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''Hellcats over the Pacific'' is a flight simulator computer game for the Macintosh computer. It was written by Parsoft Interactive and released by Graphic Simulations in 1991. Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games to be able to drive a 640 x 480 x 8-bit display at reasonable frame rates in an era when the PC clone's VGA at 320 x 240 x 4-bit was the standard. The graphics engine was combined with a simple Mac interface, a set of randomized missions and a number of technical features that greatly enhanced the game's playability and made it a lasting favorite into the mid-1990s. The basic Hellcats engine was later adapted to produce a series of games, including ''A-10 Attack!'', ''A-10 Cuba'', the ''F-18 Hornet'' series and early versions of ''WarBirds''. ==Description== ''Hellcats'' is a combat simulation of the F6F Hellcat aircraft in a series of fictional missions during 1943's Guadalcanal Campaign. ''Hellcats'' focused almost entirely on the flying of the aircraft, with a minimum of setup or in-game controls. After starting the game the player finds themselves in a minimal interface consisting of a small number of dialog boxes for preferences and selecting missions. The entire interface was based on the Mac's built-in UI, as opposed to hand-rolled elements built out of the game engine itself. This made for a spartan but easy-to-use interface. After the initial setup the user rarely used any of the out-of-game controls except for the mission setup dialog box, where radio buttons allowed the player to select one of the eight missions, along with their fuel load and zero, one or two bombs. Nothing else was required, and after selecting a mission the game switched to the in-cockpit view. Due to the simplicity of the game engine, the flight controls were also quite simple, offering basic controls for the engine, rudder, flaps and landing gear. Primary flight control for roll and pitch was normally handled by the mouse, which included a scaler that improved the "feel", although the flight engine was also fairly insensitive to overcontrol. Joysticks could also be used, but were supported via "mouse mapping", not directly. View controls allowed for a number of different options, including tower views and similar, but also a "slow following" chase mode that slowed down transitions between different flight directions in order to reduce the total amount of movement when correcting for small adjustments in flight path (this is now common to most games). One feature that was lacking from ''Hellcats'' was a "snap view" that allows the player to look in different directions and then returns to a front view when the key is released. One oft-commented-on feature of Hellcats was its "instant replay" view. The game logged out all actions in the game world to a buffer, and on command could play them back from an external viewpoint. The game would select a viewpoint that kept the "important action" in-frame. For instance, if the player was in the midst of dropping a bomb on a ship, during replay the camera would leave the aircraft and follow the bomb down to impact. On the other hand, if the player was in aerial combat and two planes collided nearby, the replay would instead keep the player's aircraft centered and rotate the camera to show this event relative to the player. The game rarely chose the wrong viewpoint, and the effect was often cinematic. The game world consisted primarily of the player's Hellcat and enemy aircraft, normally the A6M Zero. Some missions included "friendly" F6F's and a B-17 Flying Fortress. Enemy aircraft also included the Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" in one mission. Ground targets included AA guns, cruisers, battleships, aircraft carriers, and sometimes static aircraft parked at the airbases. Many of these targets could be destroyed by bombing, which was "eyeballed" by diving on them. Smaller targets could also be destroyed with machine gun fire. Air-to-air combat was relatively simple, normally degenerating into a turning fight which, unrealistically, the F6F could win by lowering its flaps. Actually shooting down the historically flimsy Zero was difficult in the game, at least at closer ranges, and often ended with the opposing aircraft's engine failing and the aircraft crashing while ditching. Although it was possible to directly "kill" the aircraft, this generally only occurred with hits at long range; at shorter ranges, most bullets simply went right through the aircraft.〔("Hellcats/Leyte Gulf FAQ" )〕 Another issue with the combat system was sighting distances, which made targets practically invisible at even a few kilometers' range. To address this, the game included a radar display that showed, unrealistically, every aircraft above a few hundred feet altitude in a 360-degree view around the player's aircraft. Although the damage modeling was simplistic, the game did track damage to the pilot and would "kill" them in certain circumstances. This could be avoided in many cases by quickly exiting the mission before crashing, although this did not help in the case of a direct hit on the pilot or a mid-air explosion. The pilot could also be lost in action after bailing out of a stricken aircraft. This was a bone of contention among players, as the system for deciding whether or not the pilot was lost was completely random; even landing in the middle of a friendly airbase would often result in a dialog stating the search and rescue teams could not find you, leaving that pilot MIA. The game had no built-in method of reviving dead or missing pilots, but there were 3rd party programs that were available to do this. The game manual was typically sparse. Instructions for the UI and basic flight were included, the later being copied from an FAA manual that often disagreed with the basic flight model in the game. The manual also included a complete copy of the original F6F flight manual, useful for historical purposes only. The key to ''Hellcatss long life was the overall simplicity of the game as a whole. Starting the game and entering a mission could be completed in a few seconds, and the in-game action demanded more situational awareness than outright flying skill. The lack of complex weapons also helped make the control system quite "thin." This resulted in a game that was much more approachable than its more complex follow-ons, and ''Hellcats'' was widely enjoyed by players that would not normally play flight simulators. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hellcats over the Pacific」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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