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Comment by navbaker | Hacker News Reader

I spent tons of hours as a kid playing Comanche on our old 486!

My game of choice was Gunship on the Commodore 64, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter simulator from Microprose. Spent YEARS playing that.

Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.

Gunship 2000 here!

I loved that it had a dynamic campaign where the frontline moved according to how well you did.

Before that, I also enjoyed LHX.

> Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.

Do you remember what the copy protection was for MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter? It was the silhouettes of US and Soviet fighters and bombers from the Cold War era: "identify this aircraft". Somehow they thought my teenage self, obsessed as I was with Cold War military tech, wouldn't learn the shapes. It's how I learned the shapes of most fighter jets.

Yes, I had a pirated copy. We all did back then, legal games were unheard of.

If you remember LHX fondly, there's a new game out with similar aesthetic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1906230/Thunder_Helix/

Still EA for now, but it looks promising.

Wow, it looks almost exactly like LHX. You weren't kidding. But can I watch from the viewpoint of my TOW missile camera, I wonder...

Thanks for the link.

That guy has been very active on twitter since the start of the development of the game. I don't have his account anymore since I stopped caring about twitter but ... he's probably still there journaling!

-- edit: I don't like half assed comments so I went and dig him up https://x.com/HiddenAsbestos

I only learned like 4-5 of those shapes, and kept restarting the game until I got one of those. :)

Me too! And in retrospect, it's amazing what they managed to pull off with the C64's limited hardware.

Thank you for mentioning it. It was a revelation.

Comanche, LHX Attack Chopper, Gunboat and Wolfpack. A handful of military sims meant hundreds of pages of specs to sift through -- best copy protection I ever had to deal with. I probably spent more time reading the manuals than I did playing the games.

Same fond memories about LHX and F117A. While searching, I was shocked how much my recollection of that experience vastly differed from its actual graphics: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/lhx-attack-chopper-xo#scr...

I don't recall having played Comanche in order to compare the two. The other game I spent innumerable hours in was F117A [1] - partially because -- again, my recollection -- one had to damn near real-time fly from the base to the target and then back, all the while in stealth mode, which usually meant going slow and terrain hugging

1: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/f-117a-nighthawk-stealth-...

I played F-117A, but my favourite by far was definitely F15 Strike Eagle II: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/f-15-strike-eagle-ii-n6

Around the time of F-117A I discovered Jetfighter II which felt a lot smoother handling wise, it was great to just fly around doing stunts to be honest. I spent a lot of time just doing carrier take-offs with an immediate 360 and back into landing.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/jetfighter-ii-advanced-ta...

Yes, I also played a ton of F117A. The terrible graphics were actually what let me run it and LHX, I had an anemic 386. I only got to play Comanche at my uncle's house. LHX actually looks exactly as I remember it. I remember those blocky polygons very fondly.

I remember Wolfpack! Never figured it out, I was way too young

The voxel-based graphics and resulting frame rate were one of those distinct “wow” moments I had while gaming as a kid. Up there with playing Doom or Flight Simulator for the first time.

Today its graphics look so outdated, but back then it was amazing how you could fly through valleys to get to targets.

There were a few games like Comanche, X-Wing, Magic Carpet and Descent that felt like they really pushed the technology while trying to show how we could utilize 3d in a different way from the other titles of the time (which were usually all FPS games).

Oh yes, I found Comanche after playing Tie Fighter to death!

Flying down canyons was so much fun, like a trench run.

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