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nine-gear crow posted:Sadly, there won't be any direct commentary by me for a while. Im going have to play guests off each other because right now I have permanent BATVOICE until my lyarnex heals up. So you ARE Batman. I always suspicious, but was never entirely sure: something about how you keep LPing games about morally ambiguous heroes in morally ambiguous worlds.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:37
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Glad to hear you're ok, Crow, even if ok is pretty drat relative in this case.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:39
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I still can't tell if you actually like Dash Rendar, or actively despise him; at this point, I'm not even sure if you know either.
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May 6, 2016 20:21
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"Enemy attack! Is it the Allied For...wait, is that a prop plane? How the gently caress did a prop plane shoot down a-" 
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May 19, 2016 20:38
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Kadorhal posted:For you movie buffs, the Kfir is probably most famous for appearing in the first Iron Eagle movie, where for some reason it was standing in for the MiG-23, which was rather apparent considering the -23 is a swing-wing jet while the Kfir is a delta-wing. Even more hosed is that the bad-guy air force was in the same general area as a lot of other countries that utilized the Mirage 5, so why they didn't just call it as it is is a mystery for the ages. I'm going to go with people actually knowing what a Mig is, but having no idea what the hell a Mirage 5 is, or why it's a threat. "Mirage 5? Is that like Maroon 5? Wait, it's a french plane?!? Boy, ain't no French plane gonna beat an American plane, everyone knows that. Can't have no good movie climax with some drat French plane."  nine-gear crow posted:This thread is a safe space. All opinions are welcome and equally valid here. Even wrong ones. Um...I actually took a liking to the dog fight mode as well. Yes, it did make the game a bit too easy, but chasing a plane through an office building while ripping it apart with your guns was fantastic, and a decent compromise between keeping the series wacky while moving it to the "real world"; It really just needed something to make it as dangerous as it was powerful.
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May 23, 2016 18:08
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Ace Combat: Assault Horizon is a lot more generous than to the various nationalities than Anglo-Only Call of Duty: the Russians are actually the ones who do most of the fighting in their own country, instead of just rolling over and doing jack poo poo when Crazy Ivan takes over Russia, and I'm pretty sure most of the player's wingmates are actually from all over NATO. Hell, the two Russian antagonists would fit right in with Strangreal: the main antagonist is basically an rear end in a top hat Belkan, and the other is only an enemy because he put honor before reason. Now, if only there wasn't a forced AC-130 segment; so glad that gaming gimmick died.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:35
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Frogisis posted:Is it weird that the thing I was most ambivalent about in Assault Horizon is that the main character talks? The helicopter missions were a decent change of pace; could have been better, but they weren't outright bad by any means. As for the main character talking, it honestly seemed like a logical progression: why should the protagonist be the only one avoiding protocol by silently killing enemies and ignoring changes in objective by high command? He doesn't have to give some soliloquy about the horrors of war, but he should at least be acting like the soldier he is, and maybe giving off an expletive or two when a nuke goes off and buffets his plane... hackbunny posted:How dead inside do you have to be not to appreciate the simple pleasure of firing a flying howitzer at infantry Try it on Ace difficulty: the AC-130 almost can't kill SAMs fast enough to actually win the mission, and the mission feels pretty much forced to boot. I'd much rather have a Warthog level that doesn't require the Player to also fight planes. Edit: Also, the thing that angers me about the F-35 is that it displaced the F-22 (something that, while flawed, has actually been doing missions for some time now, not just sitting in some loving hanger) because the heads of the US government (particularly the Secretary of Defense) thought it would be sending a message about overblown military contracts if it went down on the F-22...and then the F-35 went and became the loving poster child for overblown military contracts. I can't wait until the US government is forced to admit to everyone that the F-35 will require their entire fleet to be re-configured in order to work; not even work well, just work. Lots of people gonna be happy about that! thetruegentleman fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 20:59
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So, I've decided to try and give Ace Combat 4 another go (the game didn't work last time I tried; I'm sure you lovely duckies can figure out why without me saying), and it's looking good! Would prefer an actual HD version, but beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes. The best thing though is that I tried to do the tutorial, since I'm basically un-learning years of improved mechanics: on the last one, I actually managed to fail the tutorial mission, because it locked me into auto-pilot after letting me shoot some targets without leveling the plane completely, leading to a very slow crash into the ground while pop-ups talking about mission borders. MISSION FAILED. I haven't laughed at that kind of poor design since the original Homeworld had the AI attack (and kill) their own mothership after building a squad of frigates on the lowest AI settting. I'd suddenly won the last skirmish while faffing about with the game mechanics, so I sent out a probe in the next one to watch the enemy, and just kinda saw all their frigates all slowly turn 10 minutes in to face the mothership, and then start shooting it. I had to race out just to kill their ships before they killed themselves.
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Jun 4, 2016 19:49
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The YF-12A (the SR-71 fighter), or something like it, did actually appear in Electrosphere as a high-altitude interceptor, so it's in Ace Combat.
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Jun 10, 2016 21:22
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:poo poo, yeah, you're right. I even remember commenting on it when it came up last thread too. You can fly the SR-71 in HAWX! Its missiles magically appear around the plane when you shoot them, and then zoom off. Also, people online had a hard time remembering that the SR-71 is a bad plane to try and maneuver behind people with, so they were usually pretty easy to kill; seeing an SR-71 try to dogfight an F-14 was always fun, though.
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Jun 10, 2016 21:44
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Fun fact, the Steath Bomber WAS, in fact, supposed to be stealthy during the day: the design team determined that a light pink color would make it drat near invisible even during the day. The idea was proposed to the Pentagon's project leader, who just stared at the design head for a few seconds before saying, "Paint it black." So yeah, the plane is black because the Pentagon didn't want their cool looking plane to be pink for some reason. Not that it actually matters: the stealth is meant to make the plane harder to lock on to at a distance, so the bomber can approach the long-range air defenses and whack them with missiles, allowing more conventional planes to whack the smaller range air-defenses with virtual impunity; of course, the stealth isn't going to be doing poo poo against a jet at knife-fight range. Maybe the rebels forgot about the radarstation?
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Jun 15, 2016 18:06
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Please tell me that Crowe and Trizophenie are going to do a duel at the end of the LP, so we can see who the real Scarface Squadron leader is: all hamming it up, going all "you and I are opposite sides of the same coin. When we face each other, we can finally see our true selves. There may be a resemblance, but we never face the same direction"... What's the point of being an Ace Combat fan if you aren't going to do melodramatic dog fights over fighter's honor?
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Jun 17, 2016 21:50
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Guerilla forces are almost always bad guys, 'cause they kind of have a reputation for being rapists and murderers in the real world: even in game, the boss said the crates probably had chemical weapons, so...yeah, they're bad guys. Good guys in this kind of situation generally go by the names "resistance", "partisan" or "commando"; bad guys tend to go by "guerilla", "terrorist", or "insurgent", while "revolutionary" and "rebel" can go either way.
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Jun 20, 2016 20:50
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*This* is the mission where Phoenix starts to get famous? Seriously? Kind of a let down compared to getting famous from destroying a giant laser.
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Jun 25, 2016 10:52
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The pink plane part comes from this guy:  "Article 780, a Lockheed YF-117A stealth test aircraft, first flew on June 18, 1981, with pilot Harold Farley at the controls. The planned 30-minute sortie was cut short after 13 minutes due to a canopy warning light and overheating in the exhaust duct. Article 780 was painted light gray to reduce its daytime visual signature. Ben Rich, Lockheed’s vice president for advanced projects, wanted to deliver the production F-117A aircraft in gray, but General William Creech, chief of Tactical Air Command, wanted the airplanes painted black. 'You don’t ask the commander of TAC why he wants to do something,' Rich recalled. 'He pays the bills. If the general had wanted pink, we’d have painted them pink.'" The reason he mentions the pink part is because "light gray" was actually "pinkish gray", basically a more advanced version of the WW2 Spitfire recon plane paint scheme:  "...To make sure they were rarely seen from above, these planes were painted to fly just under cloud cover. Although the planes were ideally meant to fly at sunset and sunrise, when the clouds took on a pinkish hue and made the plane completely invisible against them, they were also useful during the day. Clouds are pinker than we give them credit for...When the blue light is scattered, a good deal of it goes right back up into space, which is why the atmosphere of earth glows blue in some pictures. This filters out a good deal of the blue that gets to the clouds. The clouds scatter what they have, which is a spectrum of light with at least some of the blue filtered out, shifting the overall light ever so slightly towards red. Add to that the fact that the water droplets in clouds can diffract light at different angles, and the clouds are often rife with pastel shades of pink, orange, and green."
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Jul 2, 2016 08:31
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An ace Chinook? That's amazing. Then again, this is Ace Combat, so maybe it's actually the ACH-47A Chinook: Ah yeah baby, the Flying Fortress of Helicopters: up to five .50 Cals/7.62mms, two fixed-mounted 20mm cannons with two pod-mounted 7.62mm miniguns (or two 19-tube 2.75 inch rocket launchers instead) and a chin-mounted 40mm automatic grenade launcher. Only four ever built, and almost immediately declared a really stupid idea at a time when there weren't enough of the transport versions for regular duties, let alone some armored monster that could barely stay airborne. Still looks cool, though  .Edit:  Balls of Steel there, lad. Balls of Steel. I think you're ACE READY, ALL DAY LONG. thetruegentleman fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Jul 2, 2016 |
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Jul 2, 2016 09:00
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Psion posted:Mortars instead of howitzers actually makes some sense for an airborne gunship role, though. I saw a proposal a few years back to re-gun the AC-130 with a 120mm mortar instead of the 105 howitzer. I imagine it went nowhere because taking an artillery piece and flying around with it is way more The 120mm mortar was determined to be unsuited for side-firing applications, presumably because it had to be breech loaded. Personally though, I suspect either the mortar just couldn't match the rate of fire the 105 can manage with whatever modifications the mortar needed to work, or the military was planning on replacing the bigger gun altogether with missiles or lasers, only to find that the replacements didn't work.
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Jul 5, 2016 20:07
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I can't tell if Crow is just super excited to explain what this game is to every commentator, or if this is a clever ploy to prevent the possibility of future game spoilers. Anyway, the Rafale is the rule, not the exception: European countries don't develop weapons together very well, with someone always either backing out due to financial constraints or because they plan to make In fact, the French army itself wasn't armed with a modern MBT until the Leclerc (1991), which itself wouldn't have been made without the UAE ordering 436, which was actually ten more tanks than France itself intended to buy. France even went so far as to develop a series of heavily armed cars as cheap anti-tank weapons for about 30 years, which got axed when the AMX 10 sold so poorly (presumably due to the advent of IFVs) that France was forced to use them itself. Of course, France isn't the only country guilty of this: the Saab JAS 39 Gripen fighter has a similar origin, and Heckler & Koch and Franchi practically survive on exports, along with most European arms companies. It's a major catch 22: the EU countries all have such small military budgets that they really need to share development expenses...but they also all rely on exports to sustain their industry, so the joint development projects are continually sabotaged out of fear of losing arms sales.
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Jul 20, 2016 21:46
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So, now that we're at the end, I can't help but think someone was really hoping to remake or expand on Ace Combat COFFIN. 3: Electrosphere (AC:3 Japanese version spoilers. Yes, there is a major difference between the English and Japanese versions): 1. ZOE isn't just an AI that's crazy good at flying; it actively holds a grudge against Phoenix, and it overcomes its fail-safes to try and kill him. 2. ZOE hacks Scarface's flight computer; NEMO can hack even better in AC:3. 3. In AC:3, Nemo can't actually target several people before the end missions. He was actively learning how to fly from at least one of them, much like ZOE did from Phoenix, and probably learned from the others as well. 4. The ending song from Legacy has a particularly interesting bit: "Why do you still challenge me? You can't win, it's not your destiny. Like the moth who flies into the flame, you won't return, you'll lose your name". Consider it in context with the above, and it plays out like this: ZOE attacks Phoenix and loses, but oddly enough, ZOE keeps attacking Pheonix even well after it should have recognized it had reached its limit. As an end result, the project is canceled, and ZOE loses its name... And yet, the program seems to have continued to exist, as eventually, the "gently caress ethics" branch of Gründer forms Neucom and re-starts development of AI based planes in the hopes of creating a kind of "super pilot", essentially reincarnating ZOE as NEMO (the name NEMO itself is "no one" in Latin. Incidentally, I don't remember anyone in AC:3 actually call the player anything other than "you"). Like ZOE, NEMO is practically uncontrollable, only this time, the person developing it doesn't really care, so long as it carries out his own grudge. 5. Scarface's plane and the Delphinus are both in the far end of the Aircraft Tree in Ace Combat: Infinity, and the Delphinus was (apparently) developed from...this, which looks rather similar to a cross between the FALKEN and the XFA-27:  Delphinus (only NEUCOM plane)  Scarface XFA-27  Oddly enough, Nemo doesn't appear, although all the other UPO fighers do... 
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Aug 1, 2016 03:49
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Mr. Fortitude posted:You know, I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was thinking that the ZOEs were some kind of really early prototype for what would eventually become Nemo. I also wouldn't mind a remake of AC 3 where it has more callbacks to the other Strangereal games and makes it feel less like the odd one out of the series but then, I'd also love HD remasters of Ace Combat 4, 5 and 0 as well as Ace Combat 6 to be released on anything other than the 360 and that isn't going to happen anytime soon either. Yeah, Ace Combat 3 is already surprisingly good, so I really hope they address it again someday, and actually let the events play out.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:14
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