Why I still love Falcon 4.0(& BMS) after 30+ years and thanks to BMS Devs
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I’m 46 years old and as long as I can remember there was a Falcon Franchise title on my hard drive. I cut my teeth as a kid on a C64 playing the earliest iterations of what would become Falcon in games like F-16 Combat Pilot and Falcon AT.
I remember the excitement when Falcon 3.0 hit and played that until finally Falcon 4.0 hit in 1998 and I immediately grabbed a copy. It was mind blowing. It was an unfinished, buggy mess of a game that crashed. Had weird AI behaviors, and wasn’t nearly as polished as the other titles being put out by Jane’s at the time such as Fighters Anthology.
But that campaign was unlike anything that I had ever seen or played before. There simply was no other game, let alone simulator that had an open world concept like that at the time. Hellw e were just a few years out of the Wolfenstein 3D/Doom era.
Anyway. I have been playing off an on for decades through the F4 Unified team era when it took like 3 hours of patching to play a functional version of Falcon 4.0 but wow, for the first time things actually worked. Then there was there were two separate forks of F4UT’s code for a very long time and like 3 different versions.
Then came BMS which unified everything into something just so amazing I can’t stop playing. Let me give you an example from just yesterday. I hadn’t played in a couple years so it took me a while to get my controls all set up and to learn all the avionics again. But once I did I fired up the campaign and decided I wanted to do some Top Gun:Maverick/Iron Eagle style mission deep behind enemy lines. Some epic 2 plane sneaky-bang stuff. So I picked some NBC plant deep inside NK and drafted a couple suitable aircraft and put the mission into the ATO.
The plant was DEEP inside North Korea and required skirting the front line and crossing the coast at 200 MSL and not raising an inch above that until pop up to take out the target. After that a fight home straight south directly across the front line and past whatever was in the way. We would take extra fuel in drop tanks to ensure we had enough juice to get out.
Anyway. Me and Chappie take off and turn out over the sea around Inchon and head North towards the coast at 200 ft. We cross the coast blowing the titles off the huts of Nork fishermen. The RWR is going insane in my ear and crowded with signals and I take a moment to look up and my mouth drops as I have a front row seat to the air battle for Korea taking place above my head and around. Planes are dropping, SAM launches are blooming. Luckily at 200ft nothing but a few licks froms earch radars but any MiGCAP was way to busy at 20000 ft to worry about my little 2 ship element at 200 ft. We make away from the coastal plain and deep into the mountains and this is where it gets interesting.
The RWR is blessedly silent. Once in awhile I dip above 300 ft or the plain flattens out between peaks for a moment and I get licks from S400 search radars but no fighters. My course winds like a snake in the valleys betweeen massive peaks so high they tower above me and look like walls through the canopy. Everything is great and I’m just 30 miles from the target. I’m setting up to make a quick pop to a couple thousand feet. lock on with the laser and LGB the factory into oblivion.
I get everything almost set up and prepped for the pop up but I have 2 more valleys to negotiate before it broadens out into a plain the target sits on between the peaks. I have the autopilot and TFR on so I have a few seconds to look around. I’m scanning around when I look to my right and see something odd sitting on a rock outcropping on the reverse slope of the ridge literally at the same elevation as me, maybe a tad lower and I’m at 200ft. I crinkle my brow and zoom in the view suddenly my mouth drops in stunned amazement as I realize that it is a lone SA-6 sitting in the perfect place to ambush a low lying aircraft trying to pul the very stunt that I was doing at that moment by shooting out of the valley onto the plain and take out the target.
It happened so fast I had no time to react and didn’t even really care that 25 minutes of low level white knuckle flying was about to be blown out into scraps. I had just been outsmarted by BMS. I watched as the vehicle rotated towards me, lifted it’s rack into place. I saw the smoke bloom of the missile motor and I saw the weapon fly off the rack with it’s nose pointed right at me.
I had time to hear my wingman scream half of a IR missile warning over the radio before I was blotted from the game world.
No sim. Not DCS, not the old Janes sims… nothing could deliver that kind of out of the box, out of the blue, completely unplanned for RNG occurance like Falcon and BMS.
Thanks guys. Its fun.
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Nice write up, brother, GOTS.
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Awesome… Gotta love Bms.
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That was an awesome read! Thanks for writing it!
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If I wasn’t already hooked on this sim, I would surely be hooked after reading your story!
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thank you for writing this… you took me back in time when I starte playing… awesome!
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Great way to return, thanks! For a minute I thought "hey, maybe I should try a low level attack deep into N. Korea… nope! Now you can fly it again but after you send a bomb strike with growlers to take out the SA6 (not to say that will succeed either)! Planning, recon, planning, more planning, and nothing is ever 100% in BMS…
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The plant was DEEP inside North Korea and required skirting the front line and crossing the coast at 200 MSL and not raising an inch above that until pop up to take out the target. After that a fight home straight south directly across the front line and past whatever was in the way. We would take extra fuel in drop tanks to ensure we had enough juice
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@SiliconMagician-0 whaaaaatttt??? You weren’t bothered by the pixellated ground graphics? Your wingman didn’t eject 20 seconds after going feet dry or lawndart into one of the mountains? What kind of 2-bit piss-poor simyulayshun is this??
Awesome story, would like to hear about your next missions! Hopefully successful this time!
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@SiliconMagician-0 BMS Forever ️
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Yeah man, (Similar story here) You got to love it for all the reasons (trials and tribulations) you stated - Nothing like it - and I will add my Big Thanks to the Teams of Developers over the years as well - Cheers
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I guard this material very carefully!