Game:

U.S. Navy Fighters (1994)

Duration: 37:52

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Lets get back in time to 1995 and play US Navy Fighters from Electronic Arts. Originally released in 1994 for DOS (30th anniversary Nov 19 this year!), it featured 6 flyable aircrafts: F-14B Tomcat, F/A-18D Hornet, A-7 Corsair II, navalized version of F-22 (unlocked later in the camapign), Su-33 Flanker and F-104 Starfighter (not available in the campaign unless you use cheats).

The game's main campaing was hypothetical invasion of Ukraine by Russia. It consists of 50 action packed mission, when we fly in different roles. During campaign we have limited supply of aircraft (A-7s are unlimited) and munitions, se we need to smartly manage available resources.

The game engine was based on earlier Brent Iverson's game - Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. The flight model is a bit simplistic, but offers some easy to pick up type gameplay. In later years, the game was given additional expansions (Marine Fighters), spin offs (Jane's Advanced Tactical Fighters) and re-releases with additional content (US Navy Fighters 97). The series culminated in Jane's Fighters Anthology released in 1998, that included content from all major previous releases (sans the rare Japanese USNF release).

This initial version (patched to 1,1) still had some problems. As you can see the effectiveness of Phoenix missiles is really low compared to USNF Gold/97/FA. In later versions also loadouts were modified to more realistic (here the Tomcat can carry 4 AIM-54s, 4 AIM-120s and 2 AIM-9s at the same time). There was also an issue with bombs being not very useful since the blast damage wasn't modelled properly - this issue was fixed in USNF97. Another big difference was gun effectiveness - in this version you need to put some serious amount of led into enemy aircraft to down it (as seen with the Backfires), in USNF Gold downing someone with guns is much faster.

EmuVR:
https://www.emuvr.net/

Wings Tomcat documentary used in the video:
https://youtu.be/FCp45f3L-H0?si=sJ1R-iVgJKW3Jy0X
*note that I had to edit the audio around 2 - 4 minute mark

Check out my full playthrough playlists.

U.S.Navy Fighters - Ukraine Campaign
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RAlU24oJM8MD70jgAYqz4el

Marine Fighters - Kuril Campaign
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RB6lO6O_HlKNwEfN5IHKhDn

Jane's US Navy Fighters 97 - Vietnam and Kuril Campaign
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RBx-qva-vtVXS18Sh_fuAAs

Jane's Advanced Tactical Fighters - Egypt & Russia Campaings
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RCguQxIPwc8jFoMyNT2XWhb

NATO Fighters - Baltics Campaign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpE6IsFIsh8&list=PLIku_oD9y-RD-6YTp45VYQngQnyi7ZJeF

0:00 What's on TV?
0:50 Wings! My favorite Discovery show.
2:40 If you played USNF97, those shots may be familiar - they used them in the intro
4:22 This landing shot was also used in USNF97 intro
5:14 I feel the need - the need to play some USNF
5:54 Firing up the game
8:00 Continuing the campaign
9:11 Ready on the cat
32:00 Landings were somewhat weird with this flight model
32:35 WTF, LSO should wave him off!
33:05 Debriefing - in later versions there were more statistics here
35:05 Phoenix trials

#retro #emuvr #tomcat

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