MicroProse Returns with the Mighty Eighth, a 10-Player WWII B-17 Simulator

This includes the original MicroProse Mighty 8th (https://retroism.com/b-17-flying-fortress-the-mighty-8th/), along with the Silent Service games, F-117A and F-19, the original Sid Meier's Colonization and a bunch of others. Though there are some notable MicroProse titles missing from their catalog: M1 Tank Platoon, the original Gunship and Gunship 2000, and F-15 Strike Eagle III all jump out at me.

Then a history section that starts off with "American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey and Sid Meier in 1982."

And waaaaayyyyyyyyy down in the footer? Contact info in Australia.

Nothing about who runs it now. Nothing about their personal relationship with Microprose or the general genre of "war-themed games". Nothing about how delighted they are to be able to revive this much-loved brand and their hopes to carry it forwards to new glory.

----

In their subreddit, I did find a link to a Kotaku interview with the CEO of New Microprose: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/05/the-australian-who-brought... - he used to run the Australian division of the folks behind ArmA, including a spin-off designed for military training, which feels like something he should be crowing about in the "who are we" section. He does claim to have been profoundly influenced by Original Microprose's games.

Kotaku asks him about the rights to Original Microprose stuff and his response is a whole lot of corporatespeak that I parse as "hahaha yeah that sure would be nice, but nope. Maybe someday if we can cut a deal with the various companies that own them, don't hold your breath though."

Of course, you could also speed time up if you wanted. But a "base frequency" of real time means the game play is not centered around "story mode." In simulation it means the player experiences the simulation at the same pace real world events might unfold.

The quintessential game of the period might be Microsoft's Flight Simulator. Which is only a game in the sense that the consequences of a bad day don't cost very much.

House of the Dying Sun (https://store.steampowered.com/app/283160/House_of_the_Dying...) might be the closest thing going I'm aware of on the current market, as an arcade space fighter game in VR. Doesn't have the same theming, but it's at least space fighters doing space fighter things in space!

For me, the question of how you'd do a modern TIE Fighter remake becomes "how do you make assumptions about how space combat works in your game-universe that line up with the Star Wars films, and also lead to fun gameplay?" Since the space combat from Star Wars (at least ANH) was basically "Dambusters, in space!" you can draw lots of inspiration from World War 2-era aviation and combat. However, given an environment where gravity doesn't play and everything has ridiculous thrust-to-mass ratios, you lose some of the interesting bits re: altitude/energy trades and everything just turns into a "Pull as hard as you can" circle fight in the within-visual-range (WVR) / basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) space, which is where most of the iconic Star Wars dogfights-in-space happen. Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat isn't really a thing in Star Wars, because Rule of Cool indicates that dogfights are cooler than slinging missiles at each other based on sensors. In the films, the writers/VFX people created the scenes they wanted by creative fiat -- in a game you need the mechanics to drive to the experience you want, and that's a challenge given Star Wars' apparent assumptions about how space combat works.

Of course there's all sorts of interesting assumptions you could make instead, but then you're just making a space arcade-sim game, not a Star Wars game.

Nope, I've clearly never thought about this. At all. Clearly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MicroProse_games

I assume the same thing exists on real combat planes now.

(Of course these are next to useless in space combat sims, as in most games ships maneuver like fighter planes with zero inertia. They're also useless in real air combat these days, as everything is done with missiles from beyond visual range. But sure looked nice on Top Gun.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DREz7qI8xRk

They’re plenty of fun but not really important in terms of illuminating anything about the era of flight and combat they reproduce.

Good VR titles force you to move many more muscle groups than keyboard/mouse or controller games. Your brain stays much more engaged when you have to, e.g., duck out of the way of an incoming projectile.

For games where VR is tacked on, or not deliberately handled, it can be a vomit fest. Playing Half Life 2, for instance, is possible in VR but it's very unpleasant. Playing Half Life Alyx, which was built from the ground up to be a VR experience, is incredible.

Other parts are downright dangerous. Apparently the headset being close to your eyes causes pupils to involuntarily dilate right as you are shining a bright light into them, creating really nasty eye strain problems for VR game developers and presumably later for their customers. Addictive behaviors are almost certainly more addictive in VR; this is why casinos create their noisy everyone-is-out-here-winning illusions in real life; one can only imagine the damage that VR gambling and pornography could do.

I am still waiting for a resurgence of arcades with the introduction of something like powered exoskeletons. These are being developed for military and mechanical contractor use, where you want to give people the ability to lift things and stuff, but transducers are often bidirectional and going the other direction, that ability to provide force-feedback can be used to suspend someone basically in air and give them a considerable amount of control of their environment: you are in a airplane cockpit, and it really shakes like an airplane cockpit. Playing VR games now, everybody laughs about how you we're trying to bend down and pick up a gun, but you accidentally grabbed Phil’s foot on the coffee table. Relatively amateurish. But that sort of pod exoskeleton could be used to go for a virtual run—no, not on this planet: on the moon.