The kill I made then was the enemy ace in a ME262, single-shot. I recall the game came up with a cutscene afterwards, giving you the idea that you were up for the fight of your life, but he was already dead, and so there i was "ROTFLMAO" when I also got an achievement. And yes it makes sense to shoot at a tank or bomber with a "dumbfire missile", but the idea of shooting a relatively small jet does not make sense to me, since it would be just dumb luck.
Well... against a jet, it would certainly be extremely challenging, and that cutscene clearly shows we weren't anticipating such an outcome
. Just for the record, though, WWII aircraft did on some occasions shoot down fighters with rockets. The Soviets in particular used rockets a lot, and had some impressive early successes (the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 against the Japanese - sixteen fighters and three bombers shot down with RS-82 rockets). I strongly suspect, however, that if we were to look at accuracy stats against aircraft, we'd find an initially dismal fire-to-hit ratio dropping dramatically over the course of the war as aircraft got faster and faster.
And as for the game itself, the extra missions came to soon(And where too expensive when you compared them to the game). And I was not happy with the lack of multiplayer(splitscreen only, no online capabilities, and this was never fixed). The atmosphere and gameplay where actually very good, and on par with Blazing Angels and Heroes over Europe... And ofcourse the Voice acting was on par with SWON, Squealing piglets
.
Ah. The extra missions. A highly unfortunate thing. Originally, the game was going to be a DVD release. For various reasons, this turned out to be impractical, and the game had to be adapted to an Xbox Live Arcade release. This meant, firstly, that the game was modified in various small ways to feel more arcade - some positive changes (better explosions are always good), some not so positive (we went from a clean, almost invisible HUD to... what you see). The biggest change, though, was having to fit within 2 GB. And there goes half the game - we simply cut the Russian and African campaigns out (the price of the game was also lower than initially planned, but yes, the extra missions were overpriced). Feel my pain, please - we originally had four campaigns that interweaved missions from the four theatres in chronological order. Each of the four theatres has a distinct feel to it, so when half the missions and two whole theatres disappeared from the initial release, I wasn't surprised to see reviewers complaining about a lack of variety. That, I'm sure, also tells you why the extra missions were released so quickly.
I think that some Wing Commander influence can be detected in the voiceovers, BTW. Certainly, that's what we were going for. In the end, this proved to be something of a disaster, if reviews are to be believed. I still think the dialogues we had struck a really good balance - sometimes, extremely serious, and at other times, very jokesy (and for once, the badness of the jokes was intentional rather than accidental
). It's just what you'd expect from a bunch of twenty-something-year-olds trying to stay sane while watching their friends drop dead all around - but it's clear the reviewers and probably most of the audience didn't get the idea. I guess the big problem was that we were squeezing into the combat missions all the dialogues that, in WC, would be divided between in-flight and the rec room. Had we had the resources to have on-the-ground conversations and shove the jokes in there rather than in the air, everything would have made a lot more sense. That was never really an option, however.
There are only very few games that "fit" in the profile of "combat simulator" today, but me and most of my close friends would still like to see more games like that, same goes for space-sims. Star Citizen should be the game that finds that atmosphere, but we won't know that untill it's done. But all in all, I'd buy a Dogfight 1943 if it came out.
Well, I'm fairly sure there will never be a Dogfight 1943, because the entire team was fired immediately after release (I was fired even before release - who needs creative directors for bugfixing, right?
), the company being convinced that the project would be a dismal failure financially. But, if you want to try something similar, I would recommend the Air Conflicts series. They're somewhat more "budget" than Dogfight 1942 was, so you shouldn't expect too much in terms of production values (especially voiceovers, they can be downright horrid), but I've certainly found them enjoyable (disclosure: I did consult a tiny little bit on AC: Pacific Carriers, and then a lot more on AC: Vietnam. The latter is probably the weakest game in the series, but... uh, don't blame me
. I was only brought in when they were almost done, so most of my feedback and design changes were implemented into the post-release PC patch and the subsequent PS4 "remastered" version, while the Xbox and PS3 editions are essentially unchanged).
