Pacific Fighters quasi-AAR

[Evo<^|SiNz|^>]

Preamble: I've spent the last 3 or 4 years of my PC gaming life playing things like Counter-Strike, various installments of Battlefield, Ghost Recon, and various other FPS-type games. When I was a kid, I was HUGE into Falcon 3.0, MS Flight Sim 5.0, Aces of the Pacific/over Europe, Red Baron... pretty much any flight sim I could get my paws on. I'm a grown up now, and I want to start getting back into it, so I picked up the Ultimate Flight Pack and started a campaign in Pacific Fighters.

These are some shots from the first mission in the Wake Island campaign, which begins in the weeks following the strike on Pearl Harbor. I enlist as a Marine in squadron VMA-214, the Black Sheep. Of course, the game is historically inaccurate, since the Black Sheep wasn't commissioned til mid-1942 I believe. In any case, we'll fly the Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat in our first mission from Wake on a busy combat air patrol. I'm in the second wing of an 8-plane flight.


Beautiful Wake Island, 1941:


Bandits inbound, 6 Zeros total. As my buddies start to engage, I'm lucky enough to get close to this one's six:


I'm thankful to see my wingman has joined the pursuit:


All right! Splash one bandit:


Down he goes:


Another wing of enemy Zero's crests the horizon, and starts taking potshots at our airfield. I descend to engage. I carelessly forget about the other enemy aircraft above me, and before I know it I have rounds flying past my cockpit. I end up hit badly. It takes out my ailerons:


I gotta leave this fight, I can't turn against these Zeros without aileron control. It's time to see if I can put it down without killing myself.


Whew, that feels better. I park it and "Mission Accomplished" appears on the screen. I must have done something right.


Although I was able to make it back to earth safely that day, we'd eventually be pushed by the Japanese off of Wake Island before the year's end.

[Mateo]

Nice work!

[Radooh]

Great shots.

I never finished the default campaigns in that game becaue they make you fly to your target for way too long.

[Evo<^|SiNz|^>]

Thank God for time shifting.

[TG_JBRanger]

Truly awesome. I WAS playing IL2:PF until I got caught up in the hype of BF2. After the let down I have since turned to OFP for a more combined arms game but PF is still loaded and I play every once in a while to just enjoy the wonderful aspects of "true" dogfighting.