Seeing all the threads and disparaging remarks about the state of the game today got me thinking: was there REALLY such a thing as "The Good Ol' Days?"
I'll admit I haven't been around Aces High II as long as some, and I missed AH1. To be honest, I haven't noticed much of a difference between today and when I started. N1K2s, Typhoons and C-Hogs still go right for the HO. Ponies sit at 20k and dive to the deck the instant they get a whiff of a co-alt conn. Vulching, ganging, hordeing. None of that's changed in the 3-4 years I've been here.
I WAS, however, around for Air Warrior for Windows. And y'know what? Except for the lack of HOs due to the game mechanics (the hit bubble didn't register them) everything that's happening in today's game was happening then. Vulching, ganging, hordeing, picking, alt-monkey 51s diving to the deck rather than fight an even fight, etc.
The game hasn't changed.
I joined back in the March-April time-frame of 2001. I don't doubt that I have changed as a person - when I started playing I was 23 with a huge chip on my shoulder and a bad anger problem. Now I'm 31, married with a kid on the way, great job, but more important I'm happy.
That said, the game has changed, and it isn't for the better. When I started playing, the focus of the game was on air
combat. Sometime around the 2003-2004 time-frame the focus of the game moved from air combat to resetting the map - and it hasn't looked back. When I started playing, you could find two fields that were a sector or so apart and if you took off and flew to the enemy field at some point you
would be met by an enemy. Again, that changed several years back - one of the most disgusting memories I have of this game is me flying to an enemy field looking for a fight, orbiting for a while with nothing, de-acking the field and LANDING ON IT, and sitting in front of the tower for 5 minutes. Nobody ever rolled.
That is more typical of game-play today.
I remember a quote from Hitech saying the base capture / map reset mechanism was an enabler for air combat. That is no longer the case. The base taking is no longer a means to an end, it
is the end.
Vulching, ganging, picking? Yes, those all happened. Hell, I don't doubt that there were even some conga lines 'back in the day'. But even though I would say that air combat "purists" were always a minority in the game, that point of view is pretty much extinct in AH today.