Category: Video games

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a review of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, and gave it fanboy out of ten points. But since then, my feelings for it have cooled – it never really lasted in my playing rota like the other Ace Combats. I found myself missing the lore of Strangereal, the “other Earth” that allows Ace Combat to disregard which nation those wonderful planes come from.

In 2019, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown arrived and showed me what it was I was missing. Six years later, and it is still a go-to in my limited playing time. A beautiful spectacle and a triumphant return to form.

After seeing the new trailer for Star Wars Episode VII, I was suddenly overcome with the urge to play my favourite Star Wars game of all time, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. Since I’ve sworn myself to a Windows-free home environment, some challenges were posed.

Lucikly, Raven Software released the source code for the game engine last year, and this helpful person has created binaries that will run it on Linux: https://github.com/xLAva/JediOutcastLinux. But since it is only the engine and not the game assets, we need to get them from somewhere. Steam to the rescue! I went ahead and bought the full Star Wars pack on sale. But when you open Steam, you’re told that you can’t install the game since it is not available for Linux on Steam. Booo.

This is where SteamCMD comes in! It’s a commandline tool meant for administrating dedicated servers, but it can be used to download game data for any game! Follow the instructions on the site to download it and run it, and if you have Steam for Linux installed, it will automatically pick up on your Steam login.   Just remember to remember to force it to pretend it’s on Windows by setting the correct variable, and then download the  app.  For JKII, the Steam app ID is 6030. (Protip: You can check the steam app ID by looking at the page for it in the Steam store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/6030/ .)

Next, you have to follow the README for JediOutcastLinux.  One snag I hit was that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit does not have ia32-libs, but install lib32z1,  libopenal1:i386, and libXrandr2:i386 instead and things should work the same. (When you run the game from the command line error messages will tell you what you’re missing.) Just download the whole repo as a zip if you’re only interested in playing, and grab the binaries from the code/Release folder. Copy the base folder that you’ve downloaded via SteamCMD together with the binaries, mark the binary as executable, and you should be good to go! The game works beautifully, with fullscreen, crisp graphics and smooth framerates.

Update: I just finished playing through the entire game without ever crashing! (Which I believe is better than when I played it on Windows back in the day…)  The only things that were a bit off were that debug messages sometimes appeared in the top left corner, and that dark or foggy places sometimes were overly dark/foggy. (I guess the video drivers behave a bit differently than ten years ago on Windows.) But no problem, because we have night-vision gear in the game!

I even managed to make it load up a mod, but sadly it crashed after the mod’s intro was over. Ah well, still not a bad showing all in all!

Disclaimer: This review is written by a longtime Ace Combat fanboy.

Here’s a trailer of the game in order to set the stage and give you a little on what to expect:

Second disclaimer: If this trailer full of awesome explodeyness and allround adrenalin-pumping didn’t get you interested, you probably have no interest in the rest of this review.

Ace Combat has always been about flying awesome planes around in awesome aerial combat whilst shooting down others in at fist-pumpingly awesome manner, and this game is no different. However, they’ve had a go at spicing it all up with some new stuff that wasn’t in previous games and shaking it all about. Gritty dark reboot type thing, like Batman Begins.

Here’s some of the new stuff:

• Moving from a parallel dimension to more or less our dimension. Previously, all AC games were on a sort of parellel earth with different geography and countries (although always vaguely reminiscent of real countries), but all the same plane manufacturers as we have in our world. That allowed us to have great mixes of planes without having to think over why someone had Russian and American planes in the same air force. Since they had developed it over several games, I felt a rather strong attachement to it and was concerned that putting things in the real world would make things more boring. However, they avoided this by completely disregarding boring stuff like politics, economy and logistics which is a bit silly at times but generally rather fun. Also, doing battle over cities you recognize from the real world is kinda awesome and gets automatic bonus points from me since I study geomatics.
• Helicopters! (Aw hellyeah-acopters.) For the first time in AC you get to hover if you want to, but then you’ll probably get shot down by a PRG-toting maniac on the ground. Quite fun, but some issues with control and general playability. Still, it’s fun to ambush armoured columns by waiting for them to drive onto the Moscow boulevard you’re hovering at the end of.
• Miniguns! You get to stand behind a minigun and blast the hell out of people on the ground. Makes for a nice distraction, but glad it’s not the entire game.
• Strategic bombers and AC-130s ! What’s not to like? Eminently satisfying one-off missions, just the right amount of this kind of gameplay.
• Dogfight mode. As seen in the trailer, you can initiate dogfights where you get up close and personal. To begin with I thought it was kinda silly, but by the end I had really warmed to it. Adrenalin-pumping excitement which really gives life to encounters with enemy aces and lets you fly through some ridiculous setpieces.

The new stuff is generally good, and the old stuff is classic Ace Combat, the kind of game where when you get shot down you pound the sofa pillows and shout “I’ll get you next time, Markov! AGAIN!”.

Third disclaimer: This kind of behaviour may worry girlfriends, boyfriends or anyone else within hearing distance.

Also, there’s a bunch of online stuff which I haven’t tried yet, but it’s probably a bit less off the hook and considerably harder. (But still fun, no doubt.) I would recommend this game to anyone has enjoyed previous Ace Combats and anyone who thinks a video game directed by a Japanese Michael Bay sounds fun. All in all, I give this game fanboy/10.