In many ways the game's the same - or at least on the surface it is. ATF is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary step for the series Paul Grace et al have been working on, and introduces some major new features along with an overall play and information structure that will be quite familiar to an audience raised on US Navy/Marine Fighters.
The familiarity in this case is a good thing, as it saves the player from having to learn a whole new set of menus and command sets; even better, for those with programmable joystick equipment, the kinds of inevitable and comprehensive tweakings of macro files and the like to optimize control continuity is minimized. As with most current sims, ATF offers some included macro files to players to start out with; you'll no doubt want to edit these to your own preferences and choices, but they give you a good idea how to optimize your initial stick programming for the design.
Also familiar is the way ATF represents the HUD, cockpit displays and view options. For those unfamiliar with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat or USNF, ATF may seem a radical departure from the current vogue in air combat simulation design, since it gives up the effort to produce a near-photo-perfect virtual cockpit to put something possibly more suited to PC-based air combat in its place, i.e., a series of pop-up windows representing various cockpit components.
The pop-up window approach to cockpit and instrumentation design will probably make or break ATF for many players; it's a particular taste, and if you're really into a "you are there" experience, with a full, working virtual 3D cockpit to scan around with using your joystick hat, you may find ATF's windowing approach a bit too abstract to sustain the immediacy of the in-cockpit experience. On the other hand, it could reasonably be argued that the 3D virtual cockpit (Pacific Air War, Flight Unlimited, EF2000, to name three examples) puts too much processing demand on current PC hardware (EF2000's cockpit, for instance, only starts to scroll around smoothly once you're at a P133MHz or better Pentium), and takes up valuable CPU cycles that could be dedicated to other work in the simulation. ATF trades off that kind of cockpit realism for the sake of providing an informational environment that can be more easily customized both to player taste and to the particular situation. Once you've figured out how to pop up the various view and instrument windows quickly, and get away from an insistence on limiting yourself only to what you'd imagine a real pilot would be able to see with his own two eyes and human neck, you'll find ATF's approach easier to get the hang of - and easier to use well during intense situations - than usual. It's actually faster to pop up a view window to check out a targeted opponent, for instance, than it is to try to scroll down or around to a "padlock" view, or to try to track an opponent through the canopy while trying to maintain a good flight profile. I find myself able to actually concentrate on air combat tactics more immediately, with a shorter learning curve, with ATF than in most sims; this makes it a good sim for newer players to the genre as well.
The graphics in ATF remain the mixed bag they've always been. Certainly a lot of work has been put into keeping them competitive with other simulations out there, and the terrain graphics in particular have gotten much better (though you're still best off keeping that hideous sky texture-map turned off unless you're really trying to impress some na(f with the power of your P166). The object detail has improved tremendously as well, making ATF a great sim to fly-and-pause so you can enjoy all the incredible work the graphics designers have obviously put into all phases of the represented combat. The cockpit graphics remain rudimentary - partly for the reasons mentioned above, and the processing demands still remain high if you've got everything turned on. Worst of all, though, the low-res modes continue to look seriously ugly, wiping out most of the fun for 486/66 and slower systems.
One of the areas ATF has expanded and improved on has primarily to do with the nature of the next generation of fighter jets represented in the simulation. The opportunity for post-stall maneuvering, as well as for supercruise and other stealth-oriented combat tactical flying abounds. You'll also notice in many of the included missions that the missions are conducted at night. This is not to save face (and cycles) on the graphics front! - it has to do with the nature of the kind of combat the included 21st-century planes will be engaged in. Night-time missions intensify the stealth capability of all of the included planes (obviously), and the systems available to handle flight and combat at night are improved enough to make playing in the dark much less frustrating than it's been in the past. One thing ATF does resoundingly well, in other words, is to concentrate its efforts around doing a faithful job of fully contextualizing the kind of combat environment the represented aircraft would be operating in.
The loss of visuals is accompanied by an increase in one of the main strengths of this series, the full, stereo audio sound design. More than an opportunity to exercise your new Altec Lansing surround speaker system, the full stereo sound actually gives the player the kinds of aural cues missing in most sims during actual combat. It doesn't hurt to have your ears confirm the close passage of other aircraft, or missiles or AAA on one side of your plane or the other - in fact it's a good aid to making the right kinds of maneuver and combat decisions during flight. More importantly, however, the radio chatter adds a nice touch of realism to the in-cockpit experience, and does much to make up for the lack of visual 3D cockpit realism mentioned above. To put it simply, EA opted for 3D sound and a 2D cockpit - not a bad alternative to most of what's out there, especially for those of us who like to use our ears along with our eyes when playing.
Another major component in ATF is the network and modem play. For the first time in this series, multi-player has been fully enabled, and it's clear lots of attention has been paid to doing it right. Connection is much easier with this simulation than it is with most, and the mission and player choices are clear, simple, and extensive - lots of fine-tuning of mission parameters (time in play, number of kills allowed before ending the mission, at what distance out the player returns to the game after getting killed, etc.). The data-passing has obviously been optimized so that play on any particular computer runs smoothly, without the kinds of sudden herks and jerks typical in this kind of thing, indicating that Mr. Packet didn't Transmit Correctly and we're now going to have to spend some time waiting for the universe to get synchronized again. The network play has been expanded to allow for what looks like up to 80 players across a single network (ten groups of eight players each, or, in other words, ten different multi-player games), making ATF a serious candidate for inclusion on some internet server somewhere - no information is presented in the manual on how this might work, but if you're familiar with internet and have a high-speed connection, it should theoretically be possible to run ATF in network mode across internet. All in all, multi-player has really been given full attention in this design.
The best part of ATF has to be saved for last mention here, though, and that is the plethora of information resulting from the Jane's connection. Jane's has been famous - for a long time - for providing one of the most in-depth and up-to-date databases of all the world's weapons systems. If you've ever read Jane's Defence Weekly, for instance, you'll find yourself drawn into what you might find a weird world of defense analysis (and advertising - that's the weirdest part... "get yer Lav-25 turret now, for lock 'n load perfection!" - well, I exaggerate, but only slightly...!), a perspective on current events that's definitely a strange departure from the one you find in most current corporate newspapers and magazines. The news that Russia made fifth place in arms exports this year, with a paltry trade of $2.5 billion (US equivalent), for instance, leaves you wondering just how many double-digit billions the four top contenders made on same along with that. Hmm... if everyone agreed not to sell this stuff for just a year, what could the world do with that $80 billion or so? What the hell would we all do with all fear of poverty, starvation, crime and unemployment eradicated from the surface of the planet? Lockheed Martin would have to start selling a helluva lot more 3D graphics chips to Sega, for one thing... er, ummm - well, you see what I mean.
Now you know what Jane's is (sorta), the main point is that EA has provided players with an absolutely massive database of information accompanying the simulation in ATF, both on-line and in the manual. The information included with this sim probably exceeds that present in all the manuals of all simulations previously published, and is competitive with many of the encyclopedia-only CD-ROMs out on the subject of modern aircraft. The major advantage of this encyclopedia over all the others, though, is that you have the excellent ATF simulation to jump into seamlessly, even from within the encyclopedic portion, which puts a dramatic new twist on the whole process of learning about a subject. Imagine going to chem lab one afternoon and finding out you get to be the hydrogen molecule, after reading about it.... Well, you get the idea. Kids used to use LSD to make those kinds of leaps. Fortunately for everyone's health these days, now we have computers to do it for us instead.
ATF may not be a massive break-through on any single front, but like just a few other designs of late, it does a number of different, familiar things extremely well and - best of all - integrates them all together in one package. I don't know of any other simulation out there right now that can take you from CD-ROM encyclopedia to flying around in non-combat mode for starters, to quick one-on-one missions against the computer, to set, challenging combat missions, to full campaigns, to full-blown multi-player allied and offensive network play, without dropping the ball in any of those areas. Above all else, ATF sets the standard for offering players a truly complete piece of work - and that's saying a lot in these days of release-with-patch-and-maybe-modem-data-disk-six-months-later.
