Wing Nuts: Battle in the Sky (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
45A playthrough of Rocket Science Games and BGM Interactive's 1997 FMV flight-sim/rail shooter for PCs running MS-DOS, Wing Nuts: Battle in the Sky.
I really like this game. If you imagine someone taking Tomcat Alley's gameplay and sticking into a soap opera about the Great War and then dedicating the entire budget to special effects, you have Wing Nuts in a nutshell.
The FMV is all of excellent quality for a DOS title. It's full-screen, it moves smoothly, and suffers surprisingly little from compression artifacting (at least, in comparison to other Dos titles. MMX extensions andDirectX were game changers there). The plot is beyond stupid and the acting is completely terrible in a fairly charming, campy kind of way. It's a title that would've seemed right at home on the Sega CD, and I'm glad it never appeared on the Sega CD. Imagine how grainy it would look as a dithered mess of 16-colors!
The real showcase is the dogfighting scenes. I don't believe there was much CG used in the production - the only apparent example is the zeppelin. But, they actually filmed people flying biplanes in period-clothing, and blew-up God knows how many meticulously hand-crafted scale miniatures of the planes for the scenes with explosions. It really is a marvel, and the optical effects still look good today.
The gameplay is just like you would expect from an FMV shooter. You move the reticle with the mouse and click to shoot - although the mouse has this super annoying lag to, I guess, mimic the physical tracking of a mounted machine gun. It's really just a transparent way to make it harder, but it's tolerably responsive for most of the fights. If the enemy out maneuvers you and gets behind, you then have to click when the cursor turns green in a direction off-site of your enemy's flight path or you'll get shot up. There are also,a couple of really difficult timed spots where you have to drop a bomb on a tiny target. It works for what it is, and the shifts do help break up the monotony.
When you complete the game, it will restart with a while new audio track as a special bonus. The entire thing is redubbed as an absurd comedy with dumb voices and the occasionally funny off-color joke, but I didn't include that here. It's a fun novelty for a couple of minutes, but that's about it.
Oh, and did anyone else recognize the officer giving orders as the same guy that played Harold Ubergrau, the Ritter family lawyer in Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within? I laughed pretty hard once I made that connection.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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