After Hours – MiG-29 Fulcrum

If you are familiar with Falcon 3 than you will have virtually no learning curve on the system set-up for MiG-29, as it is very similar except the colours are changed and the voices speak with a Russian accent! The aircraft however is quite different from the F-16, and you need to sit in a quiet place for a couple of hours with the flight manual to learn the new weapons and controls. While that is good advice, if you are impatient like me you will immediately click on “Instant Action” and get stuck into the father of all dogfights.

You quickly find that the Falcon and the MiG fly quite differently. The fly-by-wire of the Falcon gives a good linear response, but the more

Spectrum Holobyte does an excellent job of modelling tactical responses, and if you enter the fray with the radar turning and burning, your opposition will pick up the radiation and react accordingly.

Spectrum Holobyte have is sued a “plug and play” version of the MiG-29, which you in- stall over an existing copy of the excellent Falcon 3. This “clip on extra” is part of the company’s policy of producing a set of aircraft and add-ons to form an electronic battlefield. Falcon 3. 0 has already been enhanced by the “Operation: Fighting Tiger” software which adds new weapons and scenarios. Now you can fly in opposition to the F-16. The next edition is the A-10 Warthog, so if you like dodging trees and powerlines to do some serious ground pounding, look for it soon.

tional MiG-29 control system gives a slow but precise movement in pitch and roll for about 50% of the joystick movement, then all hell breaks loose and you enter a fantastic pitch or roll rate that takes you way past where you wanted to be. And yes, I have seen 80 degrees on the angle of attack gauge on the HUD.

I found the Falcon much easier to fly, but with persistence, I think the MiG-29 could be induced to give higher pitch rates which could see you turning inside a Falcon and getting that vital first shot. As yet, I do not have a second computer to test this hypothesis in head to head missions, but one day soon. . . . .

a bit mind bending at first, but helps you line up on the radial of your choice quite easily once you get the hang of it. The aircraft needs to be trimmed for speed changes which is unusual in a flight simulator, but true to life. You can switch this function off and use the trim controls to look around the cockpit.

By comparison with the F-16 and the F-15, the instrumentation is very “mid 50’s”, with few electronic aids. Appar- Installing MiG-29 is simple – you insert the disk in a drive, ently the objective of the aircraft designer is to provide the change to that drive, type “INSTALL” and follow MiG-29 pilots with as similar environment as possible to the tions. There is a bonus if you have an old version of Falcon earlier MiGs, so the colours and placing of instruments is a 3. 0-you get two disks that bring earlier versions of Falcon lot like the earlier MiGs. The horizontal situation indicator 3. 0X to version 3. 02, which fixes some of the bugs and is ensures communications compatibility. If you want to enjoy Operation Fighting Tiger, you have to install the software in this order: Falcon 3, Operation Fighting Tiger, MiG-29. The upgrade wipes your squadrons, so if you are near getting your Congressional Medal of Honor, you may have to complete the campaign before defecting to fly with the enemy. MiG-29 requires 603K of free RAM and 6MB of free hard disk space, so you may have to do some clever memory management to clean up your computer. The $20 for the Step-up from DOS 6. 0 to 6. 2 is a good investment. If you are running short of disk space, you can use Microsoft’s disk doubling utility which works with only a small loss of New to my experience is the IRST – InfraRed Scan and Track. This function is driven by the sensor just in front of the canopy. Spectrum Holobyte does an excellent job of modelling tactical responses, and if you enter the fray with the radar turning and burning, your opposition will pick up the radiation and react accordingly. With the IRST you can also use inputs from the Mainstay AWACS aircraft, com-

plete with a heavily accented voice calling bearings and headings, creep into the bandit’s six, and lock-on and track from 20 klicks. One shot panics the flight into breaking and while they are watching the first R-73 IR missile closing, you fire a second missile for a sure kill. Very sneaky and effective.

I also liked the way the Gsh-301 cannon functions. You only have 150 rounds and the rate of fire is quite slow. To prevent spraying bullets into thin air, as I usually do, you can select autofire and the cannon fires five shots only when the weapons system assesses that the bullets will hit. This is a great aid, but I still like to hear the cannon thumping away as a Falcon flashes though the windscreen.

While the MiG-29 has excellent air to air performance, its air-to-ground capability is quite dismal by comparison with the F-15E and F-16. The reason given is that the MiG-29 is optimised for air superiority. To aim a bomb, you have an “iron” sight with a fixed reticle depression so that you must dive at precisely 30 degrees, at a precise speed (that you can preset,) and release at precisely 2000 feet. I could not hit a thing, which was exactly the result I used to get dropping bombs from the Mirage which used the same system. Ivan will have to do better to be competitive with the US aircraft, as the CCIP “death dot” system is easy to use and makes cheap bombs such as the Mk-82 and Mk-84 very effective weapons.

So how does the MiG-29 rate? The MiG-29 is a rework Falcon 3, so the scores are virtually identical. Some of the player interfaces have been improved slightly as you would expect. On the other hand, having become used to Falcon, it lacked the “gee whiz” factor of a new simulation, so excitement is down somewhat. Nonetheless, the bottom line is very respectable. Here are the scores:

If you have Falcon 3 and are becoming a bit jaded with flying one type, MiG-29 is highly recommended. In addition to getting a new and interesting aircraft to fly, you also receive upgrades to Falcon. Once again, Spectrum Holobyte has done a thoroughly professional job of modelling a real aircraft, especially difficult with the limited information available. Only the Russians know how close it really is. My thanks to Electronic Arts for the review copy.