Skyfox

SkyfoxThe Game: The invasion is on, and as usual, you’re the only thing standing between Earth and alien domination. (Ever wonder why no one else is answering their pagers at times like these when the call goes out?) Fortunately, your aircraft is a kick-ass piece of military hardware, capable everything from breaking the sound barrier to hovering, helicopter-like, over a friendly installation to defend from an onslaught of enemy tanks. But the enemy makes up for its occasionally lackluster hardware with impressive numbers – and whether the hail of gunfire is coming from their tanks, their jets, or their motherships (which look suspiciously like little Comet Empires from Star Blazers), you can rack up a fatal amount of damage pretty quickly. (Electronic Arts, 1984)

Memories: To my day, Skyfox is still my favorite combat flight sim. Actually, it’s one of my all-time favorite flight sims, combat or otherwise. SkyfoxThere are quite a few controls to memorize, but not overpoweringly so – it’s still a more instinctive control scheme than 90% of anything for the Playstation these days. And none of the controls were superfluous – a good example of an excellent layout for a keyboard + joystick game.

I still get a chuckle out of how, when you climb sufficiently high in low-altitude mode, you go into a white-out cloud bank for a few seconds – while the game loads the high-altitude part of the game from the disk!

4 quarters!I hate to sound like I’m on the “my old stuff is better than your new stuff” bandwagon – after all, I do like quite a few modern games (check Pixel Fiction if you don’t believe me) – but I find myself bemoaning the fact that games today aren’t this good – or this relatively simple.

Skyfox

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