A retro style flight sim?

[mmaruda]

Hi all, I've been playing a lot of old and retro games recently and this weird idea started to fold in my head. With the whole indie business being on the rise there is ton of new games with retro style art, 8-bit soundtracks and pixelated graphics and these games get great acclaim. My guess would be that because the 16-bit art style is a conscious choice rather than a hardware limitation, the devs can produce simple yet fun games that despite not having the top of the line graphics, are still visually appealing and fun. Noone however, has tried to make a retro style sim.

 

Yeah, it is kind of a crazy idea. With most of the community wanting better graphics, more realism, more complex avionics, procedures, going back to what we had in the nineties seem ludicrous. Still, those old games have tremendous fun factor. I recently played Hind, Tie Fighter, Red Baron, Knights of the Sky and Strike Commander and found myself overjoyed. All of this was inspired by a thread on this very forum (something about people's first flight sims). Now Gunship 2000 and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat are next on my list, if I manage to find them. All this got me thinking, what if someone made a retro style flight sim game? It was sort of done before. In the age of textures and scaled sprites, ED stormed the market with a raw looking, but polished vector sim called Flanker, so why not make something like Chuck Yeager's, with a bit more credible avionics, better looking cockpits and landscape, but still retaining the 16-bit feel, with those animated cutscenes, and midi generated sound. Add some multiplayer to that, fluent animation and responsive controls with good support for modern hardware and it might be a fun trip down nostalgia lane...

 

Obviously nothing like this is in the making and probably never will be. This is just sort a thought experiment, but I was just wondering, would anyone be interested in such an idea?

[Huckle]

Nope. Sometimes I think about building a retro box and finding a CRT, but I watch youtube clips of old sims until the urge leaves.

 

Besides, eventually you'll get the opportunity to be nostalgic about today's sims.

[cichlidfan]

I am afraid that I agree with Huckle.

 

Nostalgia is fond remembrances of things/events that you do not necessarily want to repeat. ;)

[Feuerfalke]

Games like Prison Architect and FTL are great examples that your idea in general works. Both are quite retro, from the looks, but especially Prison Architect has a top notch simulation under the simple looking game.

 

But then, both games are gametypes that have no real modern competition.

Flightsims have.

 

Plus: eyecandy is a vital part in flightsims and spacesims.

 

If Falcon had on par graphics in all aspects, I bet it was an even bigger challenge for DCS.

[docfu]

One thing you might want to play with right now is the SweetFX shader and Pencil Sketch mode. It does some things with DCS that are incredibly cool to watch, even if just once, to know how far technology has come.

 

One thing I think that stops us from going back to games, and a perfect example of this is the original Mario Brothers, is that once the game is felt 'understood' or 'learned' it either becomes tedious or unnecessary. Our obligation to society, as weird as this may sound, is to find out the true limits of what we are capable of, and what benefits will be obtained by pushing back those limits.

 

Maybe even a better example of this is X or X2 /X3. When you start out it's all about staying alive and seeing what you can do, but once you've amassed a fleet of ships and are capable of destroying the entire universe, the game quickly loses interest.

 

Still, Ultrabots was a blast to play through a second time. Truly a well done game., although short.

[lazduc]

I attend a retro gaming club....commodore 64 is the main focus but we also have other 8 bit machines and new stuff. We are mostly nerds of course...Engineers, several Lawyers, couple of Doctors, Programmers, writers, etc. Several members are avid flight sim types. One guy has a 737 cockpit...complete. I too am into flight sims....of course.

There are a number of flight sims for these old computers. Several guys developed a interface device that replaces the floppy drive on the ole "64" in addition too Internet access and 4gb of flash memory along with 2 usb ports. I can store all the software ever developed for the Com 64 in the chip memory on the device. No more floppys. The device can emulate any floppy drive...5.25/3.5 and any model...pretty cool. Do not need a hard drive.

The retro gaming market is huge....last convention in Portland drew over 10,000 people. So yes to someone developing a new/old retro flight sim.

In Europe there seems to be a large number of retro types also.

Lazduc

[Wolf Rider]

I attend a retro gaming club....commodore 64 is the main focus but we also have other 8 bit machines and new stuff. We are mostly nerds of course...Engineers, several Lawyers, couple of Doctors, Programmers, writers, etc. Several members are avid flight sim types. One guy has a 737 cockpit...complete. I too am into flight sims....of course.

There are a number of flight sims for these old computers. Several guys developed a interface device that replaces the floppy drive on the ole "64" in addition too Internet access and 4gb of flash memory along with 2 usb ports. I can store all the software ever developed for the Com 64 in the chip memory on the device. No more floppys. The device can emulate any floppy drive...5.25/3.5 and any model...pretty cool. Do not need a hard drive.

The retro gaming market is huge....last convention in Portland drew over 10,000 people. So yes to someone developing a new/old retro flight sim.

In Europe there seems to be a large number of retro types also.

Lazduc

 

 

Should be good for "Zork, the buggy Beta version"? :)

 

 

 

Could always do a re-run of CFS2...

[Pilotasso]

A-10 Cuba! And Hornet Korea sacrificed graphics for functionality even at the time.

[Haukka81]

A-10 Cuba! And Hornet Korea sacrificed graphics for functionality even at the time.

 

And both of those were great sims in back then.

 

A-10Cuba was first where plane was not in rails, sense of flying was great. It feels good, even two years ago when i last time played it bit. :joystick: