The ORIGINAL milsim games and what made them great!

[The_Captain 0]

My three first military games were bundled together in a Microprose pack for the Amiga, that I got when I was ~10 years old: 688 Attack Sub (quality sub sim, slow paced, and tense), Team Yankee (An armored company combat game that roughly followed the book, which I had never read until recently. Hard to get the hang of, but sufficiently violent and semi-realistic), and F-15 Strike Eagle II (a somewhat arcadey flight sim on the easiest settings, while still feeling pretty realistic, with dynamically generated missions that formed a pilot career).

Later, I quite enjoyed Seal Team and Rainbow 6 (primarily because both games rewarded slow, well thought out play while punishing brainless arcade reflexes), before I stumbled upon OFP...

[-)rStrangelove 0]

Has anybody mentioned M1 tank platoon (Microprose) yet?

Afaik the handbook was very accurate on how to drive up to mountain tops, use the laser finder and shoot from there. If you drove up too far you were instantly under fire by all vehicles in the valley in front of you. You fired smoke, and drove up to another mountain to do the same procedure until the valley was cleared of enemy tanks and bmps. Was a great relieve to finally push down into the valley and use MGs on the remaining uazs and trucks. har har! :D

Yeah, and then Rainbow6 came along as the next big thing. OpF was the final step i guess. ArmA 2 will be very good, but i don't think it will be such a 'big' step from OpF. Already preordered btw. :D

[max power 21]

Steel Thunder from Accolade was a pretty realistic tank sim, IIRC. Back in 1988, I was more into flight sims and the NES. I recall this one being difficult to understand but lighting up infantry with the mounted .50 in the patton tank was a nice touch. You could drive a few different tanks and, quite like ArmA, command from the command seat or switch positions around and let the computer manage the other stuff.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/steel-thunder

[icebreakr 3159]

Doesn't anyone remember Gunboat? :)

Couple of them come into mind that had a profound effect on me:

- Midwinter (zx48,c64 etc.) - excellent action strategy that had a lot to offer for that time, many vehicles

- M1A1 Abrams (on XT/386 PC) - great tank sim, remember playing it constantly on mono 8mhz/16mhz XT PC :)

- Seal Team - already mentioned here

- Wolfpack - great submarine sim

- NAM - a GT Interactive game based on Build (Duke) engine, a co-creator ;) ... loved coop play and hard difficulty settings

- Interstate '76: Nitro Riders - excellent world and driving with extreme action and even better storyplay

- Harpoon series - tried numerous scenarios of conflicts (UK vs Russia, etc.)

- Shadow President - lovely world politics simulator inc. nuke wars

- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear - coop

- Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - coop

- X-COM 1 & 2 - immersive play with cunning strategy elements, addicted... me and couple of friends hooked on this even dreamt chasing UFOs :)

- Joint Operations - excellent community, a lot of potential but lousy support of Novalogic drew us away

- SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate - great coop/tdm play but only with realism mod WulfMod, original's been way too arcadish

Edited May 14, 2009 by IceBreakr

[max power 21]

I only remember hearing about it. I remember being told that the m129 grenade launcher in that game was quite something.

[sanctuary 19]

Delta Force 2, It's not really a Mil sim but it does sort of fit in, otherwise, Hidden and Dangerous 2.

How could i forget this one.

Delta Force, the 1st one that pulled me into very (infinite maps repeating itself out of the borders) large scale battlefield games. Sniping in SP was fun but not for much long unfortunately as the AI was so bad that the primary interest was online play, but there was some nice environment and well designed terrain offering many different possible approaches.

Probably the game i played the most online.

Then Delta Force 2 and its awesome grass providing real concealment at any distance that made some sniper-only war server experience unmatched even nowadays.

The SP featured unfortunately the same bad AI, so not fun for long, but again online play was a blast.

Too bad for both DF1 and DF2 the official servers were completely overrun by cheaters (as despite being 1 continent away they suprisingly had nearly no lag for my old 56K of that time) , but when going to public servers with some anti cheats programs and good admins or passworded with friends , the game experience was just utterly awesome.

Then came Delta Force 3 that i hated so much with its soldiers transforming into extremely visible black dots at a certain distance, even when a soldier was behind walls and buildings, the disappearance of grass that made sniper wars a simple shoot'em up (actually the best sniping rifle due to those heavy problems was the machineguns that had nearly no recoil whatever you jumped/ran etc... perfect to kill those black dots at long distance).

The SP was not good as not only it featured again the same bad AI that plagued the serie, but there was a lot less missions than in both DF1 and DF2 (that at least had ton of them for more variety despite the AI).

Thankfully just a year after that horrible DF3, another game appeared, Operation Flashpoint, that had nearly everything i wanted to see in the DF serie and a brillant AI that has ruined the majority of my free time since 2001.

[-)rStrangelove 0]

Midwinter was on C64? I only played it on Amiga500. Still got it btw.

Also Battlehawks1942 now came back to my mind. Simply awesome at that time. Later followed by Their finest hour, which had a great editor and a dynamic campaign btw.

Basically you were shown interesting targets / flight groups operating in your AO. You chose on of those targets and setup a flight group with basic orders. Normally you had light fighters going against enemy fighters, heavy fighters against enemy bombers and bombers against group targets / ships. You then hopped into the mission and whatever the outcome was, other AI groups had the same success/failures as you.

So when playing on the axis side you could change history and let Operation Sealion start. Pretty interesting game.

When Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe came out i was instantly hooked of course. Flying a B17 was really scary with all those rockets zooming by. :P

[icebreakr 3159]

My bad, it was made for Atari ST, Amiga and PC.

It also had a sequel Flames of Freedom and its description could be fitted to ARMA2;)

Players take on the role of a covert operative working to liberate a small chain of islands from its oppressive rulers. The missions are generally open-ended, allowing the player to approach them in whatever fashion is desired. Each island has different objectives, and the order in which these are tackled is up to the player.

The game attempts to create a detailed world by providing a number of different characters and different vehicles that the player can interact with. Vehicles include land, air, and sea vessels, although all of them control in more or less the same basic manner. The graphics are relatively rudimentary 3D, although typical for the time period.

Couple of Midwinter 1 shots:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/midwinter/screenshots

Edited May 15, 2009 by IceBreakr

[jakerod 254]

How could i forget this one.

Delta Force, the 1st one that pulled me into very (infinite maps repeating itself out of the borders) large scale battlefield games. Sniping in SP was fun but not for much long unfortunately as the AI was so bad that the primary interest was online play, but there was some nice environment and well designed terrain offering many different possible approaches.

Probably the game i played the most online.

Then Delta Force 2 and its awesome grass providing real concealment at any distance that made some sniper-only war server experience unmatched even nowadays.

The SP featured unfortunately the same bad AI, so not fun for long, but again online play was a blast.

Too bad for both DF1 and DF2 the official servers were completely overrun by cheaters (as despite being 1 continent away they suprisingly had nearly no lag for my old 56K of that time) , but when going to public servers with some anti cheats programs and good admins or passworded with friends , the game experience was just utterly awesome.

Then came Delta Force 3 that i hated so much with its soldiers transforming into extremely visible black dots at a certain distance, even when a soldier was behind walls and buildings, the disappearance of grass that made sniper wars a simple shoot'em up (actually the best sniping rifle due to those heavy problems was the machineguns that had nearly no recoil whatever you jumped/ran etc... perfect to kill those black dots at long distance).

The SP was not good as not only it featured again the same bad AI that plagued the serie, but there was a lot less missions than in both DF1 and DF2 (that at least had ton of them for more variety despite the AI).

Thankfully just a year after that horrible DF3, another game appeared, Operation Flashpoint, that had nearly everything i wanted to see in the DF serie and a brillant AI that has ruined the majority of my free time since 2001.

I never got to play DF1 but DF2 and DFBHD were both great games. I actually just played through both campaigns of DF2 and all the missions again a couple of weeks ago and the AI wasn't that great but it was still fun. The AI in BHD was even worse and it was quite rare to even see any of them walking or running most the time. The mulitplayer in DF2 was great for open battlefield combat and BHD was great for urban combat. Ofcourse OFP takes down both of them but the were fun for a while and lasted me a lot longer than most other games did other than ofp and arma.

[EricM 0]

Wargasm was indeed a very nice game for it's time, it had great potential, but didn't use it to its full extent and controls were a bit clunky (but they fixed it with mouse control later).

It had foot soldiers, helicopters, tanks, drones, APC... large environment and awsome SFX (some still even better than Arma 2 : the rain effect on the cockpit !!!) not counting the incredibly epic music (Wagner, Beethoven...)

It was quite shallow, but a great precursor of modern virtual battleground games...

[-)rStrangelove 0]

Players take on the role of a covert operative working to liberate a small chain of islands from its oppressive rulers. The missions are generally open-ended, allowing the player to approach them in whatever fashion is desired. Each island has different objectives, and the order in which these are tackled is up to the player.

The game attempts to create a detailed world by providing a number of different characters and different vehicles that the player can interact with. Vehicles include land, air, and sea vessels, although all of them control in more or less the same basic manner. The graphics are relatively rudimentary 3D, although typical for the time period.

Sounds like the typical GTA concept.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

DF1 was mad fun in MP... but, as Sanctuary mentions, the horrible AI made SP not much better than a turkey shoot. I mean, honestly, you could run (and bunnyhop) behind a patrol until you got into knifing distance. Once you knife the first guy, the second dude just takes off without even turning to see what's going on.

Shooting underwater was pure hilarity in 3rd person too.

But also my first large battlefield experience. :)

[MoS 0]

My very first Wargame was 1997´s "Muzzle Velocity" for DOS. (-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_Velocity_(computer_game) )

I was about 7 years old and didnt even understand one single word of english but still kept on fighting :p

This is were all began for me :D

EDIT: F-22 Raptor was also a great game for military air combat -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yvDRitjSiQ

Edited May 21, 2009 by MoS

[Clavicula_nox4817 0]

Balance of Power: A Geo-Political Cold War Sim.

F-117 Strike Fighter: My first flight sim; featured various campaigns: Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm.

[anguis 4]

Holy smokes, Sanctuary - that's the funniest video I've seen in a while!

M1 Tank Platoon - platoon command, team skill building through a campaign (and dealing with losses), stealth, watching out for infantry with AT weapons, awesome manual (Microprose)

JetFighter - CGA, carrier landings were quite an accomplishment, acquiring and locking onto targets (listening for "tone") seemed the most realistic of all the flight sims of the time, smooth frame rates, San Francisco (Velocity Development)

- threading the radar needle, stealthy dive bomb approaches, real world theaters, camera images that were subsequently validated by LGB videos from the first Gulf War, different bombs required different methods of delivery, returning to base and landing to complete a mission, another game with an awesome manual (Microprose) Edited May 25, 2009 by Anguis

[-)rStrangelove 0]

SuperHuey 1985

My very very very first flight sim (as much as you can call it that) was SUPER HUEY on the C64. Took me and some friend several days to figure out how to lift the thing from the ground lol. And it was quite boring tbh. 8)

Edited May 24, 2009 by ])rStrangelove

[sidhellfire 0]

My first was F-19 Strike Fighter, and that was a very good start. Best sim on 286 8MHz@12MHz :D The PC version from '88 had more radical look:

Your character could be captured, killed, missed etc. depending on where you do end mission and how.

I loved the copy protection test before playing game - you had to match the blueprints with plane model. You really didn't need a manual for this :-)

Then LHX Attack Chopper showed up, and that was also a great sim.

[Macadam Cow 1]

Did someone mention the Jane's Combat Simulation games ?

I don't know exactly how many games were released in that series but if I remember well they were really good.

I had 688(i), Longbow2, Fleet Command and F-15E, they were my very first experience with video games.

I've found this on Youtube, almost brought tears to my eyes

lYayJANfuzI

Couldn't say much more about those games as I don't remember well exept F-15E, I've spent hundreds of hours on this game. It has a huge map, a really great mission editor, interactive cockpit,... The manual that comes with the game was one of the biggest I've ever seen (about 250 pages if I remember well), almost everything was explain from flight physics to the proper way to drop bombs (yeah I know it seems obvious, but there were a lot of details)

Really sad that company disappeared...

Edited July 16, 2009 by Macadam Cow

[Mindwalker 0]

I'd have to say F-19 Stealth Fighter was my first proper flight simulator.

The anti-piracy gimmick for this game was to recognize airplane silhouettes from the game manual! I ended up memorizing every single one of them! ;)

I was around 7 first time playing it (I think), so I'm quite surprised I finished even one of the missions.

And I thought of this as a milsim when I first played it :D

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[MehMan 0]

:O

Alcatraz! I sucked at that game. Big time.

Also, can anybody remember a flying game, looked much in the same league as F-19 Stealth Fighter but you could fly an Su-47, basicly the reverse sweep wing plane and another one?

[stgn 39]

F-19 Stealth Fighter, wached my dad combat MIGs and bombing radar stations for hours, a very dificult game to play and especialy land.

AEGIS: Guardian of the Fleet, cool game with videos of different missies being fired, cool sonar, and drawn out battles with missile barages.

STGN

[max power 21]

Alcatraz reminds me of a game called Rescue: The Embassy Mission. That game rocked in so many ways. It was called Hostages on the Amiga. It was about a hostage situation in an embassy. The game featured a few different phases. The first was to get your snipers in position by avoiding search lights on the ground. The next was to rappel down the sides of the building with your entry team under sniper cover, and the last was to clear the embassy room to room.

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[sanctuary 19]

How could i have forgotten, i had so much fun with this game on my AtariST.

It was called Operation Jupiter in my language.

[Guest Ti0n3r]

Hidden & Dangerous (1999) is what really got me into this genre. Yeah I know 1999 wasn't that long ago, but I was only 11 at that time :dance1:

So that game was revolutionary to me :P

[icebreakr 3159]

Anyone tried out NAM (built on Duke Nukem engine) I made with my buddies, sequel to the Platoon Total Conversion for Duke? ;)