F/A-18 Operation Iraqi Freedom
- Glide multiple realistic missions as you patrol one thousand squares miles of satellite image-based terrain
- Face off against enemy fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, helicopters and tanks as you fight for the Coalition
- Challenging and varied missions await you as you run combat missions, usher bombers and troop carriers, and handle SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses)
- Make your own missions with the powerful and intuitive Mission Editor
- Incredible realism lets you look out from your cockpit and see what real fighter pilots are viewing over the skies of Iraq!
Product Description
Glide the Navy/Marine workhorse fighting machine-the F/A-18 Hornet. Load up with precision guided munitions. Glide above a thousand square miles of realistic satellite image-based terrain. View the same environment that Coalition fighter pilots navigated during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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If you are looking for a flight simmulator that reacreates exactly what its like to glide fighter missions (including the boredom of flying for hours before encountering an enemy) with decent landscape and ok graphics, this is for you. If your looking to have fun, and not in fact to train to be a pilot, then don’t bother. Flying is hard, the controls are very sensative, which I suppose is realistic but not fun. If you’re looking for a FPS where you get to glide instead of walk around with a gun, this is not it. There are better game out there (though mostly on PC).
Rating: 2 / 5
The conundrum with Macintosh flight sims is, simply, the lack thereof. X-Plane is possibly the premier simulator on the market, and IS available for the Mac (it’s even programmed on Macs exclusively, I hear), but it lacks combat, which leaves us with F/A-18 OIF.
While the game is dated (it is the final progression of the Hornet>Hornet 3.0>Hornet Korea>Hornet Gold family), it still has become a standard in excellent PC flight sims. Newer sports meeting have exceeded this one on the PC platform, and even the ancient “Falcon 4.0″ for Mac was leagues above this, but once again the issue becomes that F/A-18 OIF is the only choice available for Mac Combat Flight Sims, and the sole one that runs on OS X.
To address some of the bugs, one needs to download the 1.04 patch from Graphsim’s website. This will resolve 95% of the control issues that people experience, and will also allow you to custom-map your joystick/gamepad buttons to no matter what key functions you wish. But, the game does have an irritating (but occasional) habit of forgetting your calibrations and assignments mid-game, and you’ll have to re-do them now and then. It’s a livable conundrum. Incidentally, when in-game, critical [APPLE]-J will calibrate your joystick and [APPLE]-T will allow you to map the buttons.
The game flies nicely, renders quickly (the system supplies are very, very low), and will work on virtually any Mac. The best thing about OIF is that it is native to OS X, where previous versions required OS 9. The sound is excellent, and the environment is rich. The opponent AI ranges from unbelievably stupid to unbelievably cunning and impossible. The game has enough realism to be a right sim, but not so much realism that the learning curve takes years. I don’t need a combat sim that grinds my processor to a halt every time I run it – it’s more vital to me that it runs smoothly, plays easily, and offers just enough challenge. I don’t need this to necessarily look better, I just want more features and a notch of better interface.
Speaking of the environment, the crowning glory of the F/A-18 series is the included “Mission Editor”. It takes practice, but once you figure out how to design your own missions, the game takes on a whole new level of fun. Sadly, the process of making missions in OIF is also a bit buggy. Once you make a mission and save it, you will need to edit the file type to “.msn” and go it to the “Missions” subfolder in order to load it from within the game. The Mission Editor doesn’t do this automatically for some reason.
Unfortunately, the multi-player environment is more or less straight dog-fight combat. There’s no play for cooperative or custom missions with your friends and fellow flight-sim geeks. This addition would make OIF the hottest thing going.
I keep revisiting this game year after year. It satisfies my need for FlightSim combat well. Sadly, though, the splendid following it used to have on the internet is all but gone. There was a time where custom maps, skins, and missions were available for download. Virtual squadrons would organize dogfights, and people offered their input on tactics and secrets, making OIF much greater than it was.
It’s still excellent, but needs to take the next step to be splendid. Somewhere, out there, somebody could make a really excellent Mac Combat Flight Sim. Until then, though, this is your answer. Give it a try, you may just like it.
Then again, you kind of HAVE to like it – what other choice do you have?
Rating: 3 / 5
You can forget techinal support. I was having joystick issues. I downloaded their update; and, it was not anything but jibberish. I e-mailed techsupport; and, they were arrogant and refused to help.
Rating: 1 / 5
When F/A-18 first came out in the first half of the 1990s it was an astounding game, well constructed and enjoyable to play, and for the time the graphics weren’t terrible either. Today it is still fun to play, but outclassed by many other sims. The latest incarnation of Hornets hasn’t really changed much: its prettier, it has a mission builder, but it flys no better and the wingmen are as dumb as the dirt they tend to plow into. In fact, in many ways its worse: the view options are not nearly as excellent as before, the manual is uninformative for game play (excellent thing I had an earlier version of the game with a decent manual), and the setup and dialog boxes are downright weird.
I was so let down by the experience that I went to the basement and found my ancient mac with the ancient F/A-18 still installed and set it up — it was just as excellent as the new version, if not better.
If you have a newer mac like mine (an Apple iMac G5 Desktop with 17″ M9843LL/A (1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 512 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Guide, DVD/CD-RW Guide)), F/A-18 is still a fun game, but it could be so much better that unless you just want a blast from the past consider something else. If you do get F/A-18 make sure you get a decent joystick, my Logitech Freedom 2.4 GHz Cordless Joystick was simply not up to the task.
Rating: 3 / 5
I mentioned in a recent review that there was a lack of combat flight simulators for the Mac. Now, with Graphsim’s release of F/A-18: Operation Iraqi Freedom, there’s one more cat in the fight!
Hornet is a honestly accurate simulation of the Navy and Marine Body’ premier multi-role fighter. The nature of the aircraft provides a lot of variety in missions; both air-to-air and air-to-ground, which clarifies a lot of Hornets lasting popularity.
Its return is most welcome. The previous release, F/A-18 Hornet: Korea, has been on sale for a long time and was a splendid sim, but has been left in the dust by advancements in console and Windows sports meeting. Unfortunately, this new version doesn’t bring Hornet back up to par.
OIF is small more than Korea running natively in Mac OS X. It does sport a few improvements and the campaign has went from southeast Asia back to the Iraqi theater familiar to Hornet 2 pilots, but by and large it is still the same game that was considered ancient five years ago.
Not only have there been few upgrades, but some things have in fact gotten worse. The useful user interface found in previous versions has been replaced by a simplified but less informative menu system. Options that don’t fit neatly into the limited menus, such as network setup and callsign changes, now appear in unsightly Classic-stylishness dialog boxes. Functionally, the weapon load out and mission briefing screens in fact grant much less information than they used to.
You usually have wingmen, but the AI hasn’t been improved. On my first flight back at the controls I got to watch “two” turn into a lawn dart while trying to place guns on a thug that was already crashing all by itself.
In the cockpit there’s no longer a free-look control; you’re now restricted to fixed perspectives or a target padlock. Further, whenever you switch the camera to follow another vehicle your game play is interrupted by a “synchronizing view” message that interrupts the flow of your mission and makes long-range visual IDs a pain.
What’s more disappointing is that the simulation itself has received so small work. The F/A-18 is still the only texture-mapped aircraft in the game and the variety of friendly and enemy units hasn’t increased.
On the up side, the terrain is now textured with satellite images that are a significant improvement over previous versions. It’s not as nice as the chief Windows sims, but it does look pretty excellent from about twenty thousand up. Of course that just makes the flat shaded polygon aircraft seem even more out of place. All of this does guide low system supplies and high performance though.
It’s pretty obvious that the only real progress has been in the social class. It’s a Carbon port so it doesn’t require Classic to play and HID support has been added so most new sticks and other controls will work fine. No progress was made in the multiplayer department though. The UI is hideous, requires manual IP address entry, and lacks the GameRanger support that Korea had.
It’s clear that Graphsim is not as active as it used to be. The result is a release whose age is accentuated by the two-year gap between the Windows and Macintosh versions. The bottom line, though, is not that Hornet hardly competes with modern Windows flight sims.
The bottom line is that this modest update still makes it the only combat flight sim you can buy in an Apple Store for OS X. Here’s hoping that the competition heats up soon!
Rating: 3 / 5