The Jetfighter series of fighter sims has proven to be quite successful over the years, especially the very popular Jetfighter II. Missions Studios is set to release Jetfighter III, which they hope will be a fighter sim for everyman. Featuring all the details and qualities found in all the big-name fighter sims, playing JF III won't require a degree from the US Air Force Academy. This is a tough line to walk, since these high-tech jets are in reality very difficult machines to operate, and game companies are constantly striving for more and more authenticity. It would seem to follow that the more realistic a fighter sim became, the more difficult it would become to play it. So the designers of Jetfighter III are attempting to combine ultra-realistic game play with a gaming system which makes it very playable.
In JF III, the player is a pilot for the United Nations stationed on the UNS Peacekeeper (Global Peace Through Deadly Force is the slogan of JF III). There are over 100 missions to fly, some with interactive wingmen. These wingmen have their own objectives, but you can also give them specific orders. The missions in JF III step away from historical scenarios and get into possible real-world scenarios, like strikes against Argentina's invasion of Chile, and Cuba's dealings with Columbian drug cartels.
One of the most touted features of Jetfighter III is the ability to explore your very realistic surroundings, both on the carrier and in the combat area. On the UNS Peacemaker, the player is able to roam around the ship and check out various on-board features. Using an interactive 3-D interface, the player can visit his personal terminal where flight stats and E-mail can be reviewed, look at the awards case where the pilot's awards are displayed, and go to a library where an extensive database of fighter images, military commentary and information on various weapons system is available. There's also the briefing room where the player goes before each mission. The briefings are delivered in full digitized voice dialog with digital map information.
The designers are quite proud of the flight environment featured in Jetfighter III. Actual military landscape data has been used to digitized the flight areas. This means that when a mission requires you to fly over a section of Cuba, the landscape that you see in the game is modeled after the actual landscape in that specific section of Cuba. Thousands of square miles of data has been used to create the combat arena in Jetfighter III and is accessed from the disk as it is needed. One of the greatest problems with accessing flight areas from the CD is that there is often a very annoying pause in game play while it loads. But the techies at Missions Studios have developed a seamless method of accessing from the CD, which means you never notice a break in the action as new landscape is read in.
The graphics in JF III should be just as impressive as any other feature in the game. All of the terrain and cities have been rendered using a razor-sharp texture mapping method, so there's no "fuzzing" of the landscape when you get very close to the ground or buildings. Other graphic achievements in JF III may not be as noticeable but really add to the realism of the game - the proverbial "nice touches." The missile trails following a missile are transparent like they are in reality, instead of a solid mass trailing the missile. The clouds also have a degree of transparency that's noticeable as you fly into a low layer of a cloud bank. As the clouds become thicker, the transparency is reduced. It's little touches like this that the designers of JF III are using to inject a high level of reality.
As touched on before, the designers really wanted to make JF III a very realistic sim, while still designing it to be very accessible by the average player. To accomplish this, a lot of the procedures to perform tasks such as acquiring and firing at a target have been narrowed down to fewer steps. The complexity of the missions and weapons systems are still included, but the number of keystrokes needed to take these steps have been reduced. Of course, there is a tradeoff in authenticity when designers start cutting down on things, but it was decided that a lot of the authentic features of an actual jet may, in a PC game, detract from the fun of the game. Jetfighter III is a balance between authenticity and fun.
Set to be released in September, Jetfighter III is striving to be a common man's uncommon fighter sim. It has all of the advanced graphics and capabilities one would expect from a high-end product without having all of the complexity and entanglements of real-world flying. The designers have had a lot of experience designing successful fighter sims, and Jetfighter III, while not being the most accurate representation of an advanced fighter, is shooting to be one of the most enjoyable.
