Game Moments: Dogfighting With Death
As long-time readers (all four of 'em) know, aside from adventure games and RPGs, one of my favorite genres is combat flight sims. Once upon a time I even pursued a career in the Air Force (hey, it helped pay for college!) with hopes of being a fighter pilot. That wasn't to be - but I've been a fan of virtual combat flying ever since.

One of the first 'realistic' air combat sims for personal computers was "Jet," by SubLogic (the guys that did the original Flight Simulator that eventually became Microsoft Flight Simulator). There were a couple others I enjoyed - including a World War I mode in the aforementioned Flight Simulator, and games like F-15 Strike Eagle by Microprose. Jet's air combat mode kept score - and allowed me to compare my score against those of my friends at school. And so competitive air combat began.

Later, I managed to hook up two computers to play Falcon 3.0 with a friend. The game took several minutes to synchronize information between two machines even over a null-modem connection, so we borrowed rules of engagement I'd heard about on USENET (this was still before the World Wide Web had hit mainstream) - the planes pass each other first, wings level, before the fight was on. This was to help insure a fair fight, and to prolong the fights (to help make that ten-minute-long synchronization phase worthwhile).

While I played some combat sims from other eras, but for modern air combat my drug of choice went to the Jane's series (specifically ATF Gold), and then to Falcon 4.0. By the time ATF Gold came out, competing over the Internet had come of age. There were online squadrons. And online tournament ladders. Now was the time to really show what I was made of!

My discovery was that it might have been a good thing I'd never become a fighter pilot in the real world.

Now, I wasn't bad - years of reading, playing sims, and competing against AI opponents definitely helped land me in the middle of the pack. But if the bullets and missiles had been real, I'd have been dead. But when I was competing regularly, I often found myself in the top 20, and I think I cracked the top 10 once or twice. And every once in a while, I got to compete against the guys in the top three positions.

There were about four or five virtual pilots who took turns in these slots, depending on the week. Flying against them taught me that I still had much to learn. I could score the occasional victory against them, but never the requisite two-out-of-three match points to move my own position. It was clear they belonged in a different league from me.

But there was one pilot who never rotated out of the top three positions, and was almost never bumped even to second place, week after week. His callsign was "Death." On the forums, he was soft-spoken, unassuming, supportive, and terse. In the virtual skies, he became his callsign. I never beat him even once. I am not sure I even managed to hit his aircraft with a desperate snapshot ever. He was in a class by himself, as far as I was concerned.

Now, hardcore simmers are a different breed of gamer, probably closer to the hardcore "roleplayers" than either group would like to admit. They derive satisfaction by immersing themselves in the world and in the role of a pilot from whatever era they are simulating. They don't want the details abstracted away - they want to deal with all the factors a real pilot would have had to go through. Even the tedium. They usually want as much realism as can be crammed through the restriction of a 17" monitor, the more merit their recreation holds. It's not about the gaming - it's about the experience, and the mastering of real-world skills - no matter how useless or obsolete said real-world skills might be. And they thrive on details - because the better you get, the more important those details become.

And if, for some bizarre reason, those arcane real-world skills became a matter of survival, Death would have been the last man standing. And I only assume he was a man - I never flew with him with voice chat enabled, but he never contradicted the assumption of his masculinity. So I continue to use that gender when referencing him. He was simply flawless in every move he made. He had the details down. At least, he had them down far better than me.

The old rules adopted by the Internet simmers for Falcon 3.0 still applied, as they led to more exciting dogfights. While BVR (Beyond Visual Range) missile shots may rule the day in real-world combats, virtual combat pilots like their competition to be tests of flying prowess, not the luck of the draw for spoofing missiles at long range. Mind you - the top pilots are also very, very good at dodging missiles, too. But beyond a certain point, too much of the missile fight comes down to luck. For these kinds of competitions, it was all about the knife fight.

Pilots would fly at each other almost head-on, at the same altitude. The rules dictated that you had to have your wings perfectly level until they crossed the "9-3" position (9 o'clock / 3 o'clock). Many of the less skilled pilots would fudge this part of the game. They'd begin their roll just a little bit early, or come in just a little bit more altitude. A tiny bit of this was unavoidable - at a combined closure rate of something like 800 knots, small inconsistencies are unavoidable. Too egregious of a violation, and the competitor might call the fight off, demanding a second pass. For those combatants who tried to get an edge in the combat by cutting their fuel levels (and thus their aircraft weight) down to the bone, this was a dangerous call.

Death (and the other top-scoring pilots) tended to forgive all but the most blatant violations of the fight-entry protocol, and they always made perfect, by-the-book passes themselves. Nobody would be able to taint their claims of victory with suspicion of wrongdoing. And if their competitors felt they had to fudge the rules a little - well, that probably meant the offending pilot's skill was actually below that of their current ranking, because they'd relied heavily on fudging the opening game to win. And those little tricks wouldn't help them one bit.

My few dogfights against Death were eye-openers. There were no tricks to his flying. At least none that I could detect. But high-level play in games like Falcon were rarely about tricks or surprise moves. These guys knew 'em, and they would pull them off if the opportunity presented itself. And they knew to anticipate them in their opponents. No, at this level of play it was all about perfection in flying. Making the perfect turn in the viper in Falcon 4.0 was both art and science. It's about finding the perfect balance between turn radius, turn speed, maintaining altitude, and maintaining airspeed for whatever tactical situation you find yourself in. Its about like patting your head, rubbing your tummy, reciting poetry, and walking a tightrope at the same time.

Beginning pilots who just try to yank-and-bank to turn as hard as they can soon find themselves believing that their opponent is flying a totally different aircraft from heir own - one that isn't bucking, refusing to turn, and trying hard to fall out of the sky. But for the top competitors, it was all about who made the fewest mistakes in their flying. Turn too aggressively, turn too little, apply too much or too little throttle, fail to bring your nose up or down just enough to make the exact trade of altitude for airspeed, and your mistakes would compound. It was a race to see who'd build up the most tiny mistakes the fastest, with the winner earning himself a "silk landing" (meaning a landing with a silk parachute) or worse.

Death didn't make mistakes. Or rather, I'm sure he did - but his mistakes were so tiny as to be imperceptable to me. My measure of success became how long I could keep him away from making a shot. But each pass, each turn, brought him a little closer to my six (6:00 position - right behind me). I'd pull every trick I knew. I once even tried to dive down into the weeds, forcing a different fight from one he was used to - one where loss of altitude was not an option.

It didn't help. Every turn I made, he'd make a fraction better. Although combats really felt like one long, changing, evolving turn. Either way - he did it better. He made fewer mistakes. When I was flying what seemed to me to be perfectly, I'd note it only by seeing him not gain as much on my six.

But inevitably, inexorably, he'd get closer and closer to that six-o'clock position, and I'd eventually hear the metallic ping-clank of bullets ripping through the airframe, accompanied by flashing lights and the warning siren. If the damage wasn't enough to stop me from flying, it didn't matter. Another burst would follow up shortly. Ejecting was optional.

Death would type "GG, thanks" at my second defeat."Good Game, thanks." Whether this was literally an acknowledgment that I'd given him something resembling a run for his money, or simply the politeness that combat simmers give each other as a matter of course ( a far cry from the trash-talking of many online games), I'll never know. I'd return the acknowledgment, which usually doubled as a goodbye. We'd log out, he'd no doubt forget the fight he was just in, and I'd spend the rest of the evening trying to figure out what I'd done wrong, and go back into the sim to practice what I'd learned. I never got to the point where I could defeat Death, but I noticed my own scores improving both online and against the AI.

Good Game, indeed!

Labels: Game Moments

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:30 AM (Permalink)