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→B-1 Nuclear Bomber
There are no preliminaries in this game. The first thing you see is a message indicating that war has begun and you are to fly your B-1 Bomber from Thule AFB to a target in the Soviet Union. You are told what your primary target is and then given a "fail-safe" code to arm your one megaton nuclear warhead.
You control your mission throughfour types of commands: ·rnght flight control,navigation, combat and bombing.Flight commands allow you tochange course or altitude· altitude as well asthe distance you fly on any heading.Navigation commands allow you todetermine what course to set to reacha particular target and lets you checkthe status of your mission. You canalso use radar and use the searchcommand to locate Soviet defensecomplexes in your flight path. Combatcommands allow you to fight offsurface-to-air missiles and MIGsthat are launched against you. Youmay use electronic countermeasures,take evasive action or firePhoenix missiles. (Phoenix is spelled"Pheonix" in several place in theprogram and missile is spelled ''"missle"throughout.) You have six ofthem. Bombing commands are usedonly when you've reached a target,whether primary or secondary. I'venot been able to bomb a primarytarget and return safely to the airbase. I reached the base once only tofind out that the crew had died ofradic(tion radiation poisoning from a nuclearairburst. Such are the wages of war. There are 20 Soviet defense complexes from which SAMs and MIGs are launched to intercept you. Once they come within range of the Phoenix missile you may destroy them. There may be six or more SAMs and MIGs going after you at any one time after penetrating into the interior of the country so you must be constantly monitoring your situation. Your computer keeps track of enemy contacts by displaying the type of aircraft or missile launched against you and the time, in seconds, before it will hit your plane. This summary appears frequently and you may call it up by checking your status. The status command lets you know how much fuel you've got left, your altitude, your course and similar data. All of these displays are in text. Regardless of whether you drop your bomb on a primary or secondary target, the Soviet defenses will continue to fire on your plane until you've left Soviet airspace. ===Ease of Use:=== Using only keyboardinput, the game relies on two-lettercommands. "ST," for example, isthe status command. "EC" representsthe electronic countermeasurescommand. You may enter the entireword, but the first two letters is allthe computer "reads." The gameseems to be crash-proof. A 12-yearoldwho played it found no trouble ingetting used to the command structure.An eight-year-old, however,was less than impressed. Theabsence of graphics, predictably,disturbed him.Documentation: The game comeswith an eight-page manual thatincludes a map of the Soviet Unionshowing the locations of all targetsand defense complexes. The cassetteincludes versions of the game for the
