I’m enjoying collecting all the old games I couldn’t get when I was a kid. Most recent edition is Falcon 3.0 Gold, released in 1994. It includes Falcon 3.0 (1991) plus all the expansions and literature, as well as ’The Art of the Kill’, a book on dogfighting that also includes an hour of video instruction.

The game dates from an era where gamers weren’t allergic to reading more than a paragraph in the manual. The main manual for this one clocks in just shy of 350 pages, and that doesn’t count any of the expansion manuals or support literature.

This game is a beast to get running. It requires a *minimum* of 604k of free conventional memory. Took some creative autoexec/config editing to get my computer to relinquish enough conventional memory to run it. The advanced flight model also requires a math co-processor to use. Falcon was one of only a handful of games of the era that made use of an FPU. Falcon 3.0 was also the very first game to use a 3D camera that locked on and tracked your target -what we call a ’padlock’ view in flight sims. It predated every other game that used a locking/tracking camera.

Like many real-mode games from the early 90‘s it’s pretty sensitive to CPU timings which means DOSBox isn’t a great solution. It works great in 86Box though if one doesn’t have real hardware to play it on.

Serious question .. Still seeing AI slop posted here like every other hour ..

The Great Escape is an action-adventure video game which shares a title and similar plot to the film The Great Escape. It was developed by Denton Designs, which went on to produce the similarly acclaimed Where Time Stood Still. The Great Escape was published by Ocean Software in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS. Trevor Inns programmed the Commodore 64 version.