The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998

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Text File | 2003-06-11 | 14.1 KB | 306 lines

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░ ░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░ ░▒▓ COMANCHE: MAXIMUM OVERKILL ▓▒░ ░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░ ░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ── CunningDOX by Baldrick ── INTRO ═════ Wowzers. What a game. What a teriffic, violent, hi-tech, cool, virtual reality, neat-sounding, trippy game. I like it. Hell, if I hadn't already pirated it and if I actually owned a machine I could play it on I'd buy it. But I have and I don't so I've had to figure out how to play it on my own, as SOMEONE (unbeknownst to you) lost the only quickdox going around this town. So, carpe diem; here's my version. I actually included a bit of nonsensical drivel on playing the game as well as just the keys. But, for those die-hard helicopter simulator veterans among you I'll start with the keys and keep it technical so you can feel very smug: KEY COMMANDS ════════════ Simulation Controls: ──────────────────── ESC - Bring up pop up menu to adjust detail levels, choose the control device, adjust sound, etc etc etc ad nauseum. J - Recenter joystick. If you find yourself zooming off to the side or something when you have the joystick centred then hit J again. This happens most often with a crappy joystick card on a very fast machine. On some machines you have to do this quite a lot. P - Pause simulation toggle. Pressing again resumes. (There's no boss key on this one... welp...) Alt+A - Abort Mission Alt+Q - Quit to DOS (immeidately) 1 - Forward cockpit view (default) 2 - Look out of left window 3 - Look out of right window 4 - Rear view 5 - Front view without cockpit 6 - Chase view (just behind your helicopter) 7 - Ground view; sets up for a rad panoramic flyby shot; stationary. 8 - Ground view; puts you immediately in the picture; stationary. Helicopter Flight Controls: ─────────────────────────── Collective (altitude): E - collective Up o - - Collective Up D - collective Down r = - Collective Down Tail Rotor: 0 on keypad - Rotate Left. . on keypad - Rotate Right. Cyclic Control: Use Joystick OR keypad controls. Keypad Controls: (all of these are on the numeric keypad; use them for flying with the keyboard [joystick is better though]). 8 - Cyclic Forward (pitch nose down and fly forwards) 2 - Cyclic Backward (pitch nose up, slow down and ultimately go backwards) 4 - Cyclic Left (turn left) 6 - Cyclic Right (turn right) 5 - Fire Selected Weapon 0 - Rotate left (tail rotor) . - Rotate right (tail rotor) - - Collective Up + - Collective Down * - Auto-Hover mode (takes you to a nice low altitude and lets you just hover over the ground.) <Enter> - Select Next Target Joystick Controls: Use joystick to control cyclic. Button 1 = fire selected weapon Button 2 = select next target Weapon Controls / Countermeasures ───────────────────────────────── <Enter> - Select next target <Space> - Fire selected Weapon (5 on keypad) [ - Cycle through available weapons; cycle left to next weapon ] - Cycle through available weapons; cycle right to next weapon Z - Select Canon (dumb fire) X - Select Rockets (dumb fire) C - Select Hellfire (air-to-ground, guided; aims at whatever is targetted). V - Select Stingers (air-to-air, fire and forget) B - Artillery (fire then get the hell out of there; the artillery will bombard the target in about 10 seconds...) N - Select Wingman's Weapons (you can tell him to shoot a target with this.) M - IMMEDIATELY fire off two rockets. This is akin to a panic button ; - Launch chaff (against radar missile)* ' - Launch flare (against infa-red (IR) missile)* * NOTE: The computer will take care of dispensing flares and chaffs for you automatically. These are just included for control freaks. I suggest ignoring them. But keep your eye on the chaff/flare stores on the right hand side of the cockpit; when you run out you are very vulnerable to enemy helicopters and ground units. Viewscreen (VDU) Controls: ────────────────────────── There are two viewscreens; you can choose any display for either of them. Setting either one to EXP (Explain?) mode will remind you what the keys do while on the fly. LEFT VDU RIGHT VDU F1 - Map View F7 - Map View F2 - Threats (radar) F8 - Threats (radar) F3 - TAS (Target Acquisition System) F9 - TAS (Target Acquisition System) F4 - Mission Statistics F10 - Mission Statistics F5 - Damage Report F11 - Damage Report F6 - EXP Mode F12 - EXP Mode Q - Cycle displays (left) A - Cycle displays (left) W - Cycle displays (right) S - Cycle displays (right) < - Zoom in on map view > - Zoom out on map view INSTALLATION NOTES ══════════════════ Required IQ to successfully install this game: 40 This game has no known copy protection, or so says the .NFO file in my release anyway. Seems kinda dumb to me as it's real easy to copy... oh well. If you should ever feel guilty about pirating a game I think this is the one... I'm impressed to see this from Nova Logic. After all, their Arkanoid port was awful. Regardless, here's what to do: 1. Fire in disk 1. You will need 12 Megabytes free on your hard drive to install, but the game once installed only gobbles 8 MB. The install program scorns any drive letter after E:, so if you want to install to something higher (I needed it on I: when I installed) use assign: ASSIGN C=I then install to C later on, ASSIGN C=C to fix it again. Note that if your \DOS subdir is on C and you assign it to I then you won't be able to get ASSIGN again; use D: or something. 2. Run the INSTALL.EXE program on Disk 1 and wait. Pretty easy, huh? Getting it to run might take a bit more work. It seems game designers are FINALLY using proper 32-bit addressing; it definitely paid off in this game. This means that you must NOT have any sort of Expanded memory manager present at all when your run the game (no, not even QEMM). You'll probably want to make a boot disk for it; there is a batch file in the installed directory called BOOTXMS.BAT; format a system disk with FORMAT A: /S and then run this, and it will create your boot disk for you. How thoughtful of them... You need a minimum of 3072K of extended memory and 500K of conventional memory to run. Careful with those TSR's, Eugene... To start the game just type "C". GAME PLAY NOTES: ════════════════ (Zen and the art of flying death) Helicopter Flight Fundamentals: ─────────────────────────────── If you haven't ever flown a helicopter simulator before you will get very annoyed right away when it doesn't "fly properly". So we have to pretend we're in flight school for a moment here. All of a helicopter's flying power is created by the main rotor. When in a horizontal position, this rotor will just lift the helicopter straight up into the air. In order to go forward, it is necessary to actually tilt the rotor and thereby pitch the nose of the helicopter down so the rotor is pulling the helicopter at an angle, moving it forward while maintaining lift. Right away you will find that just adding collective will not actually make you go forward; it is necessary to push forward on the joystick or use the 8 key on the keypad to push the nose down and start forward motion. You can control the speed or torque of the rotor by using the COLLECTIVE control; collective up will make you go up, increasing rotor speed, while collective down will do the opposite. In a real helicopter there is a good deal of tradeoff between collective and pitch; you need to keep them in very good balance. Gunship 2000 made you do this; Maximum overkill is much more "arcade" and lets you just fly along to your heart's content without changing altitude too much; you can just use the collective to adjust it while you fly. The really perceptive among you, and those of you who've "done this before" will realise that this explanation isn't complete. A helicopter with just one main rotor would find itself spinning around and around in circles as the rotor's rotation causes the body of the craft to spin. The way this is prevented is by having a tail rotor, which is perpendicular to the plane of the main rotor keeps the whole craft stabilized. This is also useful, however, becuase without moving at all you can spin left and right by just slowing down or speeding up this rotor. You have tail rotor controls on the keypad, 0 and . which will rotate you left and right. This is handy for doing "on a dime" spins. So, now that I've bored the hell out of you, here is a quick start guide to getting in the air on the first training mission: You start out, predictably, on the ground. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the cockpit. On the bottom you have various readouts and your two main VDU display screens. For now leave 'em alone; they're already set on the best modes. Zoom the map all the way out with the > key and you might be able to see your targets. The map is the only way you locate targets in this game; none of that boring waypoint stuff. The top half of your screen is your cockpit view, with your heads up display giving you information overtop of it. The centre of the heads up display has a small Cross shaped thingy that lets you see right where the helicopter is pointed. A horizontal line is your artificial horizon, always letting you know where the ground/sky line is. On the right hand side of the screen is an altitude display, which also tells you your vertical speed (whether you're going up, down, or staying level) when you're flying. On the left side is a number that is your airspeed. (it should be 0 right now as we're on the ground). If you want to use joystick, then hit ESC and find the "Calibrate Joystick" option to set it up. Then hit ESC again to return to the game. Time to take off. Add collective until you rise up to about 100 feet, then reduce it until you stay more or less level. Stop gasping at the scenery and pay attention. Once you're more or less level, try flying around a bit. Push the collective forward so that your nose goes down and... wowzers! You're off! Take a few minutes to screw around and try flying through the canyons and stuff until you're bored. Zoom around until you see white dots on your map. These are your targets. Get quite close to the ground and steer towards them. Now it's time to choose your weapon. Try using rockets for the tanks. they're just dumb fire, so you shoot them and they just go straight ahead at whatever you were pointed at. Once you can see the tanks adjust your collective till you point right at them and launch a bunch of rockets. You will start to see some explosions and (hopefully) the tanks will be destroyed. Hitting F4 gives you a mission statistics screen on the left VDU, telling you how many more targets are to go before you have finished the mission. Hit F1 afterwards to get back to map view. Continue destroying things until you finish. If you have a soundblaster a voice will tell you, "We did it, let's head home"... at any rate your controls lock up and the copter flys off into the sunset and the missions ends. Congratulations! By this point you may have noticed that when you select a target you see a close view on the right viewscreen. This is very useful, and why you should always have one viewscreen on TAS mode. Later on you need to know right away what you are targetted on so you can choose the right weapon or change targets accordingly. Try using hellfire missiles on some of those fuel tanks. Fire one and wait until it hits the target, then change targets and fire the next. Hellfires are great against tanks. Stinger missiles might work too, although they are really for air-to-air use. These are fire and forget; fire one and then you can change targets right away and shoot another and all of them will hit. (whereas with hellfires you MUST keep it targetted on what you want to kill until it has been destroyed.) After you've made it through your first mission there's not much more to say... practice definitely makes perfect. You can get really fast with two people piloting; one taking care of collective and weapons and the other flying, targetting and shooting. Work out a good cooperative system so you get it quick and you'll be pretty damn hard to beat. On your Map screen the different threats will be represented by different colours. They are: WHITE - Benign targets such as fuel tanks. YELLOW - Tanks DARK ORANGE - Missile Launching tanks (SAM's) BRIGHT ORANGE - Enemy helicopters Maximum Overkill is quite lenient on crashing; you can thump into all sorts of objects (including walls, fuel tanks, pyramids, etc) without getting much more than a verbal reprimand, although sometimes if it's hard or you do it repeatedly you will be damaged. Keep flying until you crash is the usual motto. If you get stuck (tail rotor destroyed, your TAS doesn't work, or you run out of weapons) use Alt-A to abort the mission. Play through the Comanche training missions first. You want to do this. If you don't believe me just try one of the real Maximum Overkill missions and you'll see exactly what I mean. Above all, have fun! If you feel guilty about playing this one so much then buy it. Nova Logic has earned their money here I think. -= Baldrick =- -= 01/02/93 =-