Janes ah-64d longbow gold free download

The enemies looked fine, but then again, the only time you really saw them was 2 seconds before they explode into a massive ball of flames well, at least that was the case when they saw scene's chopper barreling down upon them. What really let me down was the terrain. Sure, EA put in "real satellite terrain", which may be fine for an airplane sim when you're 30, feet in the air anyway so you can't see a damn thin, but I want trees!!!

I want cliffs!!! I want canyons to fly through!!! I don't know how many of you have played the game Comanche before, but that game wasn't realistic at all, and it was a blast! You got to fly through ravines, pop up out of canyons and blast everything away, or fly past a mountain and find 15 anti-aircraft batteries on the other side and get blasted back to where you came from!

Such an extremely important detail that was passed over; it almost ruined the entire game for me. Longbow would have been much more fun with terrain you could do a little more with. Finally, a game that doesn't have annoying, generic, crappy midi tracks playing endlessly. In fact, there's no music at all in the entire game besides the cut screens leading to your mission. As for that one track, yeah, I guess it's all right, but you don't hear it that much anyway so it doesn't matter.

This chopper is your main attack vehicle, and while the Kiowa has some limited offensive and defensive capability, this is the chopper you send when something needs to be destroyed. The main feature of the Longbow is the Mast Mounted Radar. This gives the Longbow the advantage of only having to uncover the radar module rather than the whole helicopter in order to get a radar picture of the battlefield.

Longbow II models this feature rather faithfully, and successful bobbing and masking techniquies are vital to your success. The Kiowa is an enhancement of Bell's Jet Ranger helicopter. This sight not only includes radar equipment, but also a variety of cameras so that the helicopter may remain behind cover and visually spot the enemy. Once enemies have been spotted, the Kiowa may lase the target so that Longbows may be called in to take it out. Finally, we come to the workhorse of the Army, the Blackhawk.

The Blackhawk is a large, fast, simple machine that lacks the grace of the other two helicopters. What it lakes in grace it makes up for in stamina and carrying capacity. The Blackhawk is mainly used to either insert troops near or behind enemy lines, or to pick up troops in a variety of situations. The Blackhawk lacks the variety of digital displays used in the Longbow and Kiowa copters. The Blackhawk is much more spartan, but no less important, as an insertion mission can have just as much weight on success as a strike mission.

These helicopters are all modeled in fine detail, and they all have more than one station modeled. The Longbow has both the front and rear seats modeled, and both are fully usable by the player. The Kiowa models both pilot and co-pilot stations, although one won't usually need to switch between the two.

Finally, the Blackhawk models the door gunners, letting you personally cover insertion or extraction missions. The flight models on these choppers are also excellent. The flight model is completely configurable, so that if you want simplistic flight controls with realsitic avionics controls, you can have that.

With everything set to realistic, just getting your chopper to the LZ or the hot zone might be a challenge, as the flight model is quite realistic and unforgiving. This makes the game even better for die-hard sim nuts who just crave realism above all else. The graphics in the game itself are fabulous, with only one glaring flaw. The game has no trees I know this would really drag down the frame rate, but this is something we all wanted to see.

Other than that, the graphics are great. Objects such as your own helicopter or enemy encampments are beautiful, and the terrain is nothing to sneeze at either. But it's not the first time that the Apache range of helicopters has been the subject of a game; there's the recent Apache Longbow from Digital Integration, the not-so-recent Comanche: Maximum Overkill from Novalogic which featured an experimental helicopter based on the Apache , and of course MicroProse's very own Gunship , which started the ball rolling a few years back.

So do we really need another Apache helicopter combat sim? Andy Hollis, game producer, certainly thinks so: "The thing that really made Gunship so exciting was all the new technology it used. The Apache was cool because it had great new things like tads Target Acquisition and Designation Sight and pnvs Pilot Night Vision Sensor which allowed it to track and scan targets and enabled the pilot to see in the dark. The Longbow is a new variant that uses even more sophisticated technology, so it's still all very exciting.

Just in case you don't have a copy of Jane's handy, I'd better explain that the new Apache Longbow has a mast-mounted radar dome that sits above the rotor blades so the helicopter can stay low, popping up briefly and thereby exposing itself to scan for targets. It then dives back down into cover again, the data is analysed, the pilot accesses the threat and then pops up and takes out the targets.

A bit sneaky, you might think, but very effective - and all's fair in love and war. Of course, none of all this fancy stuff would be of much use if the terrain was essentially flat as it was in Gunship , so Origin have developed a unique meshlike terrain generating thingamy that can throw texture-mapped polygons around and look very realistic at the same time. Take a peek at the grabs to see what all the fuss is about. The pay off for this is that a lot of textures need moved quickly when in motion which means that Longbow needs a powerful machine to be seen at its best.

It's well worth spending the money to pick up that ninja PC though. Longbow succeeds as few other sims have in presenting terrain which really looks different depending on which part of the world you are meant to be in. The jungles of Panama or the mountains of Korea look very different to the flat Ukrainian plains.

Ground detail is somewhat sparse, there are no trees or other foliage and it sometimes seems like the only features you spot on the ground are those you should be shooting up.

The overall effect is good though. While you're in that spending mood, make a little extra room on that credit card to pick up a some hardware. You see Longbow makes extensive use of the mouse to interact with the various MFDs. Fine, that's always something I like to see in a sim.

The problem is that flying your Longbow with any degree of skill or success almost demands the use of some kind of throttle control. I come from Aberdeen, a place with one of the highest background radiation counts in the world due to the large amount of granite from which it is built.

Even with this evolutionary jump start, I have been unable as yet to grow a third arm from the centre of my chest meaning that in the heat of combat when I am holding my joystick in one clammy hand and my throttle in the other, I have no limbs left with which to use the mouse to select targets, define priority fire zones and all those other essential tasks the busy Longbow pilot needs to perform.

Early experiments using my nose to move the mouse have proved unsatisfactory and messy. What would really be useful is one of those throttles which incorporates a mouse control into the throttle handle. I can always dream.. Yes Virginia, and Bill Gates is a nice man, concerned only with the future of computing. The Windows95 version of Longbow Gold as mentioned above is heir to a variety of ills ranging from choppy FMV and cut off sounds to a definite sluggishness and the occasional crash of the PC that is not the Longbow.

There's a lot of Longbow crashes. The technical supplement supplied with Longbow gives some hints that this might be the case. Game running slow? Use the DOS version. Choppy sound effects? Computer bursts into flames every time you boot up Longbow? You get the idea. Your copilot-gunner is a slimy piece of work as well. Oh for a pilot operated ejector seat and let the rotors take their chances. A tragic omission is that of a dynamic campaign engine. Both campaigns are scripted trees and though this may be fine the first couple of times you play through them, the novelty will wear off eventually.

There is a vast quantity of single missions included with the game and a random mission generator for when those have been exhausted so the player is not likely to find themselves getting bored anytime soon but dynamic campaigns would have been the icing on the cake. Well, I better stop or my reputation as a hard hearted reviewer is going to be in tatters. One of the problems of seeing as many flight sims as I do if you have tears prepare to shed them now is that you can become a trifle jaded.

One sim blends into another, seperated only by a unusual subject or a novel graphics engine. It takes a lot these days for a sim to grab my attention and make me go "WOW!

Longbow Gold has done exactly that and as a consequence has vaulted straight into my top three sims of all time since you ask the other two are Tornado and SU 27 Flanker with Hind in fourth place and Warbirds coming up strongly from the back of the pack. It gets just about everything right and does it with style. The only rival that comes anywhere close is Hind from Digital Integration which scores on the challange of flying the Hind and the sheer variety of mission types provided.

If by any chance you have not yet come across Longbow in the course of your simulated flying career, make its acquaintance as soon as possible.