Ok, at first I was afraid I wouldn't be able to open it at all. After a little bit of meddling with various parts of my system, I finally managed to get the opening screen to load. Having done so, I clicked "OFFLINE" and waited...and waited...........and waited.........and yep, you guessed it, I waited some more. Nothing was happening.
I had to manually reboot my computer so I could turn the graphics settings down for the game.
I turned it down to 800x600 and was FINALLY able to load the game.
My first impressions were not favorable. First of all, the graphics at 800x600 were horrible. Absolutely horrendous. The buildings were a collection of textures slapped onto the map, and the horizon was not clear at all. In short, everything was really fuzzy. Having taken off, I noticed with a great deal of regret that they had replaced the P-51's gunsight with that of the Spitfires.. I immediately started missing it. Having climbed up to altitude, I decided to take some shots at the circling P-51s to see what the explosions were like.
Great was my dissapointment when I found out there WERE no explosions. Instead, the planes just dissapeared for a short time.
I looked down to take a look at the terrain, and then I was a little impressed. It had definately been turned up a notch or two.
I glanced up at my frame rate, and noticed I was only getting 34fps opposed to my normal 75fps in the old H2H rooms.
Too frustrated with the graphics to land, I exited the game and went to graphics settings to turn them up. Having turned them up to 1280x720 I attempted to re-enter the room.
The wait was even longer. I was afraid I'd have to manually reboot again. 2-3 minutes later, the tower finally appeared.
Though the graphics were greatly improved over 800x600, they were still greatly lacking. The thinner structures next to the runway sort of blended in with the skyline, blinking as I sped down the runway.
I took a look at my framerate. It was down by 12. I was only getting 23 FPS.
After shooting down, or rather, vaporizing the circling P-51s (after all, they didn't explode, they just dissappeared) I headed for the deck.
Now, most of you are probably thinking I have a crummy machine, and that's where my problems are coming from.
Negative, my machine is not crummy at all, here are its specs:
Pentium 4 at 2.4GHz
512MB ram
100GB hard drive
64MB Geforce 4 ti4200 (This graphics card out performs the new 128MB Geforce FX cards)
I run the H2H games in the current version of Aces High with everything maxed out.
1600x1200, and I get 75 fps.
Is this what is going to be replacing the old Aces High? I do understand this is the beta version and all that, but from what I saw today AH2 in its current state is not an improvement over the previous version. In fact, it is a step backwards.
Of course, I am betting anything that I am going to be flamed big time for this critical post, but I felt I had to tell you all what I thought of it.
-Ace
P.S. The trails from the tracers are nice. The spirals make it look much more realistic.
