Home Computing Weekly


Combat Air Patrol
By Vidipix
Dragon 32

 
Published in Home Computing Weekly #124

There are a large number of flight simulators available for all popular home computers, the Dragon 32 included. Dragon 32 flight simulators have to beat DACC's excellent 747 simulator and this is what I partly judged Vidipix's CAP against.

CAP is essentially a fighting rather than a flying simulation. Your aircraft is a Tornado of the RAF and you must attack Russian Mig 25's and avoid their attacking fire. Your weaponry consists of 2 SAM ground-to-air missiles and a fast firing cannon. You must quickly learn to recognise which aircraft, all displayed rather poorly, are the enemy and which are American FI5 Eagles. I tended to have a crack at anything that came into view partly for the sheer hell of it and partly to have a go at the anti-conciliatory attitude that is prevalent in computer games (I wasn't a fan of Raid Over Moscow, either). Not that I often got the chance. I suppose that the game mirrors a real combat mission in that you do not have aircraft whizzing about constantly firing and attacking but without a moving landscape and with very little else to do (admittedly there are refuelling and landing options) one tends to hanker for a scrap.

The program is rather slow working; a large proportion of it is written in BASIC. This fact I found out by accidentally pressing the Break key only to find the program stop and display itself. I am a little sceptical of any programmer who does not know or use the well-known POKE's to disable the Break key.

The program overall is fair, but I did not find it particularly entertaining. It has been done before and much better by other companies on the Dragon and other machines.

C.G.

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