Blast from the Past : Joint Strike Fighter by Innerloop Studios (1997)
Hi there simmers.
I will recollect some memories on an old title, Joint Strike Fighter developed by Innerloop, and distributed by Eidos. Both are renowned houses, more so the Eidos, and both are long defunct by now.
First off, a disclaimer, disregard the "You have failed" text under most of the screenshots you will see in this article. I have deliberately crashed in order to be able to view every object in campaign world so I can take cool screenshots :). I had to create a virtual machine just to run this thing for those shots lol.
This particular title is, infact, kind of an unsung hero, a little obscure and forgotten. However, it did many things pretty good, and perhaps even ahead of it's time. Although, many of it's features were rather incomplete.
Way back then, when JSF was a whisper, had years before even which conterder will be built was chosen, when neither X-32, nor X-35 were yet flown at all, someone made a nice sim-lite for them. While obviously realism in sense of being true to real aircraft is completely out of window, flight models were pretty decent for the time. Avionics, cockpit etc of actual aircraft weren't set in stone yet back then, and, 18 years later now, apparently they still aren't :) But at least we now know JSF is F-35 and X-32 will remain an X-Plane. In game, we can fly either X-32 or X-35, but they don't really differ a whole lot.
The JSF had some interesting stuff going for it :
- It had a dynamic campaign system
- Four maps / scenarios were available
- An obscure futuristic fighter project (which, apparently still is some time in future to enter service today)
- Nice graphics & terrain for time
- Less on rails flight models and landings compared to titles of it's day
- 3D virtual cockpit where you can turn your head around AND still see your functioning instruments AND can actually, kind of click MFD buttons.
- This was bit of an easter egg, but a cheat allowed player to fly everything in game, yes, even the helicopters with... surprisingly quite helicopterish flight models (which were significantly better than contemporary helicopter "simulations" by Novalogic). Although, obviously without actual cockpits.
- Day / night / weather (and wind effects) were modeled.
Terrain geometry was pretty smooth, and it was textured pretty nicely too. Adding on top of that, weather effects and mist over terrain could also appear. It looked good and smooth from either low or high altitudes, something that doesn't always happen in sims. Besides geographic features, maps had ports and cities, which consisted of mostly decent looking rectangular 3d buildings, roads, seas, radar installations, tents, military bases, SAM sites and also trees that would appear when you are close enough to see them.
3D models for objects were detailed and accurate for it's time, although hopelessly low polygon by today's standarts, they still look distinctly like the platforms they portray. Similarly for textures and dynamic lighting effects, they were there, but are unsuprisingly low res by today's standarts. Explosions were a bit goofy looking but I guess they work. Also worth noting is animations for these models were mostly ahead of contemporary competition too Sukhois and MiG-29 s would have their nozzles open / close according to their throttle settings, control surfaces would move according to inputs, landing gear would bounce by suspension according to terrain or due to hard turns.
Besides multiplayer, there were two modes of gameplay : Dogfight was air-quake against AI opponents. You could choose distance at which enemies appear, theather and weather, having wingmen or not, guns only or with missiles too. It is an air start, never ending waves type of scenario.
Other option was the Campaign. Here, you would choose one of 4 scenarios :
- Afghanistan was the easiest, no inclement weather, less numerous and less sophisticated enemies, over a mostly desert terrain. IL-76, Tu-22M and MiG-29 are the most numerous air encounters, down on earth were some SA-3 sites and some convoys guarded by SA-13 (Strela-10) or ZSU-23 vehicles.
- Colombia was the mid ground in difficulty. Green terrain with forested mountains and some cities, with occational rain. Scenario involved drug barons getting too powerful and seizing control of government, having their own military. Interestingly, enemies operate western aircraft in form of Mirage V and F-16.
- Korea is probably among the most popular settings for a combat flight sim/game. Whole mothership of Falcon 4.0 and derivatives, F/A-18 Korea, MiG Alley are other titles that come to my mind. Korea in JSF is a lush green terrain, but it is the hard difficulty campaign with S-300 batteries and Su-27s thrown in. There are also ships of Krivak and Kiro classes.
- Kola Peninsula is the nightmare winter campaign with a big and sophisticated concentration of ships, fighters, SAM sites and whatnot. Weather is usually bleak. 2S6M Tunguska gun / missile combination air defence vehicles will accompany convoys and will patrol valuable ground targets, in addition to Shilka and Strela units. S-300 batteries are all over the place, skies are patrolled by Su-27,Su-35 and MiG-29 squadrons, guided around by A-50 AWACS.
After choosing the theater and reading the splash screen, we are greeted by main campaign screen.
In this screen we could :
- Let the game plan a flight / mission for us, or we can do this our self by adding way points on map.
- Choose our aircraft's payload. There were 4 stations for inside the internal weapon bay, but we could also opt for loading 4 more weapons under the wing hardpoints, which would cancel stealth capability of JSF. We even can choose the amount of fuel we will load.
- We could choose our wingmen, either none at all, or up to 3. Any one of 3 wingmen could be chosen from X-32, X-35 or F-22 types. Wingmen may also opt for stealth by having only internal bays loaded, or maximize payload at expense of stealth by using wing hardpoints too.
- We could read up on intel regarding targets on map.
- We could skip time for minutes / hours / days
- Finally, we could fly the mission plan we chose (or even fly withuot one)
Targets destroyed during the missions would remain so for the later missions, although some new threats could pop back up. Besides normal enemy assets, there would be some that tagged Primary, Secondary or Secret. These are assets important for succesful completion of campaigns, and their destruction is player's priority. Although, you will have to defend friendly assets as well.
The ways one would lose the campaign are :
- Too many friendly assets destroyed
- Too many aircraft lost (this include your wingmen and own aircraft too)
- Too many pilots lost (so you really should at least try to eject)
Speaking of ejection, once your pilot land on terra firma, you can actually walk around and even fire your pistol! Neat eh? Not useful for anything perhaps, but still pretty neat anyways.
Although you could quit a campaign flight anytime, only "Quit and Save" command would add into progress of campaign. And if you did not use that command when you are on a "Friendly Base" you aircraft and pilot will count as losses. So this made it important to returning to base and landing safely after finishing a mission.
As you can see, it was a pretty interesting campaign system, but also had some flaws :
- Almost no friendlies : no allied ground forces and almost no friendly combat flights besides players.
- Only player could attack ground targets
So it was kind of like being all the way back to old days of lone wolf player, vs the world setting. Campaign and progression was dynamic, but there wasn't a big living war that player partakes, it was rather a war centers around player and their actions.
If we look at multiplayer, it was Dogfight mode, but with humans instead of AI opponents. I did play it with some friends a few times in ye olde 90s / very early 2000s, and it was rather fun and intense actually.
During my short foray for taking the screenshots yesterday, I have found guns only dogfights to be surprisingly intense, it was difficult to put the pipper on target and keeping it there. As well as finding / staying with enemies. Although, this is likely compounded by the fact that looking around is nowhere even nearly as easy as we are accustomed with mouse or trackir, and we also can't zoom in or out in cockpit. Field of view is pretty narrow to be honest.
I have also found the landings to be unexpectedly challenging, again partially compounded by visibility. Still, both ground handling and landing itself does show some unexpected challenge.
When it comes to weapons and avionics, things are pretty arcadey to be honest. It is old "pick next target from a list of targets" arcade aproach in both air to air and air to ground. When a missile reach it's maximum range, it simply disappear :) this is about 18 years ago after all...
However, the flight model was much more dynamic and lively than most titles of it's day, even if quite a bit on the rails side by today's standarts.
Weapons we can load our birds include AIM-9X (which in game looks more like AIM-9B than anything), AIM-120C in air to air category, and AGM-88 HARM for SEAD, LAU-8 rocket pod for external storage, GBU-31 and 38 JDAM, CBU-97 WCMD and finally 3 versions of JSOW glide bomb with either single warhead, a few AT submunitions or many submunitions against soft targets.
Overall, the game had interesting stuff, strong for it's day, harkening to advances of today, but also felt unfinished and unpolished in many other aspects. Therefore, it never really had a huge following. It is nice to see just how far we came in both graphics and realism today from JSF, but also interesting to see just how many stuff it did right back then like having a huge, nicely detailed terrain with many active units, still with good performance, and also the dynamic campaign it had.
So with these features it had, I always have found JSF an interesting title, and wanted to share my thoughts on this little piece of flight simulation history.
I will now leave you with some screen shots, they do look quite nice for such an old title but... oh boy we came really far in 3D graphics in 18 years :)
Some Mirage prettyness...
And some Fulcrum prettyness too!
Visit this flickr album for more screenshots from JSF
I will recollect some memories on an old title, Joint Strike Fighter developed by Innerloop, and distributed by Eidos. Both are renowned houses, more so the Eidos, and both are long defunct by now.
First off, a disclaimer, disregard the "You have failed" text under most of the screenshots you will see in this article. I have deliberately crashed in order to be able to view every object in campaign world so I can take cool screenshots :). I had to create a virtual machine just to run this thing for those shots lol.
This particular title is, infact, kind of an unsung hero, a little obscure and forgotten. However, it did many things pretty good, and perhaps even ahead of it's time. Although, many of it's features were rather incomplete.
Way back then, when JSF was a whisper, had years before even which conterder will be built was chosen, when neither X-32, nor X-35 were yet flown at all, someone made a nice sim-lite for them. While obviously realism in sense of being true to real aircraft is completely out of window, flight models were pretty decent for the time. Avionics, cockpit etc of actual aircraft weren't set in stone yet back then, and, 18 years later now, apparently they still aren't :) But at least we now know JSF is F-35 and X-32 will remain an X-Plane. In game, we can fly either X-32 or X-35, but they don't really differ a whole lot.
X-32 Climbing after takeoffThe JSF had some interesting stuff going for it :
- It had a dynamic campaign system
- Four maps / scenarios were available
- An obscure futuristic fighter project (which, apparently still is some time in future to enter service today)
- Nice graphics & terrain for time
- Less on rails flight models and landings compared to titles of it's day
- 3D virtual cockpit where you can turn your head around AND still see your functioning instruments AND can actually, kind of click MFD buttons.
- This was bit of an easter egg, but a cheat allowed player to fly everything in game, yes, even the helicopters with... surprisingly quite helicopterish flight models (which were significantly better than contemporary helicopter "simulations" by Novalogic). Although, obviously without actual cockpits.
- Day / night / weather (and wind effects) were modeled.
Terrain geometry was pretty smooth, and it was textured pretty nicely too. Adding on top of that, weather effects and mist over terrain could also appear. It looked good and smooth from either low or high altitudes, something that doesn't always happen in sims. Besides geographic features, maps had ports and cities, which consisted of mostly decent looking rectangular 3d buildings, roads, seas, radar installations, tents, military bases, SAM sites and also trees that would appear when you are close enough to see them.
Mirage V and IL-76 it escorts over Colombian terrain from down low, Still looks damn fine if you ask me!3D models for objects were detailed and accurate for it's time, although hopelessly low polygon by today's standarts, they still look distinctly like the platforms they portray. Similarly for textures and dynamic lighting effects, they were there, but are unsuprisingly low res by today's standarts. Explosions were a bit goofy looking but I guess they work. Also worth noting is animations for these models were mostly ahead of contemporary competition too Sukhois and MiG-29 s would have their nozzles open / close according to their throttle settings, control surfaces would move according to inputs, landing gear would bounce by suspension according to terrain or due to hard turns.
Besides multiplayer, there were two modes of gameplay : Dogfight was air-quake against AI opponents. You could choose distance at which enemies appear, theather and weather, having wingmen or not, guns only or with missiles too. It is an air start, never ending waves type of scenario.
Other option was the Campaign. Here, you would choose one of 4 scenarios :
- Afghanistan was the easiest, no inclement weather, less numerous and less sophisticated enemies, over a mostly desert terrain. IL-76, Tu-22M and MiG-29 are the most numerous air encounters, down on earth were some SA-3 sites and some convoys guarded by SA-13 (Strela-10) or ZSU-23 vehicles.
- Colombia was the mid ground in difficulty. Green terrain with forested mountains and some cities, with occational rain. Scenario involved drug barons getting too powerful and seizing control of government, having their own military. Interestingly, enemies operate western aircraft in form of Mirage V and F-16.
- Korea is probably among the most popular settings for a combat flight sim/game. Whole mothership of Falcon 4.0 and derivatives, F/A-18 Korea, MiG Alley are other titles that come to my mind. Korea in JSF is a lush green terrain, but it is the hard difficulty campaign with S-300 batteries and Su-27s thrown in. There are also ships of Krivak and Kiro classes.
- Kola Peninsula is the nightmare winter campaign with a big and sophisticated concentration of ships, fighters, SAM sites and whatnot. Weather is usually bleak. 2S6M Tunguska gun / missile combination air defence vehicles will accompany convoys and will patrol valuable ground targets, in addition to Shilka and Strela units. S-300 batteries are all over the place, skies are patrolled by Su-27,Su-35 and MiG-29 squadrons, guided around by A-50 AWACS.
After choosing the theater and reading the splash screen, we are greeted by main campaign screen.
In this screen we could :
- Let the game plan a flight / mission for us, or we can do this our self by adding way points on map.
- Choose our aircraft's payload. There were 4 stations for inside the internal weapon bay, but we could also opt for loading 4 more weapons under the wing hardpoints, which would cancel stealth capability of JSF. We even can choose the amount of fuel we will load.
- We could choose our wingmen, either none at all, or up to 3. Any one of 3 wingmen could be chosen from X-32, X-35 or F-22 types. Wingmen may also opt for stealth by having only internal bays loaded, or maximize payload at expense of stealth by using wing hardpoints too.
- We could read up on intel regarding targets on map.
- We could skip time for minutes / hours / days
- Finally, we could fly the mission plan we chose (or even fly withuot one)
 |
| Target Intel Window |
Targets destroyed during the missions would remain so for the later missions, although some new threats could pop back up. Besides normal enemy assets, there would be some that tagged Primary, Secondary or Secret. These are assets important for succesful completion of campaigns, and their destruction is player's priority. Although, you will have to defend friendly assets as well.
The ways one would lose the campaign are :
- Too many friendly assets destroyed
- Too many aircraft lost (this include your wingmen and own aircraft too)
- Too many pilots lost (so you really should at least try to eject)
Speaking of ejection, once your pilot land on terra firma, you can actually walk around and even fire your pistol! Neat eh? Not useful for anything perhaps, but still pretty neat anyways.
Although you could quit a campaign flight anytime, only "Quit and Save" command would add into progress of campaign. And if you did not use that command when you are on a "Friendly Base" you aircraft and pilot will count as losses. So this made it important to returning to base and landing safely after finishing a mission.
As you can see, it was a pretty interesting campaign system, but also had some flaws :
- Almost no friendlies : no allied ground forces and almost no friendly combat flights besides players.
- Only player could attack ground targets
So it was kind of like being all the way back to old days of lone wolf player, vs the world setting. Campaign and progression was dynamic, but there wasn't a big living war that player partakes, it was rather a war centers around player and their actions.
If we look at multiplayer, it was Dogfight mode, but with humans instead of AI opponents. I did play it with some friends a few times in ye olde 90s / very early 2000s, and it was rather fun and intense actually.
During my short foray for taking the screenshots yesterday, I have found guns only dogfights to be surprisingly intense, it was difficult to put the pipper on target and keeping it there. As well as finding / staying with enemies. Although, this is likely compounded by the fact that looking around is nowhere even nearly as easy as we are accustomed with mouse or trackir, and we also can't zoom in or out in cockpit. Field of view is pretty narrow to be honest.
I have also found the landings to be unexpectedly challenging, again partially compounded by visibility. Still, both ground handling and landing itself does show some unexpected challenge.
When it comes to weapons and avionics, things are pretty arcadey to be honest. It is old "pick next target from a list of targets" arcade aproach in both air to air and air to ground. When a missile reach it's maximum range, it simply disappear :) this is about 18 years ago after all...
However, the flight model was much more dynamic and lively than most titles of it's day, even if quite a bit on the rails side by today's standarts.
Weapons we can load our birds include AIM-9X (which in game looks more like AIM-9B than anything), AIM-120C in air to air category, and AGM-88 HARM for SEAD, LAU-8 rocket pod for external storage, GBU-31 and 38 JDAM, CBU-97 WCMD and finally 3 versions of JSOW glide bomb with either single warhead, a few AT submunitions or many submunitions against soft targets.
 |
| Some one needs to have that AIM-9X checked, it looks more like an AIM-9B or R-3S :) |
Overall, the game had interesting stuff, strong for it's day, harkening to advances of today, but also felt unfinished and unpolished in many other aspects. Therefore, it never really had a huge following. It is nice to see just how far we came in both graphics and realism today from JSF, but also interesting to see just how many stuff it did right back then like having a huge, nicely detailed terrain with many active units, still with good performance, and also the dynamic campaign it had.
So with these features it had, I always have found JSF an interesting title, and wanted to share my thoughts on this little piece of flight simulation history.
I will now leave you with some screen shots, they do look quite nice for such an old title but... oh boy we came really far in 3D graphics in 18 years :)
Some Mirage prettyness...
And some Fulcrum prettyness too!
Visit this flickr album for more screenshots from JSF
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