Star Road

I know a few people who play Digital Combat Simulator, which is a simulation in the truest sense of the word: it makes the self-proclaimed “Real Driving Simulator” Gran Turismo look like Ridge Racer. For example, it can take 20 minutes just to turn on your plane, and then another half hour to fly from your base to the front line. Oh you just got shot down? Okay, we’ll see you in an hour. For the guys who strap into this sim, realism is the point; for me, it’s a burden.

I just want to fly around and blow stuff up. Luckily the PS1 has quite a few flight sims to choose from, even if you just look at the first year of its release. This is where Agile Warrior F-111X comes in. This game was released on November 2nd, 1995 in the USA and Europe; the Playstation itself was released in September 1995 in North America and Europe (but had been out since December 1994 in Japan), so keep that in mind when we’re looking at the technological limitations of this “combat simulator”.

Yeah, in this context I’d say it’s a simulator, as it does have many realistic features. The majority of the weapons and aircraft in this game are from real life, like the the Sidewinder missiles we’re firing at these Dassault Mirages.

Like most simulations, Agile Warrior F-111X has an unforgiving start and a very steep learning curve. In fact the learning curve is so steep that I almost gave up permanently after my first hour. But luckily, the developers knew their game was ridiculously hard, so they did what was natural at the time: put a bunch of cheats into the game.

Armed with this power, I jumped back in to this game with button combos that would do things like refill your health and ammo, or order a bombing strike from a B-1B. There’s even one that makes you invisible to all enemies but that kinda sucks the fun out of the game.

This game runs at a very impressive (for the PS1) high resolution of 512×240 and looks very good, especially for a 1995 game. However, as usual, I can’t resist the allure of cranking up the internal resolution and seeing all the detail. On an emulator note, I also turned on “CPU Mode” under Duckstation PGXP settings, which is not usually needed but it fixes the gaps in the terrain in this game.

Here’s a rare screenshot of the third person view; it looks so much cooler, but I rarely used it. For one, the outside view doesn’t show important stats like your ammo and health, but perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t give you an aiming reticle in this view, which makes it much harder to shoot down anything. There is a real plane designated F-111, but it looks completely different; the plane in the game looks like an amalgamation of several “fifth-generation fighter” designs, which is cool because this game is from 1995 and that generation of planes was released in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The F-111X seems to share some characteristics of the Lockheed YF-22, which was the prototype of the F-22. Over 30 years later, it’s easy to forget how cutting-edge this game was trying to be.

Another small but relevant reason I switched to first person view is an old racing game trick: the game runs at a bit better framerate if it doesn’t have to render your vehicle on the screen too. Not helped by the game’s high resolution, the framerate sometimes does sit at 30 but it can easily drop to 9 when lots of things are happening on screen at once. Unfortunately, overclocking the emulated CPU just speeds up the game, so a very low framerate is just part of the experience here.

The story is pretty stupid overall; it’s the same old generic mil-sim drivel about how somebody we don’t like invaded somebody we do like, so we have to show up and kill everyone and destroy everything. I’ve never had any military fantasies, so I can easily ignore that and get right down to business. You’re mostly blowing up the usual stuff like buildings, tanks, and planes, but there’s one objective where you have to blow up this space shuttle–as it’s taking off!

It’s unclear what some of these guys are doing–if anything–but it’s still cool to fly around friendlies. This AWACS plane is missing a couple details, but it appears to be a Boeing E-3 Sentry.

As mentioned earlier, one of the cheats is to order a bombing strike from a B-1. Whoa! It even sounds right too: these planes have an insanely powerful and deep tone from their jet engines that sounds like rolling thunder, and this game actually does a pretty good job of representing it.

Sometimes the draw distance is actually not bad, and there is a ton of action on the screen.

Most of the time though, the draw distance is comically poor. There is an afterburner mode if you double tap the throttle when you are already at full, but it’s practically worthless: the plane flies so fast that you arrive everywhere just as it’s being drawn on the screen!

Every level has a set of objectives, which consist entirely of things you need to destroy. Thankfully, you get a handy map overlay to let you see where they are. The other thing the map is helpful for is to see where you’re going; once you fly to the edge of the map you just get “stuck” there, ostensibly flying but not making any forward progress. With such a short draw distance, it’s virtually impossible to fly anywhere on visual navigation alone.

The main thing that takes this game away from pure simulation territory are these power-ups, offering Armor, Fuel or Ammo. This adds a bit of strategy to the game; for example, it’s not a good idea to go around blowing up all the fuel tanks first, because you’ll need to fuel up later in the mission. On a side note, in some images (like the one above) there are odd black shapes of varying sizes. They aren’t holes in the geometry; that’s flying shrapnel from something blowing up.

This type of strategizing, plus learning the controls and techniques, gives the game its steep learning curve. At the beginning of the game, I was frequently using the “refill weapons and armor” cheat, leaving fuel as the main variable and learning to strategically bomb fuel tanks and trucks. That helped me get over the initial hump of difficulty, and soon enough I found myself using the cheat less and less.

You can even blow up ships! They have most of the typical war biomes in this game, although sadly no urban warfare (probably due to technical limitations).

Everything in this game is really nicely modeled, which was definitely not a given back in 1995. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all you get: the environments are quite sparse.

So about that stupid story. It’s told entirely through these scenes in the briefing room that precede every mission, where your commanding officer gives a briefing of the mission ahead.

It’s actually fairly informative, as they show you the main targets and things you need to watch out for.

Ah, there we go: one-a-them oil rigs that sarge mentioned back at base.

I would love to have some twisty roads in the desert. Wait not that kind of twisty road!

This level is a trip: a Saudi base has been hijacked by “radical fundamentalists”, so we have to shoot down the F-117’s they stole. The USAF did station them out there for the Gulf War, so I guess they were still lying around a few years later.

What a badass plane. And of course, your lock-on weapons don’t work against this stealth aircraft.

This is your main screen where you choose your mission. Interesting that Next Generation magazine claimed this game only has “half a dozen” (six?) levels when it actually has ten.

Okay the draw distance is bad in this game, but the Kazakhstan level is comically bad. Watch out for that tree!

My main gaming setup at home is a PC connected to a Samsung S90D, their flagship TV. I also use a Macbook Pro to work on this site. On those setups, this night-time level was roughly the same as all the other levels, with sparse details and a low draw distance. But as I write this article on my old Lenovo P1 laptop which has a screen with very poor black levels, I can barely see anything in these pics! This must have been a nightmare in the mid 90’s, when many of us were still playing on TV’s from the 1980’s.

Uh oh…we have nukes. Pretty cool though how they replicated the fireball and subsequent mushroom cloud. They seemed to have combined a couple weapons here; “B61” is the name of a family of nukes and the original B61 was a gravity bomb. However, “SRAM” stands for Short Range Attack Missile; the B61 family of SRAM’s had model numbers like “AGM-53” and “AGM-69”.

Moving on to Libya, we are fighting against AC-130 gunships, the ground attack variant of the C-130 Hercules cargo plane. Unfortunately, this is not one of the better plane models, because it doesn’t look very much like a C-130.

I love when you get a plane super close up like this. And are those school buses in the background..? Yep: the briefing warns you about retrofitted civilian vehicles.

It shouldn’t be funny, but there’s something about the way that napalm (the green and yellow canister) flings out of your plane that’s just comical.

There’s a C-5 Galaxy that flies around and drops tanks. Given the logistics, it’s amazing that is actually a real thing.

Next we are over in Mexico, although it looks very similar to the Burma level from earlier. Ultimately this game does get a bit repetitive: each of the 10 missions is roughly the same as far as objectives go, and by this point the level designs start to repeat as well.

However, that’s a bit like deriding a racing game because all you do is drive around in a circle and all the tracks have black tarmac and grandstands. You play a racing game for the driving experience, and similarly you play a combat flight sim for the combat experience. So despite the repetition, I was still enjoying the game. By this point I had finally escaped the initial difficulty curve and was hardly using the health/ammo refill cheat, if at all.

What does get tiring is the low draw distance and sparseness of the environment; you spend a lot of time in the HUD map figuring out where you need to go, because it’s literally impossible to see anywhere past your immediate vicinity.

This level is also near Mexico but is suddenly completely different. Being the “Gulf of Mexico” level, a lot of this one takes place over water.

And whoa, check out that skybox: those are some rad clouds. I wish they had leaned into this more; it’s a work of fiction, so the missions don’t all have to take place in the middle of the day (or at night). I wish more levels were around dawn or dusk like this one.

If you cause enough damage to an enemy airplane, the pilot will bail out and you can watch him parachute down.

There’s no specific incentive to do so, but you can also unload your machine gun on these guys, and they vanish in a pretty gnarly explosion of blood and guts.

For the ground troops who are armed, you do have an incentive to shoot them down. Not only can they attack you, but…

…they also might drop a power-up after you kill them!

Finally we’re at the last mission, and this one lands pretty close to home–literally! “Nellis Air Force Base. I’m sure you remember our Red Flag exercises out there.” I do! Those exercises are a very interesting time to be around the Air Force base, because you get to see some of the more exotic USAF metal flying around, as well as planes from other militaries around the world.

The mission itself doesn’t take place at Nellis though; it actually takes place at Area 51. This plot point is so stupid that I have to quote it verbatim: “Recent budget cuts have created a rebellion among high-ranking covert operatives working at Area 51. They have taken control of Groom Lake Air Base and the Aurora project. They are planning to sell the Aurora spy plane on the international black market. This is a direct threat to our national security.” Wow. The upshot? We need to destroy Groom Lake Air Base and everything there.

Fitting for the last mission, this one takes place at sunset.

They fully lean into the Area 1 mythos, featuring exotic craft like flying saucers.

There are also B-2 Spirits, which are huge planes. This formation was pretty rad to see, and also convenient because blowing up the middle plane would take out the rest.

Here’s some other type of UFO in the popular triangle shape.

Sadly, you have to blow up the entire base. Just like millions of other people, I’ve always wondered what the hell they are working on out there.

After that you get the usual “MISSION COMPLETE” message, and then it goes straight into this FMV. “Well done, men. This one’s on SOCOM.”

You then get a video of a blonde doing a stripper-like dance inside the briefing room. How delightfully 90’s!

The end. Straight out of the box, this game is hard to like: there’s a huge learning curve, and the difficulty can be quite frustrating. It’s a simulation: your skills genuinely dictate the outcome, which makes the difficulty depth more understandable. Still, they don’t even give you so much as a training mission before sending you straight into the main game to die: such was the simplicity of Playstation games in 1995.

Of course, the developers knew full well how hard the game was, proven by the range of built-in cheats. These days emulators can also use cheats, but it was fun to stick with the original experience of pausing the game and banging in arcane button codes. Combined with occasional use of the rewind function in the emulator, this game became a very enjoyable experience. It was a nice quick shot of combat adrenaline, and now I want to check out Air Combat and Warhawk, 1995’s other combat flight sim standouts.