I discovered a time compression feature in Longbow yesterday which helped no end with playing through the remaining missions quickly. I have to point out that I didn’t play these properly but just using the cheat options to get this out of the way as quickly as possible.  This pretty much consisted of putting time compression onto 8x and firing my endless missiles at every target I came across until my CPG told me the mission was complete. I’m pretty much going to make this post screenshots only as I don’t have a lot to say about the missions having played them like this.

The Koreans are attempting to cross the Chunchon river and carry out a pincer movement. The early missions here all deal with stopping that advance.

In this mission I have to find a target and lock onto it so that a fighter can destroy it. The target is actually invulnerable in the mission to my weapons which is a bit contrived but at least its something a bit different.

In this mission I have to escort some helicopters and even cheating I just can’t seem to manage it. They always end up disapearing on me but I don’t have to win every mission so after 5 or 6 attempts I give in on this one and just keep going.

After completing the final mission North Korea withdraws and we win.

On the whole, this didn’t look like a bad mission pack. It improved on the original game, added a bit more variety and even had more cutscenes. I’d like to have seen more story with these rather than just discussing a particular raid in the war. Every other Origin flight sim had some sort of story element and it’s odd that its missing here. I know that we are going for realism which might limit this, but just having chats with your fellow pilots after a mission or something would have really added something to make the missions worth playing through. However, if I’d liked the first game, I’m sure this expansion would have been worth the money and then some. Playing through the whole thing on cheat mode was a bit of a pointless exercise but it was either that or skip it altogether. If I regarded this as a real Origin game I’d probably have put more effort into it but games like this aren’t why I started this blog. 

I notice now that Longbow 2 has been put down on Mobygames as being developed by Origin so in theory I should give that a go also – I would probably do so but as it happens I can’t get it to run on my PC. I just get a blank screen after the intro videos. There is even a website dedicated to showing you how to set this game up on modern PC’s and that didn’t help me out so it looks like I’m fated not to play it for now.  I won’t be losing any sleep over this. Strangely, I gather it runs fine on Vista so I may come back to it at some point just to complete the set. I do own Vista but it didn’t survive on my hard disk for very long – I’m definitely not reinstalling it just to play another flight sim.

So I’m glad to say that its back onto games I have some desire to play and write about for the rest of this blog. I wasn’t actually looking forward to the sequel to Crusader so much after I played the first one as the gameplay was wearing a little thin but right now even playing Crusader 1 again would be great by comparison so I’m raring to get started.

Next: Crusader – No Regret