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Developed by Microprose in the early 90's, B-17 Flying Fortress is one of the only Flight Simulators ever produced that attempts to replicate the experience of flying (and utilizing) a strategic bomber.The game consists of a series of randomized bombing missions over occupied Europe during WWII. The player takes control of the entire 10-man crew of a B-17 bomber, one of the most mass-produced allied aircraft of the war. These four-engine tin cans are slow and ungainly, but their massive bomb load-out, numerous defensive guns, and sturdy construction made them extremely successful in bombing the crap out of Nazi Germany's industrial and logistical capacity.Each mission begins on the tarmac at an airfield somewhere in southern England. The player must take off, together with up to five other bombers, form up above the airfield, and proceed towards its target. Navigation is done manually, by looking out a window (there are several) or gun emplacement (there are plenty) at the ground below, and comparing it to the flight map. Along the way, enemy aircraft might come up to try and shoot the bombers down. Assuming you survive, you would then need to brave heavy flak over the target area, and use the famous Norden Sight to accurately drop your bombs on the target. Then, it's a slow limp home through even more enemy fighters, followed by a tough landing at (hopefully) your home airfield. A mission can last over an hour of flight, but fortunately it is possible to compress time during the uneventful parts, stopping only to fight, bomb, or recalculate your position.While the game isn't terribly realistic, it is certainly not an arcade game. Even an uneventful mission can be decidedly tricky. On the one hand, the player needs to keep an eye out for all sorts of things, like engine malfunctions or navigational errors, throughout the entire flight. Once enemy fighters show up, it's almost vital to take control of one of the many gun turrets and help shoot the enemy down. At the target, it may sometimes be necessary to drop bombs through thick cloud cover (practically guessing where the target is), and the norden sight is a difficult piece of machinery to master. Injuries on board need to be treated, and it's the player who must assign a crew member to treat another, or perhaps even pull an injured man out of his post and replace him with an able crewmate at an important position on the plane. Then the engines start going on fire, fuel is leaking out, half the crew are bleeding to death, and you're still trying to get back to the English Channel to avoid having to bail out over Germany. Even if you actually manage to get to your home base, expect at least one wheel to refuse to drop properly, in which case one of the crew have to manually crank it down into position. An hour-long mission suddenly sounds like one hell of a nightmare. This is Truth in Television, to be sure.This game is probably the debut of several tropes in video games, although practically no attempts were made to repeat any of them. Since strategic bombers aren't considered as cool as fighter-planes, a lot of potential shown by this game was not capitalized upon. It featured realistic navigation (by comparing the ground below to a map), crude technology and "squad" command (giving orders to the rest of your bomber wing), as well as managing a crew of ten people with various skills and responsibilities. RPG Elements are also included - any of the crew-members that you are not currently controlling will attempt to do their job to the best of their ability, with their skills governing how well the AI performs. It was even possible to take a "back-seat" approach and let your men do all the work on their own, although during the early missions they normally sucked. With time, surviving crew-members would get increasingly better at what they're doing, especially if you yourself performed well while controlling them. Be careful not to get too attached to a crewmember, as this is a very dangerous line of work to anyone on-board.In the early 2000's, capitalizing on advances in 3D technology, Microprose released the sequel: "B-17 Flying Fortress: the Mighty Eightth". Superior to its predecessor visually, it was also ridiculously accurate with both the flight model as well as how things actually went on the plane itself. The detail on board the aircraft was nothing short of amazing, to the point where less hard-core players could hardly even cope with the first few missions. The sequel introduced much larger bomber formations, better damage modeling, and the ability to fly both P-51 escorts and German Messerschmidt interceptors, also extremely well portrayed. In addition it was possible to take the role of a Squadron Commander, allowing the player to actually reconnoiter and choose targets for bombing raids, then go out and fly the planes to bomb those targets. The manual for this game was easily over 100 pages long, with large parts of it dedicated to learning how to fine-tune the goddamned engines. Fortunately, the settings could still be toned down considerably for easier play, but this is still a very hard-core game.
This work features examples of the following tropes:
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