<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Review of Thunder Strike</TITLE></HEAD>
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<CENTER><h3>Review of Thunder Strike</h3></CENTER>
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  Thunder Strike is a flight sim, created with (surprise, surprise) the Flight Sim Toolkit.The front end is polished, and doesn't (unlike some I could mention) make you waste about five minutes before you are allowed to play the game (if you want to by-pass the front end entirely, the four missions are in the form of normal applications, and double-clicking on them will deposit you in the relevant mission.
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  The missions are not the best I have played, the game's producers make extensive use of depots, which are, in my opinion, an unnecessary waste of time. I can't say that the senario 'worlds' are very well constructed - there aren't nearly enough enemy planes, and the enemy seems to have no tactical sense at all when placing his depots. The plane you fly has one of the highest specs of any FST game I have ever played, and the enemies are both varied and interesting to combat. The 'flying brick' mode (CTRL-B) is, like all other FST games, implemented as a 'world exploration' and general cheat system.
<p>
  As it's produced with FST, the limitations of a program which must be at least five years old are inherrent in this game. No matter how polished the front end is, the game's graphics look primitive and stupid compared with such things as the Iron Dignity demo. Everyone seems to have abandoned FST, including the authors. This is a real shame, since the package could easily be brought up to a modern standard of graphics, to bring Acorn flight sims into the present. Such things as texture mapping, gourard shading etc. may consume large amounts of processor time, but, with the increasing proliferation of the StrongARM, a flight sim which Acorn users can show to PC owners without cringing is no longer a theoretical, if still a practical impossibility.
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Author: Shanaka Thilakawardhana (and Simms, authors of FST)<br>
Status: Shareware (reg. 5 - probaly not worth the money)<br>
Availability: Datafile PD, which has been taken over by APDL, and the Datafile's <a href="../Commercial/PDCD5">PD-CD 5</a>.<br>
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