David Hingtgen

At the end, I was frustrated enough to set it to easy. Didn't help much. I could cast haste on myself, blind on the enemies, and still miss a lot and not get off many attacks. I could spend 2 rounds casting nothing but buffers, and still be in a tough fight, against basic lackey orcs. It reminded me of like Persona 2 for "long hard battles". I play RPG's more than anything else, (they're like 2/3 of what I own) and this is the least fun one in a long time, IMHO. Amazing, considering it is FFX with a LOTR setting.

Ah, thanks. I've never seen the Revell F-14D built-up out-of-the-box before. Only "plastic in a box" and "5,000 hours of modifications and paint".

Rant time! 1. I *love* FFX. I have a save with 92 hours on it. 2. I think FFX has about the most perfect battle system of any RPG in a LONG time. 3. I got fed up and annoyed with LOTR pretty quickly and am not going to finish it. Trading it in for Metroid Prime 2. Detailed analysis: 1. In LOTR, the battle system is like FFX with one big exception. (well, 2, but they go together). You are slow, and miss a lot. You can easily have enemies get in 4-5 hits in a row, causing your death, before you can have a character take another action. Also, you can easily miss 3 times in a row. So by round 4, having had maybe 2 characters hit twice (if you're lucky), you've taken off 1/2 HP of 1 of the 3-4 bad guys. That means LOOOOONG fights. 2. Enemies have high HP, as RPG's go. Yes, you can get lucky and get a triple-critical hit and take out badguys in a single hit. But not nearly as often as you'll miss time and time again, and then die because the enemy got in 4 or 5 free hits, plus double counter-attacks every time you miss (because they always get to have their regular attack right after their counterattack). Yes, they miss too, which only prolongs the already long fights. 3. Story. I like LOTR quite a bit, otherwise I wouldn't still have my 15-year-old copies of the books. But this is not a "parallel" story. It is EXACTLY the story following EXACTLY in the fellowship's footsteps. Kinda boring IMHO. Also, the characters are so utterly like their Fellowship counterparts, from clothes to speech, it just kind of feels stupid. The ranger is SOOOOOO much like Aragorn, and the dwarf is SOOOOO much like Gimli, it feels like you're playing a knock-off of LOTR, rather than a "real" LOTR game. 4. Yes, everyone else seems to have nothing but praise, but I started disliking the battle system at about round 2. Oh yeah--magic does have a 100% hit-rate (thank god, there's been dozens of battles where I've had one bad guy with like 5HP left, but it took another 2 rounds to kill him because EVERYBODY missed time and time again, and he got in like 6 hits and killed off 2 of my guys) but magic is quite weak. 5. Quantifying the above: no I'm not screwing up my stat-building or anything to have such slow, missing, low-damage characters. Even the elf-chick (with naturally high magic and dexterity, with me devoting most of her points to even higher magic and dexterity, with similar armor/accesories for even bigger boosts) still does sh*t for magic damage, and misses all the time. Even using the most powerful water spell against a fire-based enemy who has had his magic defense weakened from a previous status attack.

"miniature spiral hand-drill"=far superior to a pin-vise. IMHO. They're even smaller than a small pin-vise, and drill much faster/easier.

wm cheng can probably tell you exactly how, but it's always best to drill a smaller hole than you need, then work your way up.

Well here's the big things that are "incorrect" from a flight-dynamics standpoint: 1. Pulling a 6G+ turn doesn't bleed speed. Not any. 2. Your stalling speed is your stalling speed. Thus, an F-14 can roll 90 degrees and do sustained 360 turns like that, at 130kts. 3. Thrust/weight ratio seems "inflated". Most any plane can sustain vertical flight, even an F-117. 4. You can reach max speed at sea level, or thereabouts. 5. Acceleration is much faster than real life (see above).

What kit is that, I don't recognize that wing-sweep mechanism. Also, it looks like an F-14B. (Well, close to a B, missing the "shoulder pad" ECM antenna) Missiles appear to be AIM-54A/B, not C. AIM-54C is the only type carried by the F-14B and D AFAIK. Easy to fix, just sand off the 4 little "squares" on the front end of the Phoenix. 99% of people miss this.

Yes, the F-16C will unlock all other F-16's. Takes about 170 kills, based on my stats. I still don't have the Su-35, be a while before I get the 37. As for Yellow--I still haven't even SEEN him. I presume he can't be much worse than any Su35 or 47, I just haven't even had the chance to fight.

Well the F-14 is the fastest Navy plane of all time. And the F-4 still holds second place.

I wrote a little mini-FAQ about it just after I built mine. No, it certainly won't win any awards for "well-written", but it should help. http://members.aol.com/ncc42768/PGWingZero.doc

Burton+Depp were at the core of my fave movie, Edward Scissorhands. If anybody BUT Winona Ryder had been in it, the movie would have been perfect. Now, can we get Danny Elfman to do the music?

Why they have the S-32 as a separate plane I'll never know. And I REALLY wonder why it's considered better than the Su-47, seeing as how it's the unbuilt prototype. That's like having the single-tailed F-14 concept rated as better than the F-14D... Difficulty: ammo, and how much damage you take. 1 missile will do about 3/4 damage on Expert. No plane can take two missiles. Hard vs Expert---guns do quite a bit more damage against you. Free Mission: The more exp gained for harder levels isn't worth the added difficulty, because there's NOTHING more frustrating than having racked up 20 air-to-air kills--- (I think they're worth more than ground kills--actually, I think Exp is based on the target's point value, because the last time I played 27+, Grimm actually got the final SOLG hit, his only kill that mission, and his plane's bar shot up like 20%--because SOLG is worth a LOT of points) --then die with 30 secs to go because they kind of expected you to be using an Su-47 when playing mission 17 on expert, not an F-16C... Play normal, maybe hard. Expert--nothing beyond the first missions, because you'll be fighting for your life trying to evade missiles with "less than the best" planes. You can go from 100% to 0% health REAL fast in expert, unless you're moving CONSTANTLY. I've never been able to use a full load of SAAM's, you'll die if you stand still for long. From a time/annoyance/boredom factor, replaying lots of missions on easier difficulties is better I think. Still say 16B, boring but low risk of death and lots of targets. I actually do 3,4, and 27+ a lot just to hear the music. Same for 18. Not worth as many points, but more fun.

Upgrading planes: Did you use "basic" planes for the entire game? I mean, I used the F-22 when *necessary*, but otherwise, F-16C, F-14B, etc. Still took until 2nd run-through for many. Still don't have some on 3rd run. Best way to upgrade: Mission 16B. LOTS of targets. Little to worry about in the air. Mission 2 is the shortest mission, if you just need like 10 kills. 4 is also short, with more kills. 17 for air-to-air. I upgraded many planes purely by fighting in free mission. I mean, you're sure not going to upgrade planes much sinking the Hrimfaxi or rescuing Nagase all the time.

I was comparing to the sub. English VA struck me as very monotone and steadily-paced. She'd be a great "computer" voice, if you know what I mean.

Close enough? GI Joe USS Flagg is I would guess around 1/200 scale. Maybe 1/300. Quite a ways from 1/48 or 1/72. It's not to scale unless you can fit half of an airwing or more on deck.

I think added just for fun. Or maybe they couldn't figure out what control surfaces should move if it was tailless. I do think they didn't quite get the YF-23 right. It's 1000x better than AFDS did, but not 100% correct. Try full aileron, and note the tail position. Then add in full rudder in the opposite direction. The plane will yaw, but the rudders won't change. I think it's purely due to having too much "visible" differential with the stabs for roll. All the planes in AC5 do that with their stabs---most obvious with the Super Hornet---full roll should not move the stabs to their max position in opposite directions. They should only have like a 30 degrees difference. In AC5, if you have max roll and max pitch simultaneously, one stab is full up and one is neutral--in real life, you would have one stab full up and one like 80% up. Stabs don't need to move much to cause roll, because they don't have to counteract the entire lift/gravity balance on the plane like they do when controlling pitch. They also don't do it alone, they have the ailerons or spoilers for help. Even an F-14 with max stab deflection for roll, is never more than 20 degrees I think, maybe 30. And that's BETWEEN them, not each. So 10 or 15 degrees up, the other 10 or 15 degrees down. F-15's and F-16's have REALLY subtle stab differential for roll.

Quote from the last review: "the A6E Intruder comes with unguided free-fall bombs which are difficult to use, making the plane undesirable" Uh huh. Getting the target in the middle of the circle is obviously too difficult. And never mind the fact that the A-6E has some pretty big bombs which make nice big BOOMS. In the entire AC series, Mavericks (Which the reviewer seems to like on the A-10) etc have always seemed useless to me---you don't get enough to make them better than a double-dose of Sidewinders, and have no spread damage. A few 1,000 or 2,000lb bombs are a lot more useful than a dozen Mavericks or SLAM's. Heck, the F-5E is pretty good for a bomber in the entire first half of AC5, due to a decent bombload and the ability to have 4 bombs dropped at a time. I had lots of fun using the A-6E in mission 18 on Expert, to get exp to get the EA-6B. A-6's are just inherently good planes. If they weren't, they wouldn't have been in the fleet for decades upon decades.

I watched about 2 mins of GITS. Kusanagi's voice is really "bland". Didn't watch enough to see what they cut. I'll stick to my DVD's.

Default X-29 scheme is identical to the default F-5 and F-20 schemes. I think. Only flew it once. Saved them some work, re-using a lot of textures. F-4X is vastly superior to the other F-4's in every way. AC5 has most every upgrade handle better than the predecessor. As in, F-14D is rated both more agile and faster than the B, when it obviously shouldn't be. They also rate many planes way too close in speed, and make many slower ones almost as fast as the faster ones. There's almost no difference between the Mach 2 and Mach 2.4/2.5 planes in the game, they're all rated in the mid-80's for speed. Which is about the entire speed-range in real life for most jets.

YF-19/21 are much bigger valks than the VF-1---in 1/72 they could probably use a larger scale female figure.

Soundtrack comes out in December, hopefully the liner notes will have the lyrics.

I'd like the lyrics for Unsung War. I know the first line is "something something something something Razgriz".

Green lights: right side Red lights: left side. Worlwide standard, civil and military.

All planes have OS, RZ, and ONE of the following: YK, BL, SP. All planes have only 3 colors. If you've got SP, then don't bother looking for a YK one to shoot down to get his color, etc. I really wanted a "fleet" F-14D color. Especially Bounty Hunters. If the A and B can obviously be the Jolly Rogers, I wanted the D to look like a famous squadron roo. I also wanted the F-15S/MTD to have its "real" colors as well--the X-29 does.

I'm not much fond of purely experimental planes designed with the goal of exploring one aspect of flight, like most of them are. Speed, roll, high-alpha, high-altitude, vectoring, etc. Very few are anything close to a "practial" warplane. X-29's one, and only because it's made from F-5/20 parts. X-31 maybe, due to so many parts from other planes. X-32/35 are mis-named, to this day I think nobody knows why they're X instead of Y. (And then they went and screwed up the F-numbering, X-35 should have been Y-35 to become F-24) YF-17 of course would ROCK, and be way cooler than the EA-18G. Heck, why not upgraded F-104's? They served into the 80's. No worse than an upgraded MiG-21. And a Viggen!