bad looking and we thought they were great!

mates.. you apparently enjoy graphics more than I do   I still like to play old crappy looking games. Bad look doesn't spoil game to me as long as it works. ^^

Some of old games are still the best. Such as Battlezone, Spearhead, Armored Fist II.. and so on. ^^    well... actually.. pretty much only tank games that I had before SB.

[Asid]

But my god - were games really that bad looking and we thought they were great!

Years ago game developers put a lot of effort into telling you a story. They came with a proper manual, which in the case of many rpg's and adventure games would contain a story. Many games had a history and deep lore. This would set the scene and "paint" a picture in your mind. This art is mostly lost now   The devs now mostly rely on chrome.

Regards

[JudgeDredd]

Oh I understand.

Games nowadays are often a cut down version of a game from 10-20 years ago and from a gameplay perspective, they were (are) superb.

But I really cannot go back to games that looked like that. In fact I've bought several retro games from GoG and I just can't play them. A couple of big names for me are Strike Commander and X-Wing v Tie-Fighter

Just can't do it and yet - superb gameplay (I LOVED Strike Commander...why isn't there a game out there like that now? Guns for hire)

[Frankie]

Long before SteelBeasts1, there was Tank Commander. 1995. It is totally unplayable now as it runs way too fast on modern PC rigs.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/tank-commander

I recall playing Strike Commander. It was a game before its time. I mean it had the padlock view when many other flight sim games after it lacked. Lots of action AND humor!  Even had a Tornado it it. Enemy AI would punch chaff and fakes to avoid your air to air missiles. Very cinematic, had a great story. Character development. You even had to take care of the accounting part! When it came out you needed a good 486 to run it. LOL.

[Asid]

Long before SteelBeasts1, there was Tank Commander. 1995. It is totally unplayable now as it runs way too fast on modern PC rigs.

There is a little prog that is used to slow down modern pc's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowdown_utility

[JudgeDredd]

And after saying all that, who went and just blew £8 on Wing Commander III:Heart of the Tiger and Strike Commander? Aye....yours truly.

I fully expect to be as disappointed as I was when I bought X-Wing and Tie Fighter - but wth - they were £4 each and two of the most enjoyable games I had ever had.

In fact, Strike Commander was THE first PC game I bought and it only just fitted on the 80MB hard drive of my brand new Tandy IBM PC Compatible 486SX with 2MB of RAM (upgraded to 4MB) - for a nice cool £1200 

[Frankie]

Bob's your uncle.

[Lusik]

I spent hundreds of hours playing Tornado when I was a kid. I had Amiga at that time and it was the best looking and the last realistic flight sim available for that platform. And I didn't even bother 5-10 FPS.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Frankie]

Hi JudgeDredd

Gameplay. That's the keyword that makes some games stand the test of time. Tornado's gameplay is tremendous.

I just went back to it the other day using Dosbox. The beauty of this game, and many other games of its era, is that after having learnt the avionics and ordinance commands, once the action starts, it forces you to make decisions just like a real RAF Tornado pilot. Meaning that you have to deal with the terrain, AAA, SAM radar signals, airborne SAMs, waypoints, weapon management, fuel consumption, map, time to target and a hundred and one other things. Oh yeah there is also wing sweep angle and wing flaps management. Even after you leave the target zone, you have to watch out for SAMs and triple-A and enemy CAPs. Flares and chaff launches will save your life. Don't forget to hit that Electronic Countermeasure thingy button.

And all that gameplay from just one stand-alone mission. Throw in mission planning and the gameplay ratchets up several notches higher. Gamers would spend and hour or more planning and crafting multi plane strikes in Tornado, only to fly for 20 to 30 minutes.

The dynamic campaign was truly dynamic, and the game was bug-free - something unheard of now. Tornado was Digital Integration's DOS flight simulation masterpiece, never to be rivaled.

When I look back at the graphics, it's like *yuck* compare to so many games after it. But in the thick of the game, dealing with gameplay elements that force you to make instant decisions and to stay alive, the 1992/1993 polygon graphics don't matter so much. In fact I would go so far as to say that the polygon graphics force your mind to imagine the details. It's like your mind and imagination fills in the gaps and deficiencies of the dour graphics. So in the end, the graphics ain't that bad. Especially when the game models so many things. Like laser guided bombs, loft bombing, runaway bombs like JP322s.

I also love the way the screen shudders to simulate vibration of the airframe. I've played night missions with the lights switched off. So nice. So much power in your hands. All this gameplay for a mere less than 10 megabytes of files. In the end, the outdated polygon graphics can be forgiven. That's my opinion of this classic.

Cheers
Frankie

[Frankie]

Hiya All

I've souped up my Tornado Tribute website.

To get an idea of the kind of graphics and animations Tornado had/has, I've set up some GIF animated 15-second shorts for various scenes. Curtesy of http://gifs.com. For each animation, you can also turn the sound on/off. My favourite animated short is "Tornado Down". From http://www.moodurian.com/tornado :-



Haha, this for a flight sim where the graphics was outdated by two years by the time the game was released in 1993. The delay was due to additional programming work that included AI, mission planner and the works. Gameplay was the order of the day here. The list of animations give you an idea of the avionics and ordinances modeled by Digital Integration. The game was written in assembler and packed a ton of gameplay in less than 15 Megabytes of hard-disk space!

Cheers
Frankie "TornadoMan" Kam

[Frankie]

A few weeks ago I had emailed some retro gamer dude/enthusiast/blogger/gamer in the UK, asking him if he had a particular edition of a PC review magazine. That magazine had an excellent review of Tornado. He said he would check out his collection. On 16th February he posted the magazine scans on his website. His name is Richard.

http://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/tornado-magazine-reviews/

Two of the best reviews I have ever read of the mother of all flight sims, Tornado.
It is nice when retro-gamers from different countries collaborate and work together eh?
Cheers, Frankie.