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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I loved this game as a kid - it gave you a rare sense of freedom - movement within an expansive space, and that joy of throwing things in gravity-defined arcs, rather than locking you into grids, straight lines, or constrained single-screen levels. Never knew there was a 'fly home' key though.

Chopper Commando was (for me) a spiritual followup, and I loved that game even more.

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OMG I used to land manually and that was the main cause of death. I always thought that game was great but way too hard. So the fly home lands you?!

That was my reaction as well. But then I tried it and it crashed while landing.

It flies about as well as the Outer Wilds autopilot (famous for crashing into the sun because the sun is often between you and where you're going), if there's a building between you and the airport, it's going to fly into the building. But I used to land this way all the time, it can do the hard bit if you have an otherwise reasonable path to landing.

We used to play this on the notionally IBM PC compatible machines on a Netware LAN in the "Computer Science" laboratory as opposed to the BBC Micros w/ Econet in the "Electronics" laboratory at school, or later the actual PC compatible (as in, running Windows) LAN Manager network in the library.

In the BBC lab we'd play a LAN MUD about a sort of grim future world that was built by pupils older than me (out of hours I'm told Elite was played but I never saw that), in the CS lab we'd play either a very violent fantasy RPG MUD also home grown, or Sopwith and in the Library games were banned but we had some weird stuff inspired by a mix of teletext and BBS that I built, and an IRC-type setup again built by me written in some mix of QuickBASIC and pre-standard C++.

I think I managed to learn how to consistently land in Ocean's F29 Retaliator.. somewhere in the late 2000s.

https://youtu.be/gXdfsFYX-XU the version with MT-32 music, which is I never ever heard till today.

Odd thing about F-29, compare it's loading screen to the loading screen of the 2-year earlier ATF by Digital Integration on the C64 ....

They're probably both ripping off the same concept art of the YF-22/YF-23 (I suspect it's closer to the YF-23), but still.

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