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Review for the Alaska Apple Users Group

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 16
Date: April 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I mentioned in a recent review that there was a lack of combat flight simulators for the Mac. Now, with Graphsim's release of F/A-18: Operation Iraqi Freedom, there's one more cat in the fight!

Hornet is a fairly accurate simulation of the Navy and Marine Corps' premier multi-role fighter. The nature of the aircraft provides a lot of variety in missions; both air-to-air and air-to-ground, which explains a lot of Hornets lasting popularity.

Its return is most welcome. The previous release, F/A-18 Hornet: Korea, has been on sale for a long time and was a great sim, but has been left in the dust by advancements in console and Windows games. Unfortunately, this new version doesn't bring Hornet back up to par.

OIF is little more than Korea running natively in Mac OS X. It does sport a few improvements and the campaign has moved from southeast Asia back to the Iraqi theater familiar to Hornet 2 pilots, but by and large it is still the same game that was considered old five years ago.

Not only have there been few upgrades, but some things have actually gotten worse. The useful user interface found in previous versions has been replaced by a simplified but less informative menu system. Options that don't fit neatly into the limited menus, such as network setup and callsign changes, now appear in unsightly Classic-style dialog boxes. Functionally, the weapon load out and mission briefing screens actually provide much less information than they used to.

You usually have wingmen, but the AI hasn't been improved. On my first flight back at the controls I got to watch "two" turn into a lawn dart while trying to put guns on a bandit that was already crashing all by itself.

In the cockpit there's no longer a free-look control; you're now restricted to fixed perspectives or a target padlock. Further, whenever you switch the camera to follow another vehicle your game play is interrupted by a "synchronizing view" message that interrupts the flow of your mission and makes long-range visual IDs a pain.

What's more disappointing is that the simulation itself has received so little work. The F/A-18 is still the only texture-mapped aircraft in the game and the variety of friendly and enemy units hasn't increased.

On the up side, the terrain is now textured with satellite images that are a significant improvement over previous versions. It's not as nice as the leading Windows sims, but it does look pretty good from about twenty thousand up. Of course that just makes the flat shaded polygon aircraft seem even more out of place. All of this does drive low system requirements and high performance though.

It's pretty obvious that the only real progress has been in the background. It's a Carbon port so it doesn't require Classic to play and HID support has been added so most new sticks and other controls will work fine. No progress was made in the multiplayer department though. The UI is ugly, requires manual IP address entry, and lacks the GameRanger support that Korea had.

It's clear that Graphsim is not as active as it used to be. The result is a release whose age is accentuated by the two-year gap between the Windows and Macintosh versions. The bottom line, though, is not that Hornet hardly competes with modern Windows flight sims.

The bottom line is that this modest update still makes it the only combat flight sim you can buy in an Apple Store for OS X. Here's hoping that the competition heats up soon!

Average

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 19, 2007
Author: Amazon User

When F/A-18 first came out in the first half of the 1990s it was an astounding game, well constructed and enjoyable to play, and for the time the graphics weren't bad either. Today it is still fun to play, but outclassed by many other sims. The latest incarnation of Hornets hasn't really changed much: its prettier, it has a mission builder, but it flys no better and the wingmen are as dumb as the dirt they tend to plow into. In fact, in many ways its worse: the view options are not nearly as good as before, the manual is uninformative for game play (good thing I had an earlier version of the game with a decent manual), and the setup and dialog boxes are downright strange.

I was so let down by the experience that I went to the basement and found my old mac with the old F/A-18 still installed and set it up -- it was just as good as the new version, if not better.

If you have a newer mac like mine (an Apple iMac G5 Desktop with 17" M9843LL/A (1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 512 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)), F/A-18 is still a fun game, but it could be so much better that unless you just want a blast from the past consider something else. If you do get F/A-18 make sure you get a decent joystick, my Logitech Freedom 2.4 GHz Cordless Joystick was simply not up to the task.

Really Realistic, not much fun

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: February 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you are looking for a flight simmulator that reacreates exactly what its like to fly fighter missions (including the boredom of flying for hours before encountering an enemy) with decent landscape and ok graphics, this is for you. If your looking to have fun, and not actually to train to be a pilot, then don't bother. Flying is hard, the controls are very sensative, which I suppose is realistic but not fun. If you're looking for a FPS where you get to fly instead of walk around with a gun, this is not it. There are better game out there (though mostly on PC).

No support

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

You can forget techinal support. I was having joystick issues. I downloaded their update; and, it was nothing but jibberish. I e-mailed techsupport; and, they were arrogant and refused to help.

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