Falcon 4

Now hear this! Falcon 4.0 represents the finest modern flight sim to arrive on the Mac's doorstep since Graphic Simulation's F/A-18 Hornet series. It's got great features but hefty hardware requirements. If you'd like to fly a rocket ship and want to enjoy exciting campaigns, the first of their kind available on the Mac, then you can't pass up this simulation.

Over the years I've had many a discussion about what makes a modern flight sim realistic. By modern I mean post-Vietnam. Starting several years ago, my wish list was simply that. Wishful thinking because computer hardware was not up to the challenge of presenting a realistic stand alone environment. Too much ram and processor speed was required to get the job done. So it got real old when you flew missions and had to do EVERYTHING yourself. For example, F/A-18 Hornet while technically a wonderful sim to fly, made me feel like a one-man band on missions. To attack the factory, I first had to go after the fighters that were coming after me, then knock out the the SAM site(s), and AAA. Maybe I had the energy to drop a bomb or two on the factory. And if lucky, I'd survive the bandits on the way home. To add insult to injury, I didn't even know what the factory looked like before I got there!

I'm not bad mouthing F/A-18. But it's a good example of how things have changed in a matter of 2 years.

I'm happy to report the one-man band days are gone. Microprose has created a dynamic stand alone, F-16 flight simulation. What makes Falcon stand head and shoulder's above previous simulations are the ACM visual aids, and robust campaigns with extensive intelligence and planning information. The graphics are a mixed bag. But even so, this is an exciting simulation!

They spent alot of time consulting with real Falcon pilots and it shows. Falcon 4.0 has every kind of mission you could ask for. Intercept, Close Air Support (CAS), Escort, Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) and Recon to rattle off just a few. And for you dogfighter types, there are more kinds of Combat Air Patrol missions than you can shake a stick at! BarCap, HavCap, TarCap, and ResCap. Don't have time to explain them all. But for example, a TarCap is a Target Combat Air Patrol. The mission would be to protect friendly strike aircraft that are attacking a ground target. The F-16, being a versatile player, can perform most of the combat mission roles.

31 Tutorials
Preparation is the key to success. A great deal of effort was spent to prepare the rookie pilot. Not to teach flying in general, but to teach how to fly the F-16. Make no mistake, if you have no experience with flight sims, this would be a tough one to start off with. And even if you do know how to fly, it's got a steep learning curve. Half the fun is learning how all the gizmos work and preparing yourself to be functional on a mission.

Honors for the best flight sim tutorial to date, go to F/A-18 Hornet which had a VHS machine. It played tutorial movies of exactly what needed to be done with the aircraft, including instruments, radar, weapons displays and the outside view. A picture is worth a thousand words. While Falcon 4.0 doesn't have that, it does have, 31 in-depth, well explained lessons that take up half of the thick flight handbook. And they are accompanied by Tactical Engagement training setups. Pete "Boomer" Bonanni, an F-16 pilot is your teacher and his expertise shows.

When loaded, Tactical Engagements place the aircraft into training setups, usually airborne with targets close at hand. Starting with simple tasks such as takeoff and landing, they progress into highly relevant maneuvers such as max G turns at corner speeds and high speed over the top, designed to give the rookie pilot a real feel of how this baby handles. Then on to weapons delivery and basic fighter maneuvers (BFM). Allow about a month of dedicated time to get these lessons under your belt or you may be seeing alot of black, as in blackout.

A great learning innovation is the freeze mode. It allows you to pause the simulation but all of your electronics and exterior views continue to work. Freeze mode is incorporated into most of the lessons with great effect. For example, targets hang out there in space allowing you lock them up with radar. There is also a real pause mode that stops everything.

After working your buns off on all this training you can get into Instant Action. Setups that place you into airplane, ready to slice and dice. Set the parameters as your experience and confidence allow, possibly starting off with easy settings, such as making the enemy pilots real dum. Raise the difficulty notch as you gain experience.

Falcon's Campaigns
Before long you'll be ready for the campaign. Your heart will be pumping the first time you jump into one. For this is the real thing. No freezes allowed.

Three scenarios are available on the Korean peninsula. They represent the dynamic coordinated efforts of hundreds of ground, air, and naval units with a single goal in mind, beating back some kind of North Korean aggression.

Within the campaign, Air Command works directly with the Korean Theater Commander in Chief (CINC) to generate the Air Tasking Order (ATO), a daily list of missions. Your squadron's piece of the ATO is posted on the daily mission schedule page. It's your choice of which missions to fly. Program pilots fly the missions that you don't. The success or failure of your missions have an impact on the success of the campaign.

Mission Planning
Remember preparation? After picking a mission off the board, the planning page offers extensive planning and intelligence info. This includes a display of the route to and from the target, with terrain, and editable steerpoints. The flight plan has altitude and timing info at each steerpoint. Icing on the cake is the recon photo of the target.

And yes, you are part of a package. A group of planes flying to the target that will provide coordinated mutual support! Take a close look at the mission schedule page at right. (click on it). For my first mission, I chose the OCA strike that launches at 1042. At 1047 there is a SEAD escort launching. It's mission is to protect the OCA strike from enemy air assets over the target. Viper-1 is the call sign and some details can be read in the mission briefing graphic below.

A Typical Mission
The OCA consisted of a flight of four whose mission was to bomb the Sangwon Highway Airstrip. My mission call sign was "Stud-1". First I read the briefing and copied the steerpoints, times, and some other pertinent info onto my Lineup card.

The map displays vital info, such as the location of enemy units and radar coverage, superimposed over mission's route of flight. I did not like the approach to the target, so I swung the Initial Point (IP) East so my last 10 miles into the target would be aligned with the runway.

Then the reconn photos. I was able to swing the view around facing West to see how the target would look coming in for the strike.

Last but not least, this mission used BLU-107s, runway cratering bombs. On the Tactical Reference page, I pulled up delivery info which states that BLUs should be released at 250-500' AGL (above ground level). Handy info indeed! I'd like to add that the Falcon Handbook Chapter 27- Mission Planning and Execution contains an excellent walk-through of mission preparation.

Takeoff
I activated the mission and choose to start on the runway. Thing are quite busy because you pop into your Falcon with only a few minutes before launch time. Quickly I adjusted my HUD setup and color, then ripple interval and count for my ordinance. There were six BLUs loaded on the aircraft and I only wanted to make one pass.

Launching from Mandumi Air Base, I turned to the North East for steerpoint #2 and sent a voice command for my flight to join up. The right MFD is shown at right in Nav mode showing the route of flight and steerpoints. The left MFD has Range While Search (RWS) air to air radar active. Contacts with X's through them are jamming.

During the mission, I asked Sentry, the airborne AWACS for the picture to find out where the nearest threats were. After locking up a radar contact, Sentry can be asked to declare it as hostile or friendly.

There's alot going on. I can see ground explosions in the distance and aircraft flying about.

During the mission, my flight was threatend by a pair of MIG 29s so when asked by my second element leader, Stud 1-3 to engage, I sent a voice command with a keystroke. Voice command pages appear on the screen. Pages are toggled and commands selected by typing a number.

The Target
Things are pretty tense right now as the moment of truth rapidly approaches. Inside the IP with less than 2 minutes to weapons release. The target is on the horizon, displayed as a diamond in the Hud on the left picture. I can see the SEAD escort has arrived and is zooming around engaging other aircraft.

Recording is turned on. I've switched out of the Nav mode by toggling the BLU's which are displayed in the right MFD. My HUD indicates a CCIP bombing mode. Ok now, simply place the little circle at the bottom of the bomb fall line on the runway, about 1/3 up, then press and hold the pickle button until they all release.

For air to mud delivery and refueling, the HUD view, pictured at right is a nice choice. MFDs can be cycled on or off and can be displayed in all 4 corners of the screen.

Piece of cake! All the training has paid off. To see how I did, I momentarily toggle to Satellite view. Later I'm able to revel in the movie of my attack with the help of the ACMI feature. Yeehaw, did I say this game was cool?

Pulling off the target, there are lots of air threats about. I ask Sentry for the picture and am told MIG 29s are at my 3 o'clock 7 miles. Switching to Aim 9s and the ACM vertical scan mode, I pull hard to the right. Selecting Padlock view, bingo! The Situational Awareness display is very nice for maintaining aircraft orientation as your view swings about in Padlock. Those labels are pretty darn nice too. (See the next section) After hosing a couple of bad guys, I head home. What the heck happened to my wing men? This is one of the many parts of Falcon that I'm working on. Those voice comms can be tricky in the heat of battle.

I completed the mission and was happy to find upon return that the mission was a success and I had a high rating although two of my wing man were shot down. I highly recommend staring out campaigns in the Rookie mode.

If your killed
A very nice feature of the campaign is that if the worst happens, you can return to your last saved mission and keep your identity to try again.

How Does it Fly?
Very nice. There were F-16 pilots coming out of the wood work in this project so my guess is it's a pretty accurate flight model. It appears to be more accurate than Hornet's. The Falcon is a rocket ship but you can bleed off all your airspeed rapidly while your blacking out if you horse it around. After flying Warbirds where the planes tend to dip and roll a bit, the F-16 is rock solid. Maybe it's the fly-by-wire. The plane is smooth and really nice to fly. Dogfighting is a blast and with the visual aids, you can actually maintain sight of a maneuvering target. Real nice options apply labels and magnify the appearance of your targets (air and land based) if desired. I maintain that the best classic dog fighting environment is in WWII era sims like Warbirds. But for a modern flight sim, this is the first one that has all the visual aids I could ask for. My only complaint is with the 2D Cockpit view.

Exterior Views
There are many aids in Falcon to help you out visually. Hey the Microprose guys recognize that your looking at Falcon's environment and trying to pick out bogies though what could be a pretty small window (your monitor). There are many exterior views to choose from. The most popular are Virtual Cockpit and Padlock View. But for Warbirds and Hornet fans there are no traditional exterior views. The simple look left, right, etc, with a 45 degree look up modifier is not there. The convenience of quickly flicking around various exterior views, looking for trouble is not there. After seeing perfection in Warbird's views, it's hard to accept anything less. But I'll try.

The Padlock View and the Situational Awareness Bar are wonderful when you use them. Padlock visually locks onto a target and the view swings automatically to keep it in sight at most times. The SA Bar shows where the target is in relationship to your tail.

The 2D Cockpit is cumbersome. Looking right, requires multiple clicks to the right. Each click moves the view to the right about 45 degrees until your looking 135 degrees aft. And same with looking up. It's up, up, up. To get back to the forward view its down, down, down.Virtual cockpit, while it can be panned is not nearly as fast as the Warbirds views. In the defensive BFM lesson, I'm continuing to experiment with the best way of keeping the guy on my tail in sight as I maneuver. When the bogey is at your dead six, you can glance back in Padlock mode, but the padlock won't lock on in that position. With Virtual Cockpit, you can also glance back and this appears the best mode for looking back. Once you get him off your direct six you can switch to padlock, getting the visual lock, and then your in pretty good shape. The nightmare would be if you loose your padlock view in the middle of an engagement, which can happen. Then your in trouble, at least I am. <g>

Below are a sequence of shots from the offensive BFM lesson, using Padlock and the SA Bar. Somehow in the conversion, these screen shots show speckles that you won't see in the game. The best representation of how the game looks is the "GDay" shot which is nice.

How does it Land?
Pretty hard! It's alot tougher than I anticipated, although they tell you that in the manual.

Adjustability
There are alot of scalability and difficulty settings built into Falcon. Graphics can be adjusted to fit your hardware.Don't expect pretty pictures without hardware acceleration. Skill level choices run from rookie to ace that allow complete control over the difficulty of the simulation. Radar and refueling can be set to realistic or simple.

The autopilot has 3 preference settings. 3-Axis holds the aircraft on heading and altitude. Steerpoint flies to the selected steerpoint. And with Combat , the plane does it's own dog fighting and refueling, really! These settings can't be changed from within a mission and regarding the autopilot, it's an inconvenience.

In some computer configurations there are reports of problems getting Falcon to run properly. Some problems with voice communications. However it runs well on my Yosemite G3. I have had some problems getting the tower to issue landing clearance. It stutters and sometimes pauses during heavy action. And this is on a pretty fast machine. Where's that 500mhz G4? New patches are in-work.
Graphics?
My first impression of Falcon's graphics were negative. Maybe my expectations were set too high. This is my first sim with 3D accelerated ground textures and I really noticed how the surface texture rectangles are pieced together. It's most apparant with large altitude changes as the textures expand and undulate. However, the more I play the game the less I notice it, and even appreciate it, especially when dog fighting. As a back drop, surface textures do promote a real sense of space and being there.

Textures build along the horizon and sometimes it's very noticeable. At low altitudes, the seams between the texture can really stand out, looking like dashed lines, and detracting from the overall appearance. And it's bothersome how the runway textures don't appear until your pretty close in whether attacking or landing. I've heard the graphics are better with 3Dfx Voodoo. Rumor has it that new drivers will help the Rage accelerated graphics.
A Steep Learning Curve
There is alot to figure out. I've got quick reference notes laying around cause I'm not going to remember it all. That's part of the territory. :-)
No Mission Editor
Have not found one. Not a big deal to me at this time cause my plate is full with the campaigns!

Conclusion
It's not perfect, but it's one heck of a program and has the best campaigns of any Mac compatible flight sim. I recommend it.

Pros: 3D accelerated; immersive campaigns; good tutorials; excellent flight modeling; excellent visual aids; good selection of scalability and difficulty settings.

Cons: Questionable graphics; no simple exterior views ; steep learning curve; difficult to land.

Min System Requirements: 200MHZ 603e processor, 256 L2 cache, 32mb RAM, MacOS 7.5.3, 4x CD-ROM drive, 175mb hard drive space, joystick. (be prepared for disappointment)

Recommended System Requirements: 233MHZ 604e processor, 512 L2 cache, 3Dfx Voodoo1, or ATI Rage Pro, 64mb ram, MacOS 8.1, 8X CD-ROM drive, 375 MB hard drive space, joystick with throttle.

Really Hot System Requirements: 300MHZ G3, 1MB 2:1 backside cache, 3Dfx Voodoo II, 3dfx Banshee or ATI Rage 128, 128MB RAM, MacOS 8.5.1, 24X CD-ROM drive, 600MB hard drive space, joystick with throttle and rudders.