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F/A-18

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: July 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is definitly the most realistic flight combat sim I have ever played. The graphics are great, detaile is very precise, and gameplay is awesome. Some of may favorite details to the game are the radio calls, variety of weapons, good physics (realistic damage rates, stalls), and unbeleivable detail to almost everything. It seems just like you're actually flying. The downsides are some equipment (on board navionics) are hard to use, and some missions get lengthy because of just flying around but you cant always be engaging in dogfights. DOESNT GET MUCH MORE REALISTIC THAN THIS!

BUCKLE YOUR SEAT BELTS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

BEING A VETERAN OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY, MOST SIM'S WE GET OUR HANDS ON JUST AREN'T REAL, FAKE LOOKING MORE GAME THEN SIM, BUT JANE'S INFROMATION GROUP AND ELECTRONIC ARTS HAVE PUT TOGETHER ONE OF THE BEST, IF NOT THE BEST SIM THAT I HAVE EVER PLAYED. THE WORLD OF F/A 18 IS SO REAL FROM THE USE OF THE ATFLIR TARGETING POD, TO THE NIRD(NORMALIZED IN RANGE DIPSLY) FOR THE LAUNCH OF A AMRAAM MISSLIE. THIS GAME USES THE MOST ACCURATE REPORTS OF THE DAY, AND PUT'S IT ALL TOGETHER IN A 3-D REAL TIME REAL WORLD PACKAGE THE AIMS TO PLEASE. SO IF YOU LIKE FLIGHT SIMS BE PREPAIRED FOR THE RIDE OF YOU LIFE AS YOU KEEP YOUR ANGLE OF ATTACK IN THE YELLOW, LOWER YOUR FLAPS, CUT YOUR SPEED, DROP YOUR GEAR, AND LINE UP FOR THE 3 POINT SCORE WITH E/A'S/JANE'S F/A/ 18!

Cath the 3 wires! or...maybe 4....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Great game in general despite of it's age....
Nice skies and clouds...

Great and accurate flight.. you can't just pull off your super hornet without losing power especially at low speeds..

makes you feel carrier ops from jumping off the flight deck to trapping back at the carrier... Even if you can touch-down straight on Land-based runways doesn't mean you can easily catch the wires om the flight deck.. takes a lots of hours of practice.. even months for my case....

nice array of air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, each has their unique ways of deployment from fire-and-forget AIM-120 to Lase 'em up Paveway LGB's

flexible mission editor for realistic theater of war..(why just edit the campaign missions instead?..)

Downs...Terrain looks like a molded sandbox and the "black" seas
lots of bugs if played w/o the patch. You can't taxi your plane in the carrier only on Land-based Airfields

Though somewhat over and under rated, it should be more widely owned

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First off, it's a little bit glitchy in XP depending on your system. However, if you have a Win98SE or later partition on your hard drive it will likely work fine.

The graphics are acceptable and cpu intensive. That is correct. The low level ocean effects are not very good. The "sparkle" effect on the ocean never really worked, and I can't even say that the low level detail enhancing feature is particularly doing that much for the water, either, which is VERY dark. You have to play with texures on high, however. Otherwise there's absolutely no detail to the ground, whatsoever. You really have to run this on a top of the line G4 near 4ghz or above (hyperthreading, etc) to run it with everything on max, especially the number of objects. For me with a 2.4Ghz processor the number of objects needs to be on the "required only" setting to get decent frame rates. And with everything else maxed out it still gets a little choppy sometimes, though is still playable.

Under Win98SE, the sim supports 16X anisotropic and 3X antialiasing. Some people, including me, get weird lines in the water at 3X AA, though. I usually run it with 16X & 2X, respectively, to keep things both manageable and not too jagged looking. This also takes care of the lines for the most part. It's a nice compramise. With a top of the line P4 and graphics card, I mean best of the best, you might be able to get away with 3X. At this setting (or simply with 16X/2X at 1024X768), it looks like most of the modern titles out now in terms of smooth lines and resolution. Though textures may be a little lacking in comparison, the combination of volumetric clouds, lighting, and weather effects are still more advanced than even Falcon 4 Allied Force.

The avionics and weapons modeling are second to none on Janes' FA-18 and F-15. No other sims, not LOMAC, not Falcon 4 Allied Force, can exceed the accuracy of Janes study sims on these counts. You also get CVN wire trap landings and other trappings of navy aviation that was previously only available in Flanker. Janes/EA did quite a good job of modeling the dynamics of a fully loaded high-power aircraft in real world flight. You can't reach mach 1 below 15,000ft, and even then with a full load you'll be lucky if you can manage supersonic flight while level.

Now for the bad that you probably won't hear anywhere else. I certainly didn't. Well, actually the first point I want to make isn't really a minus, just a correction to those who posted before me on here. Jane's F/A-18 never at any time had 3dfx or Open GL support. The two versions, the Original and the Classics, are differentiated only by the paper manual verses the pdf CD manual, respectively. Jane's did not re-release F/A-18 with graphics changes, and its graphics engine was new, not based on the previous F-15.

Next, while the dynamics of the F/A-18's flight envelope/altitude/top speed are modeled well, there are some glaring problems with the flight model and controls elsewhere. While there is buffetting if you have forcefeedback, there is no wavefront compression simulated. There's no reduction in acceleration as you pass through the sound barrier. Here it's just a number. The only effect for most users is that you suddenly lose all rudder "phenomena" (more on that later) of any kind. In the real world at supersonic speeds rudder becomes a small unstable sort of wobble (see X-Plane for the proper effect). This leads us to the most glaring oversight, one that has never been corrected and almost never mentioned by any reviewer:

THE RUDDER IS DEFECTIVE. It's obvious that Janes/EA did intend to implement a semi-correct one, but all you get is a wobble all the time, and even then it is infinitesimal. It's as if your aircraft yaws very slightly in the direction you apply rudder, then when you cease rudder application it "wobbles" right back to the previous heading. Not good. There are all sorts of people on the net trying to downplay this issue. It was immediately obvious to me as a defect in the programming, but only one real world Super Hornet pilot and one other guy agreed with me, and I think originally the other guy was espousing the opposite view until the real pilot set him strait. I've lost a great deal of respect for the so-called professional reviewers in magazines and the big websites after this fiasco. A lot of people won't admit to it without extreme prodding, and even then it was with "well, if you can't accept a little defect like that you won't ever be content with any sim!". Yeah, whatever, dudes.

Now, because the real Super Hornet has angled vertical fins (and thus rudder) and a fly by wire system with a funky design, you do get some roll when you apply a lot of rudder at certain speeds in the real aircraft. O.k., cool...so what's the apologists' point in mentioning this? Again, they're trying to downplay a defect by saying how Janes intended the rudder (without the roll, but present) wasn't going to be totally accurate anyway, so why complain about not having any at all? That's a pretty stupid argument to justify a defect, don't you think? Especially when I'd be perfectly content with even the most basic rudder function (which Janes/EA intended, but apparently didn't know they'd screwed up on) that is so necessary for dogfighting, refueling, and landing. This has to be the worst single, isolated oversight in an otherwise near perfect, unique flight sim I've ever seen. Good luck trying to catch the number 2 wire with no rudder, folks. It can be done, but it's a lot more difficult than it has to be.

I'm liking Jane's F/A-18 a lot. But with the rudder/trap situation, even the naval-appeal becomes almost moot. Still, between the Super Hornet's low-observable design, both launched and dragged decoys, and the twin engines (w/ fire suppression that can save your behind) there's a unique combination of strategy and variation of approach you can take. You can make it home on one engine. You can take on a field of SAM sites if you approach with EMCOM, launch your decoys high enough, use every ECM available to you, and get in & out quickly without overextending yourself. The amount of ordinance, fuel, and decoys you can carry with you is stunning.

Additional comments:

The product description is way off. You can't taxi on a carrier in this sim. Like I said before, you can't feel going supersonic...there's no perfomance change or transonic buffetting. I've never heard the canopy creak. About one third of the buttons don't function, one quarter only show their state but still require keyboard/joystick to click/push, and this sim does not do the "super bug", as I guess they call it, from start up to shut down. To be fair, Falcon 4 didn't do it either until freelance modders hacked into the software, and at least Jane's has laser guided bombs (which AF does not). The hud text is also hard to read, even with the sim set to 640X480, which you'd think would mean much larger text but is not much of an improvement over higher resolutions unless antialiasing is turned off. Team Super Hornet update #3 will include a fix to enlarge this text for those higher resolutions in 2006. There are some pretty amazing things going on with modding for FA-18, in spite of the lack of source code.

I am absolutely certain now that the only problem with rudder implimentation in this sim is an incorrect value or decimal point in the code. All that's happening is the program's rudder routines think you're flying faster than you really are. Even if you're flying below 200 knots it thinks you're going like 3 times that and just gives you that wobble (though the wobble even then should be a little bigger). Hopefully some day a hacker genious will correct the problem in a free fix for all of us since EA abandoned the title and strictly control the source code for a piece of software they can't even lose revenue on (i.e. it's out of print).

Dogfighting is excellent, though the aircraft's pitch and roll rates are too low and there's no rudder functionality beyond that slight wobble that can help in gun shots. The sluggishness of the controls can take some getting use to, especially compared to the earlier F-15's flight model, which is the finest flight model of any combat sim around. If you can get Strike Eagle to run perfectly in D3D or 3DFX on your system, there is nothing better around in that regard. Unfortunately, that one has very limited multiplayer support, a shame considering it's a two seater and Janes/EA had the know how to make it happen after Longbow 2. FA-18 has in depth multiplayer with a healthy, inclusive community.

There's also a campaign editor, in addition to the mission editor. It's cryptic and you need to read a lot of stuff on the net to even begin to use this undocumented feature, but it's there. Some gurus have gone to great lengths to create new wars for your enjoyment. There are also tons of voice-overed training missions online that are quite good.

This Game Rules

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 12, 2001
Author: Amazon User

FA 18 is a great but complex game. You should do training missions if you want to succeed in the campaign.The cockpit is 3D and very hard to figure out, but if you like combat simulations buy it, just prepare for a extreme challenge ( the voices on the radio get annoying too).

Jane's F/A-18

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: October 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game because so many people in virtual squadrons were transitioning to it from Graphic Simulations' "F/A-18:Korea". This is a very realistic simulator in terms of flight model, carrier ops, etc. The graphics of the outside world is superb. But I have one gripe-- I'm extremely disappointed in the graphics detail of the cockpit. Yes, it is a 3D cockpit, but other F/A-18 sims have done better on the rendering. And when I play the game, I'm constantly reminded of the fact as I fly the plane, as I don't use external views. (Real pilots don't use external views)

All Around good game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: June 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Jane's F/A-18. A game that does most things right. Good graphics.... good sound... challanging... yet easily learned. If your interested in applying real world tactics in a game.. this is one that you can do that in.
You will need however... at least a 600MHZ P3 or AMD Athlon proccessor to run this with 80%-90% of the graphics at the highest levels. It would also be advisible to have a GE Force2 graphics card or a ATI Raedon 7500.

Best Flight Game of its time

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: December 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Of all the flight sims I've played this one was the best. Everything about it was wonderful from the graphics to the game play.

I recommend this to anyone who like combat flight sims.

Since its from janes it carries alot of accuracy along with it.

Isn't worth anything

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 12
Date: February 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is a major upset.I bought it immediatly when it cameout and played it twice.It was suppose to beat falcon 4.0 but it isn'teven close.Falcon 4.0 is the closest game to real life.When i played f-18 the handleing of the aircraft was inpossible to real life,it moves way to easy.Also the cockpit is a disgrace of a plane,it is so horrible.I just wish i could get my money back because it was a major waste.If your looking for a great flight sim i suggest falcon 4.0 because it is so accurate and graphic,eventhough you need the patches.The game is way ahead of its time. END

DO NOT GET IT

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 19
Date: August 29, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Do not get f/A-18. The views are all stupid. The grapics Are very Bad. IF you want to get a High quality game Get U.S. Air Force better known as USAF

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