Cheap Air Attack Pack (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Air Attack Pack

Novalogic = Awesome Sims
Novalogic - they do their homework to make their sims as realistic as possible.

The Attack Pack is a nice collection of flight sims. Joint Strike Fighter from EDOS is added to the Novalogic quartet.

The Good: Five sims in one pack; fighters, bombers, and choppers - Oh My!
The Bad: Lack of paperwork and manuals. One book covers all five games. This pack is great for flyers already familiar with these aircraft.
The Ugly: Choppy graphics for those with less than 64 MB graphics cards and 256 MB of RAM.

Bottom Line...
A great collection for experienced flyers.

- Catch me later -

Decent sims, but check your systems first
This is a pack of nice simulations, and especially stand-alone sims (which are games dedicated to a single airplane, rather than using one or several generic models to simulate several or dozens of airplanes). None of these games come off as very realistic, though realism is may not be for everybody (if you took a pass on "Falcon 4" because of the three-ring binder that served as the manual, you're probably not a "hardcore simmer", but that doesn't make you any less a person - keep telling yourself that).

The F-22 title included "Lightning 3" is actually the third F-22 game NL has published - none of which came off as realistic. While some of that unrealism stems from the plane's space-age maneuverability, other aspects of the game (which allows some startling control authority at either extreme of the flight envelope) undermine the whole thing. I guess its prettier than DiD's "Total Air War" but without that game's more demanding flight model or its dynamic campaign builder.

F-16 and MiG-29 are essentially the same game, though using the more unforgiving flight model of the Russian plane and a Russian-accented instructor who measures everything in metric to distinguish the two. I played these titles on a Celeron 350 and thought the frame rate was rather poor. While the Russian Arctic redoubt from which I flew the MiG-29 looked compelling, I couldn't understand why frame rate was so choppy.

I've never actually played "Commanche" in any of its versions, and I won't comment on its rep.

I had played JSF on my P200MMX/VoodooII, but not that much. The real JSF, the F-33, won a flyoff against Boeing's F-32 and will now supply units in the USN, USMC and the Royal Navy. The F-33 is small, maeuverable and capable of vertical takeoffs and landings. Stocked with high-tech goodies, the F-33 will handle both strike and counter-air missions. As for the sim, while it looked gorgeous and had an incredible frame rate given both the system I was playing on and how good the graphics looked, I had an incurable control problem that had my airplane spinning on its roll axis straight into the ground. It was a frustrating, but one that didn't rear its ugly head on any of my other games. I'm also biased against the game because its based on an airplane (actually two - you get to fly the F-32 as well, since the winner hadn't been determined until way after the title was released) about which very little is known. I don't know if that's because Eidos wanted to get the jump on America's newest whiz-bang toy (forseeing the same rush that flooded shelves of Software Etc. with F-22 sims) or simply because they'd save themselves the trouble of having to account for differences between their sim plane and the real thing, of which nothing was known. It just seems like a waste, because their flight model and graphics engine would have been perfect for just about any airplane, and would have gone a long way to selling a more realistic sim for an airplane that hasn't gotten its due from the sim community (like the Phantom, the Crusader, the Super Sabre - even the Shenyang F-8).

One last thing - though most of todays systems will be able to run these games with ease, I never tested them on my Win XP system. Also, many of these games were written in the days when the graphics acceleration cards of choice were based on 3DFx chipsets, and relied on the application software called "Glide". Today, with 3DFx out of the picture, "Open GL" is now the standard software, and its not backaward compatible with Glide. In other words, unless you saved your old Celeron system (Voodoo II card and all) or are willing to shell out some bucks to get a "legacy" system, you'll be stuck flying these games in software only. That means you'll probably be unable to play these games to the full, assuming that they'll run at all in software-only mode.