Be Excellent To Each Other

Why did nobody tell me about this? I'd seen it on shelves a few times but never made the connection to the previous game thinking it a tiresome arcadey type thing. Looks much improved over Birds of Prey with more planes better multiplayer and replays. Can be had for under twenty five sponds too, insta-buy for me.

My god. A game thread! I liked Sturmovik. Not many others did though.

Playing the demo now, this is fantastic. Nice to see such dedication to improving what must be a very niche title like this. Probably be my GOTY this one.

I really enjoyed it as well, it had heart rather than being a by-the-numbers, focus-grouped, demographically-targeted income generation application. One of those games that I would keep going back to. This new one has four player co-op too, heavy bombers and fighter escorts hopefully. JIZZPANTS DIMLIE

I'll wait for the markg edition with all the DLC.

For the asking price for the game I don't mind paying a little bit more if it supports more of this sort of thing. I also get the feeling that the DLC will be stuff they have actually worked on after release.

Oooooh!

Sounds good, I'll keep my eye out for this.

£24 from Simplygames.

Didn't they turn the servers off in under a year in Sturmovik?

Does it have swastikas?

Peer to peer isn't it? Unless it uses a server for matchmaking or something.

Not so many, it's mostly Japanese who you get to kill this time.

Oooh! Carrier operations are always good, as are dive bombing runs against ships and, of course, torpedo bombers. Does it have a dynamic campaign? Flying boats?

Any of you remember the old Lawrence Holland/Lucasfilm Games sim Battlehawks 1942? Or its spiritual sequel, 1942 Pacific Air War?

I think it has PBYs, definitely has carrier landings and take offs and dynamic campaign. It's just a shame that it was marketed so poorly, or rather not at all. I must have seen it about five or six times before realising what it actually was since they dropped Sturmovik from the name entirely and it just has the Konami logo on the box front.

Weird marketing decision that. Wonder what they were thinking... can't see why they'd want to disassociate it from Sturmovik.

This just plopped through the letterbox and right into my grubby mitts. Can't wait to get stuck into it. There's a hundred planes to buy through the xp points you get for playing. I can see this getting pretty addictive. Also when your planes get shot up they stay that way unless you pay to fix them or leave them for six hours, the idea being to encourage players to use different ones.

Planes list:

http://www.birdsofsteel.com/en/game/planes/

Avenger, Val, Kate, Catalina. I'm happy with that. Stuff like the Beaufighter, Tempest (!!!) and Hurricane are just a bonus.

Swordfish, Mosquito, I-16, F4U etc etc.

I'm ordering this tonight.

Get on it. We can fly together late at night. It will be beautiful.

SOLD!

The previous one (Birds of Prey) was actually Tim Stone's favourite flight game when it came out, so thrilling was the action.

You mean £22.99 from Simplygames.

It's rubbish, you'll hate it.

I won't be playing it, it's just for my collection.

I think you can earn points in private matches, which is good since earning enough to buy planes takes ages in SP apparently and some of the players out there are not honourable aviators but spawn-killing bell ends who should stick to CoD with all the other infants.

I sometimes pray so hard for an open-world Knights of the Sky re-make that I end up throwing myself around the room like a dervish.

Battle of Britain DLC released this week. 480pts. Reasonable!

Had some really good fun on this last night. Just going through the tutorials and doing a couple of campaign missions. Landing on the carrier was a right cunt, though. I ended up getting so fed up re-flying the whole long rectangular circuit that I started heading straight over the carrier before doing an Immelman to line up. Turns out I had just been going a bit too fast the whole time. Should be easier in future.

Also had a quick go online. I still have no planes in my hangar so I had no choice but to start off an old Russian Chaika biplane. Game type was air domination and I have no idea what was actually going on except that I was to try and shoot down the planes marked in red. The ensuing fight soon made it pretty clear that I need to buy more planes, pretty well everyone else seemed to be supersonic compared to me. Eventually though, just outside the main fray I spied the distinctive outline of another biplane presumably under the control of another hapless and bewildered beginner. I hit WEP and closed to within a couple of hundred meters. I even felt a bit bad on seeing the panicky response as I opened up on him, mostly though I just laughed before being promptly shot down once again.

Looking forward to getting hold of this.

I really didn't get along with Birds Of Prey, but I'll be interested in seeing how people get along with this. Watchlistified.

What was it about Birds Of Prey you didn't like? There's a lot been added and changed but some stuff feels familiar so if you didn't enjoy the basic experience of flying and aerial combat in that game then it's unlikely that you'll much prefer this one.

Do you still need to do the tweaks to the control surface sensitivity to avoid constantly stalling?

I've not had any problems so far, I'm using a flight stick though. I did turn down the sensitivity but that was just to help with aiming.

Depending on the difficulty setting it was either much too easy or much too hard. And then I got to the first level playing the Russians and the plane where the engine stopped working if you maneuvered too hard and that was the final straw.

Problem almost certainly existed between gamepad and chair, to be fair.

The middle difficulty setting (so high fidelity flight model but still some of the targeting assists) was the sweet spot. I remember the plane you're talking about, and it took some seriously excessive maneuvers in close succession to knacker the engine. I mentioned the adjustments needed to the control sensitivity: that might have been an issue too, as they were basically treating the tiny little analogue stick like a proper flight stick. Unless you had Lt. Commander Data's fine motor control, pushing the analogue stick *just enough* was almost impossible, while pushing all the way was the equivalent of wrenching the plane's yoke hard up against the stoppers and unsurprisingly causing a stall.

The targeting assists were needed because you're just not able to discern (on a screen) the same amount of detail (even in HD) as you could in reality to identify targets.

Here's the old BoP thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4432

Right, yeah I can't really comment on the difficulty curve of the campaign yet as I've only just begun playing, as Perkies said about the previous game the middle difficulty seems to be where it's at. But there seems to be enough in this one that the single player campaign is really only a small part of it and the rest leaves it very much up to you to tailor the difficulty yourself. So far I've been switching between realistic and simulation as I find it much too difficult to shoot things down in simulation mode, but I find it quite rewarding to try and land on carriers etc in sim mode.

??

Nah, just a fairly crappy Saitek AV8R.

OK C U L8R

Call me maybe.

Fucking HELL, that carrier landing was a bitch.

This is great so far.

We should definitely try the coop soon.

Yeah, after the pub tomorrow night?

You northerners and your pigeons...

My 'Ooh I fancy building oned of those' list is expanding.

OT: WE GOT A DIMLIE!

Is there any DLC to just buy all the planes off the bat? I don't want to have to spend hours cocking about with something shit whilst everyone MiG 21's it up.

It's all WWII planes, Mali.