A
flip-book Aeroplane dogfighting
game that was a ton of fun. Originally
published by Alfred Leonardi (taken from their website, aceofaces.com), this game has an mystifyingly interesting
algorithm. In the
simple version of the game (there are actually
graduated levels of difficulty) you and your
opponent (most oftentimes my
brother) each had a
book with a
picture of what you could see as the
pilot, and a list of moves, each corresponding to a
page number. Your opponent and you would each
choose a
move, and then you would tell your opponent the corresponding page number. You would go to that page number,
lookup your move, flip to the corresponding number, and that's the next "frame" of the dogfight. Weird, and
disturbingly
accurate.
The moves that you could do are all very
realistic. There were
slow,
normal, and
fast manuevers that you could complete. Every type of manuever that you could think of would be in there, even an Immelmann turn! (that being where you do a loop around your
opponent.. that always used to get my brother). Moves such as
barrel rolls,
stalls, and
wingovers were all
described in the instruction book that came along with the game, and thus really helped you get into the whole
feel of it. You could even "
become" a
personality, with certain bonuses and such. I always thought the
Red Baron was cool, once i figured out what his real name was.
The
purpose of the game was to get the opponent in your sight. You know this was the case when in the picture your little aeroplane was
shooting at the opponent (or the opponent was shooting at you. All in all the game required a lot of in-your-head 3d
perception and
anticipation. It was $20 dollars when i bought it a long time ago from the back shelf of my
hobby store. We eventually stopped playing because we wore the books out, and I kept getting
beaten severely. To this day i wonder if there was a trick to it, that i never knew about. My
suggestion is to definately
try it if you get the
chance...