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Free Duel, Oh This Hot Seat Of Ours
Round Four: Biplanes and Triplanes
TASO and Triplane Turmoil are a little less loosely connected than the previous games, but in both you fly vehicles which behave best in horizontal level, as opposed to the 360-degree thrust of the first category clones. Well, gotta admit landing a helicopter in TASO is a lot more easier than landing a biplane in Triplane..
Wait a second.. Why do I keep calling the planes biplanes while the game undeniably is called triplanes..
Sheesh, never mind.
Triplane Turmoil, similarly to all the games in the third category, has a complete, enjoyable one player mode in addition to the multiplayer shootout. Well, some probably disagree on the "enjoyability" of it, since it can become so repetitive, being quite hard and AI having seemingly no randomization at all. Especially the beginning of many missions have a very scripted feeling.. I remember flying for England I think, a mission where you have to defend a harbor with
the Japanese against a German attack (with some Finnish mercenary pilots).. it just simply took me million tries to figure out which planes to try and shoot down myself, which leave for the AI.. if a bomber got through it certainly did not miss its target, so it was (and is, go try) quite unforgiving. Every time the only "random" attribute, ie. player's behavior
changed, the AI pilots reacted and the pattern became very different. I guess it simply was more fascinating than frustrating for me. Ok, back to multiplaying.
AI serves all right in multiplayer mode, usually we have all four countries in the air even if we lack the fourth player. Well, have to admit it is not nearly as satisfying to shoot down the computers plane.
On technical side, the graphical approach deserves a mention; one-player, it's a full-screen 320x200 VGA and no worries. It's enough of a field of vision, the game scrolls but sideways which is important as you have to know in which height you'll stall. For the planes you don't see on the screen, an indicator is shown on the edge of it, explaining the altitude (by vertical action) and distance (colour getting lighter while approaching). In multiplayer, game can be, and by default is, played in a 800x600 SVGA resolution, which splits the screen into three slices, requiring no scrolling and showing all the action at once. This works very well, no complaints here. There's also a VGA mode, but splitting the screen into four boxes is much worse, you see so little. I guess it's possible to play the game that way too with the indicators, but not exactly pleasant.
The triplanes are, understandably, pretty much restricted to the horizontal level of action. Especially when rising too high stalls the plane, and it's not actually very high you have to go (approximately a fifty meters or so ) until this happens. This defines gameplay, limiting but also requiring tactics. A head-on with your guns blazing is not a way to increase your kills/death ratio, although you don't really have room for that much else. By this I certainly don't mean the game was boring - on the contrary, it's quite a lot of fun to try and find that decisive bit of advantage over your opponents.
Since there's less *stuff* and not as much to learn as with the other games, it could serve as an introductory level game into dogfighting "scene", but the surviving is also a bit more difficult, as the planes are pretty fragile.. well, easy to learn, hard to master.
The variety of tools of destruction is not wide at all compared to all the other games mentioned, the planes of different countries behave a little differently (equalization optional). Besides that, there's just your trusty machine gun, although you can try and surprise your enemy by turning a bomb into an air-to-air freefalling missile. Oh yeah, and don't forget the secret Japanese defensive maneuver called "Mystical Exploding Porcupine."
The game which TASO resembles most is the old classic Armor Alley, with all the helicopters, turrets, infantry.. but with a number of improvements: the graphics are more colourful and pleasant, the landscape (or battlefield) has hills and steeps in addition to actually wrapping around, so you cannot know from which direction your enemy is coming at you, the initial split-screen two player setup can be stretched to up to four players simultaneously..
On behalf of Armor Alley, we have to admit that TASO has no modem or serial game nor AI, and AAs selection of ground vehicles is more diverse. But then TASO may be little less tactical, while a heavy, a noisy, and an unwashed lot more arcade. If four players is too much for your keyboard, don't worry, the two-player mode, the duel hits the target pretty neatly, scattering remains all over. Although there may not be as much noise and hassle with only two pilots compared to four, the game balance et all those neat philosophical terms come so well defined, so solid that the duel indeed becomes a match of skill, marksmanship, and piloting capabilities, not forgetting the ability to manage your base.
Well, I do have to admit that when the 1.30 came out, we stuck to an earlier version. Version 1.30 did have a lot of additional features, such as more complicated base building & managing, adding a couple of more choppers, buildings and stuff, such as a cruise missile .. unfortunately, something which the earlier chapter is all about was a bit spoiled. Indeed, there were two game modes, and the alternative for Campaign was titled "Classical", but we could not get the hang of it, as it too had changed since the last version.. well, maybe we just sucked at targeting the cruise missile. I just wished there would have been a third mode, with similar settings as the 1.20 version had. But of course you can have the v1.20 on your HD too for that, though you can't get that one registered.
Apparently there's only so much of tactical and management side you can add to a fast arcade shooting game, and the earlier version was pretty much optimized for our threshold.
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