(Below appear ongoing impressions of Red Baron II by PS Piranah. These were first posted on the Sierra Flight Sim Forum. Reprinted below with his permission.)

December 5, 1997

Well, the main problem right now seems to be a total lack of people on WON. After waiting several hours BKRavager showed up and was hot to jump into a game.

1. I don't know what type of J/S he has but he said it wasn't working. Even after right clicking screen and clicking Joystick.

2. Although frame rates looked very good this trip HE was very warpy. I asked, but he said he didn't think to ping the room server to see what his delay was. Mine was at 263ms last time I pinged it not much else to do in there while waiting for someone to show up...

3. But got to give him credit, he came right after me using the keyboard. Shot him down in short order.. another small prob. He tried to get reborn by hitting ENTER, as it states in the help file, but nothing happened. Not even after I unloaded all of my bombs and rockets on his smoldering wreckage. He finally got back to the field by right clicking mouse and reborning that way.

4. Yes! you CAN fly under the bridge. LOOKS WAYYYYYY Cool too. Shades of George Peppard in "The Blue Max".

5. Low Level straffing runs look great too. You can see the turf being torn up by the bullets. But small targets seem extremely vulnerable to this as they nearly spontaneously combust.

6. He finally located me again and we did another quick fight resulting in him misjudging his altitude. At this point I have to sternly protest the lack of a up/ forward and an UP view!!!! This is unforgivable! Too many times I lost sight of him due to this. Perhaps the padlock view would help but either it is not working here or I kept missing the key. In either event. I would very much look for myself. With a padlock view you aren't always sure where the system is looking. With fixed views I KNOW where I am looking and can instantly take measures to bring my guns to bear. This problem is compounded by the view not returning to front when releasing the hat button. THIS is another indication of not enough serious gamers being involved in the beta testing process. Had I been in it they would have heard some SERIOUS whining about the views! Most flight sticks have a hat switch and MANY of them are 8 position. Sure hope the box version will support that. ie like the Sidewinder FF.

7. Got dropped out of the game. I think BKRavager quit to try and get his stick working. But after that my video was hosed up. Colors were all wrong once out of the game. Tried exiting WON and found that the game had left my computer in 760x480 mode with 256 colors, insted of my original setting of 1024x720 32bit color.

8. Reset display settings and tried going back into game. It immediately changed the settings back to 760 blah blah and then minimized itself. When I maximized it the first 2 screens were down in the right hand corner. So I could only see about 1 fourth of them. This straightened itself out when I got to the internet connection screen. But the color of the WON screen was trashed.

9. Waited a little longer but am getting REAL tired. Been up since 3am, hadda drive up to DC today.

10. Exited game and was again in 760x480 mode. Now that is annoying!

Would be nice if I could get in more than one flight a night to check out a bit more stuff.

Til next time,

PSPiranha

December 4, 1997

Okay,

Got the other computer set-up and went through all of the necessary stuff to get on line and load games etc. etc. etc.

The news is---- Some of you can stop holding your breath and the rest can stop hyperventilating!..

SYSTEM: 300Mhz P2 MMX.. 64megSDram... 4.3 gig HD... Matrox millenium II w 8 meg ram... Awe64 sound blaster... 56k modem.. 24x CDRom...

Had no problems during the loading portion of the deal. Got logged on and waited and waited and waited til someone showed up. Fellow name of ROOS finally came in and after explaining things we agreed to a no hostility flight to get the feel and test it out.

Logging into the game went uneventfully.

1. The delay while you are waiting for the system to release the planes is a bit disconcerting. I understand WHY it does it but still this could be better. You aren't really sure if there is a problem or not. Perhaps a timer window or even a few differently colored lights to let you know that things are progressing normally and are about to be released to fly.

2. We managed to fly around for about 10 minutes before he told me he had to go. We each crashed once. ROOS because he botched the landing and I because i got over zealous on a bombing run.

3. We were both able to take off again while in the game and continue flying.

4. The ground and buildings are ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS! Nice job! Especially since it is not 3D.

5. The views are going to take some getting used to. after releasing the hat button the view remains in that position. Perhaps I am just spoiled by the self returning views of other games. Would like to have that option.

6. Never did find a button that would give me a view straight up OR up and back! This is, IMHO, an absolute must in the slow moving and at arms reach fighting we are talking about here! LOSE SIGHT, LOSE THE FIGHT!

7. Flying around at low level allows one to actually do a bit of NAP OF THE EARTH flying. There are a bunch of small valleys and hills that give one a much more immersive feel than the old RB with it's flat terrain.

8. Bomb, Rocket and Machine gun damage to buildings/ defences seems a tad off. I put several bombs and rockets into some sheds with little obvious effect. However, a strafing run on the guard tower set it ablaze with just a few rounds.

9. Own plane's bullets are difficult to see when firing at anything but empty sky. Didn't have time to try the incendiary bullets.

10. All and All this went MUCH better than the first try! The only difference I can really find is the video card. Did you support the ATI 3D Rage card for that demo?

11. Frame rates were much better this time although we didn't do any close flying against each other. I am hoping to get in a game tomorrow night where we actually get to fight.

12. I did encounter a problem later on though. After ROOS left i exited WON back to the desk top and read some more on the keyboard control layout. I tried to log back onto the network and Got a black screen. I could move the cursor around and get the little pointer to change when it was over something. I clicked my way out of this and tried again. Next thing to happen was at the screen where it asks what sort of connection you want to make. I clicked internet again but there were no buttons to let me continue the log-on process. Finally had to control-Alt-Delete my way out of this. I then got the message....ASSERTIONS LOGGED 0 Messages....1 Warning..0Fatal Logged in; C:\SIERRA\OnlineGames\Strategy\RB2MULTIPR\assert.log

At this point I decided to reload the game.

Did so and was able to log back into WON again with no problem. Other than noone there to play with.

It looks like a lot of the problems were caused by the video card. Sorry for any hair that got torn out or teeth that got gnashed to rubble. Anybody wanna buy this other computer? oooops, guess this may not be the best place to advertise it.

THis is a good example of why games companies need to maximize their outside beta testing. The people who write the programs and test them in-house are all pretty computer literate and thier machines are maximized for what they are doing. This however, causes no end of problems for those, MYSELF INCLUDED, who have all of the computer savy of jello mold.

Squeeeeeeeee ya up there,

PS(what the heck is a bios, anyways?) Piranha

December 3, 1997

To make a long story short, Found it, bought it and took it home.

To be totally honest, I am EXTREMELY disappointed. As you will recall, I asked about the number of people beta testing the game. This was for several reasons. One of which, the more people and the more systems it is running on the better to find problems.

I haven't seen this many lock-ups, crashes and DTDT (Dump to Desk top)s since I got the initial beta test version of AirWarrior2.

First off I will state the system I am using. Compaq Presario 4850 PII 300 Mhz 64 Meg Sdram 6.4G HD ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP2x 56k modem 24x CD rom

1. was very disappointed to find that I couldn't do ANY flying off line to get a feel for the game.

2. Can't choose or cal joystick unless flying.

3. Waited and Waited until JG1Bela showed up in WON and we tried a few flights. Of course the first thing that happened was my screen would go black when we tried to go to the options sceeen. Found I could, sometimes, minimize it and restore it and it would work.

4. You have no control over plane if you right click in the air. That led to one airplane being destroyed. I was trying to select the joystick option to choose Force feed back like it says in the helps file) and to cal it. All the Joystick option seems to do is turn the Joystick on or off.( another planes crashed.)

5. Got lock-up at this point. And the Big RED X stating: FATALRBII:C:\\REDBARON|SOURCE\LibPatch\Grdfile.ccp@65... GRIDFILE::getgroundInfo:findnode returned incorrect node Asked me if I wanted to retry, said yes, got: BARONMP Illegeal operation and it shut the game down. The same thing happened again when we tried to fly.

6. Thought perhaps I had a bad load and decided to uninstall the game and try reloading it. Used the Un-install feature.

7. Got a message stating that Un-install was unable to remove the following files: C:\\Sierra\OnlineGames\Strategy\RB2MultiPR\data\Multi.' C:\\Sierra\OnlineGames\Strategy\RB2MultiPR\data.' C:\\Sierra\OnlineGames\Strategy\RB2MultiPR.' C:\\windows\Solcache.' In the Multi folder there were also the three files not mentioned) mppilots.dat mpprefs.dat mpsets.dat And in the Data folder there was assert.log

8. It then told me I would need to reboot to finish the un-install process. I said OK It then rebooted or should I say, ALMOST rebooted. System locked up at nearly the end of the re-boot process. Had to turn it off then back on again.

9. NOW, WHERE IS MY IOMEGA ZIP DRIVE? Not listed anymore!

10. Got rid of the excess RB2 files and reloaded the game.

11. JG1Bela was waiting patiently for me. We tried flying and then I got another DTDT. No error messages this time.

12. TOO frustrated to try anymore tonight!

13. On the Plus side, I will state that the ground and buildings looks very good. Much better than that English sim.

14. Sound is very good, especially the way it shifts speakers when changing views.

15. Sirens can get to be a bit annoying after a bit. Wonder if they could really hear that over the noise of the engines and slipstream?

16. Bombs and rockets on the planes? didn't see a way to start without them. Perhaps I missed something there though

17. Rudder was EXTREMELY sensitive. gonna make gunnery tough.

18. I could hear JG1Bela firing his guns and dropping bombs but he was nowhere in sight.( we had agreed not to fight right away in order to get a feel for it.

19. I won't say anything about the views as yet because i couldn't select my joystick

20. Airplane looks much better after hitting the F1 key, changing the res of the game.

21. There were times that the screen was a bit choppy. All in all, I am sadly disappointed. Unless you can tell me there are going to be some patches available REAL soon I will be returning this product. I really feel that I wasted $45.00

I just hope the regular version was tested better than this before going gold.

PS( after the adreneline rush has worn off) Piranha