Down in Flames

Tom: I used to play a lot of flight sims back when they existed. A few years ago, I finally realized I was never going to use my joystick again, so I put it in a closet next to my cloth map of Britannia and a box of floppy disks. But when Bruce told me we were going to play a World War II flight sim called Down in Flames, I hauled out the joystick and spent a half hour or so trying to plug it into the extra VGA port on my $400 videocard. USB has made us all dumb. Well, it��s made me dumb, at any rate.

Then I discovered I wouldn��t need the joystick, since Down in Flames is actually a cardless version of a card game. Having played a lot of Magic, I immediately went back to my closet and hauled out a few boxes of cards. I had a few Moxes in there I was hoping to be able to use.

Bruce: For some inexplicable reason, when Battlefront converted Down in Flames: The Card Game into Down in Flames: The Computer Game, the company explicitly hid the card-based mechanic behind some animations and text messages��as though card games don��t warrant a $35 purchase price. Unfortunately, Battlefront also hid a lot of other stuff, like pilot skills, the specific effects of fatigue, and range to target, all for apparently no reason other than that the developers failed Interface 101. Good thing the game itself is great.

Tom: The Solomon Islands campaign matches superior numbers of frail nimble Japanese fighters and pokey bombers against a handful of stout American bombers and some badass Corsairs. If you don��t know what Corsairs are, think back to that TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep in which Robert ��I dare you to knock this battery off my shoulder�� Conrad played a guy who flew Corsairs. You might recall that those planes were so cool that their gull wings made them look like they were shrugging their shoulders at the prospect of flying against the Empire of the Rising Sun. ��Enemies?�� they seemed to ask. ��Who cares?�� Then Robert Conrad would grin from the cockpit, dazzling the audience with his white teeth and 1970s good looks. Of course, I��m too young to remember that show, but Jeff Green talks about it a lot.

Turn One

Bruce: Although the game is really coy about revealing it, the Japanese are flying from Rabaul and the Allies are flying from Guadalcanal. There are three territories between them. Each turn, the territories are worth a certain number of points to one player or the other for being bombed or defended. Sometimes territories are only good for fighter battles. It��s all wildly random and about as historically accurate as having Russia bomb Luxembourg. But since aircraft are secretly assigned and then simultaneously revealed, it can make for a very tense game, historical wackiness aside.

I have only four pairs of fighters. Two of them have a lot of experience, meaning they��re high level and have a lot of extra abilities, like good armor class and high dexterity. I call them my A team. The other two are just starting out, which means they still have their training swords and newbie armor. They��re the B team. For me, a lot of this game is going to hinge on not getting any of these guys too shot up and fatigued. If I get one or more of them killed, then Nimitz help me.

Tom: Guadalcanal is the only target for me to bomb during this turn and my two Bettys are the only bombers that can reach it. I��m not about to risk those girls for a paltry two points, so all bomber pilots get to rest up��which is a big fat waste of the turn, considering they have zero fatigue. Thanks, Down in Flames, for screwing me right out of the gate.

Hoping to catch Bruce��s fearsome B-17 Flying Fortress early on, I guard Rabaul, which is a juicy target for the Allies. I use my best Zero pilots, Seiji in his regular M2 Zero and Junichi in his awesomely advanced M5 Zero. Hopefully, I��ll catch me a Flying Fortress.

Bruce: I��m sure Tom is going to be defending Rabaul with his best planes, and I��d prefer to concede two points than incur serious fatigue penalties if things go wrong there. Likewise, I��m not going to risk any bombers at Munda for just two points. And I��d even rather give Tom two points for bombing Guadalcanal than incur fatigue for a one-point reward.

Instead, I��m hitting only two targets this turn. My Flying Fortress and B-25 bomb Santa Isabel, while my A team of Corsairs goes on the fighter sweep. While it��s only two points, I hope to catch as many fighters as Tom wants to send there, and to give them a beating.

So on turn one, I��m outright conceding five points to Tom. This means I need to win both of the areas I��m contesting in order to come out ahead, and even then it will be a one-point game. But I��m pretty confident of winning, and the first turn is about not fatiguing my pilots. Once the targets start getting more valuable, I��ll hopefully be flying fresh pilots against Tom��s tired squadrons.

Tom: The big news this turn is a dogfight in which I get bracketed by Bruce��s fighters, one pair coming up from below and the other descending on me from above. I manage to score a sweet scissors maneuver using my Zero��s agility, but Bruce gets me with a vertical roll followed by a deadly card called In My Sights: Destroyed. Why can��t I draw a convenient In My Sights: Destroyed?

Bruce: Shooting down, or even damaging, enemy planes greatly increases the fatigue they incur. That��s if they bail out. One of Tom��s pilots goes down with his Zero, leaving his partner to fly solo for the rest of the game. There are no reinforcements.

Tom: Unfortunately, my only encounter with Bruce��s bombers is in Santa Isabel, where I��ve got a pilot with exactly zero experience points. Stupid noob. He just watches while Bruce drops a bunch of bombs on my stuff. If there were points for recon, I would have totally rocked on this mission.

Score: Bruce 6, Tom 3

Turn Two

Bruce: Once again, I have only one target to defend (Guadalcanal), but this time Tom would get eight points for successfully bombing it, so I have to fly air cover. I send the A team to handle this important mission, and send the B team to Santa Isabel, where a two-point fighter sweep is available. I��m hoping Tom will be sending his best fighters either as escorts to Guadalcanal (where the A team will meet them) or as Rabaul defenders (where they��ll meet no one).

Yes, once again I��m passing up the Rabaul points. I��m not excited about incurring more fatigue on my medium and heavy bombers for just five points. I��m hoping to sneak into Bougainville with some dive-bombers and catch Tom napping. I��ve conceded five points this time, but if I can win the other three areas, I gain nine.

Tom: Now I��ve got a worthwhile target for my bombers. Guadalcanal, here we come! It��s going to be tough dropping enough ordnance to score the points, so I��m sending both Bettys in. Good luck, ladies. I once again keep Seiji and Junichi over Rabaul, hoping to intercept Bruce��s heavier bombers. Meanwhile, I take advantage of the luxury of having scads of pilots by sending them to the four corners of the Earth��or at least the five areas in the Solomon Islands��to look for Bruce��s planes.

Bruce: Sure enough, Tom goes for the eight-point grand prize in Guadalcanal. The game randomly assigns the bombers to come in at very low altitude. Fighting at this altitude gives my Corsairs a bonus to their horsepower, which is basically the number of cards I can cycle through my hand each turn. Since bombers can only react and not attack on their own, this allows me to rapidly cycle my cards until I get a good combination and then pummel Tom��s planes repeatedly while he watches. At the end I get a bit cocky, and Angel Diaz��the wingman of my Pappy Boyington analog, Paul Myers��gets shot up pretty good. But everyone makes it home, which is not the case for Tom��s pilots. Two of his bombers lose their crews and will be flying solo for the rest of the game. That��s a huge blow.

Tom: Adding injury to insult, Bruce��s Dauntless dive-bombers manage to shoot down one of my Tonys. A Tony is a second-rate fighter, a Frank Stallone to the Sylvesters that are my Zeroes. But it��s a fighter nonetheless, meaning that it should shoot down bombers instead of getting shot down by bombers. But in Down in Flames, bombers have some card voodoo played by the A.I. so quickly that you don��t get to see what��s going on. It��s like this: cardcardcardcardcard��you��re dead! What��s worse, the Dauntless kills the pilot and leaves me with a gimped Tony whose contribution to the war will be on par with Frank Stallone��s contribution to Hollywood.

Score: Bruce 15, Tom 8

Turn Three

Tom: I��m splitting up my best pilots for the fighter sweeps over Rabaul and Guadalcanal. Once again, Junichi in his lovely M5 Zero stays over Rabaul, but this time he��s accompanied by the worthless noob who watched Bruce��s bombers unload on Santa Isabel. My second- and third-best pilots, Seiji and Daizo, fly over Guadalcanal.

Bruce: This turn brings out the chance for some major dogfighting: Both Rabaul and Guadalcanal have five-point fighter sweeps. Yet this turn, I��m going to take the biggest gamble I��ve made so far and concede 10 full points to Tom in order to rest my A team and have them at full strength for an all-out push on the final turn. That leaves me with just the B team as fighter cover.

I can realistically defend only Guadalcanal or Santa Isabel this turn. Because of the way the points work out, my best shot is to contest Guadalcanal and let Tom bomb Santa Isabel uncontested.

I��m hoping Tom assigns max fighters to these sweeps, as I am allocating all my bombers this turn and that may mean fewer interceptors elsewhere. The B-17s and B-25s hit Bougainville while the Dauntlesses dive-bomb Munda. That last one is just a hunch: I don��t think Tom will bother defending an area that is worth only one point for successful defense and only two to me if I bomb it.

Tom: If I��ve learned one thing from this game, it��s that tired pilots suck. I��ve been running my boys all over the Solomons and they haven��t had time to sleep, as I can see by their high fatigue scores. But one of the problems with Down in Flames is that when you play a campaign game, there��s no indication of fatigue��s effect. This is odd, since the default game is really explicit. It says helpful things like, ��Hey, if you fly now, you��re going to have -1 airframe�� or ��Dude, this guy has been run so ragged that he can��t even get a single burst in a P-40 Thunderbolt.�� These are things I like to know. But when I��m playing a campaign game, it says unhelpful things, like ��27�� or ��39.��

So imagine my surprise when I finally corner a couple of Bruce��s pilots only to discover that Seiji and Daizo are so tired that when Bruce plays something as innocuous as an In My Sights 1:2 card, it��s the equivalent of a head shot with an aimbot in Counter-Strike on a guy who forgot to buy a helmet. The end result: down in flames, indeed. Sayonara, sleepyheads.

Bruce: As the Allies, I��m always envious of how many planes the Japanese get in this campaign. The thing is that in Down in Flames, quality usually beats quantity. And with Tom flying tired pilots against my rested aces, this gap is magnified. I guess I��m not so jealous after all.

Tom: Over Bougainville, a place apparently named after those flowers my grandmother likes, a Zero and Oscar encounter Bruce��s B-25 Mitchell and B-17 Flying Fortress. If Tonys are the equivalent of Frank Stallone, Oscars are the equivalent of what it would be like if Dolph Lundgren had a younger brother trying to make it in show biz. The B-17 is at very high altitude, where my tired pilots can��t do anything but waggle their wings suggestively. So they content themselves plinking away at the B-25, trying in vain to build up enough bursts to play an In My Sights 2: Destroyed card that I managed to draw. Bruce��s bombers just laugh and fly away, but only after dropping a bunch of bombs.

Score: Bruce 26, Tom 18

Turn Four

Bruce: This is the last turn, so there isn��t any need to save planes for later. Rabaul is a big, fat eight-point target for me, but for the fourth turn in a row, I��m going to pass. Instead, I just need to make sure Tom gains no more than seven net points this turn, and the best way to do that is to fly max protect and deny him the big-point targets while sending the bombers out to force him to spread his fighters thin. If I just successfully defend Guadalcanal and Santa Isabel, I can guarantee there aren��t enough points elsewhere on the board for Tom to win. I feel like the guy who has to calculate all those possible NFL playoff scenarios. ��If the Allies win at home and Japan loses its next two on the road��.��

So I send the A team to Santa Isabel, which is within range of Tom��s fighter cover, while keeping the B team over Guadalcanal, where they��ll likely face depleted bombers and tired fighters. The big bombers hit Bougainville, while I once again sneak the Dauntlesses over Munda. Everything has to go right for Tom this turn or he loses.

Tom: At this point, my best chance is to hope that Bruce accidentally hits the Execute button before moving any of his airplanes. Otherwise, the fat lady is pretty much halfway through her aria by now.

Bruce: All Tom gets is three points for defending Rabaul. The Allies sweep the skies over Guadalcanal and Santa Isabel and successfully bomb Bougainville and Munda. Paul Myers, my virtual Robert Conrad, ends up an ace, having shot down one Japanese fighter and four bombers.

Tom: My decimated Bettys were finished off in a suicide mission over Guadalcanal, which is ultimately a very Japanese thing to do. Junichi spends his fourth turn in a row flying patrol over Rabaul, wishing someone would show up so he could at least shoot the guns��even just once��of his super-duper A6M5 Zero. He could have been a contender, but Bruce never even came to Rabaul.

Final Score: Bruce 38, Tom 21.

Publisher: Battlefront.com Developer: Dan Verssen Games Genre: Strategy

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.