Buzz-hard Soviet Campaign (BASPM)

[JasonPratt]

PKA Droptest
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This is what I get to watch. Clearly the resolution bug has not been worked out for windowed play yet.




As with original BARIS, once the mission goes you can only sit back and watch the dice roll.

The screen is amazingly unhelpful about what the problem is; and why the chance of success is less than the mission component average reliability.




The animations are, for want of a better word, static -- much like the original BARIS for that matter, though there the static animations consisted of (very pixied) photos of real life footage (maybe slightly tweaked considering there wasn't much real-life Soviet footage available) cycling through. In the remake, think of cardboard cutouts moving around over a flat background. (Obviously this would be happening within the mission control screen format box, instead of the box being plastered over the mission graphics due to the resolution bug.) Sometimes the background graphic plate itself moves around to suggest movement of the graphics.




For example, what you're seeing there isn't a 'cutout' of the PKA moving over the background graphic; it's part of the background graphic, which slides in from top left to bottom right to suggest the thing is landing.

The mission was a success, but the post-mission debrief or whatever crashed with the same resolution bug that prevented me from assembling the mission in the first place until I restarted the game with fullscreen (from which I couldn't take screenshots). This being the case I feel justified replaying the mission again, on fullscreen, reloading until I get an equal success. This only takes one try, though at least one more problem occurs during the test. The informational graphics are significantly better when everything is lined up, even though the mission animations look, well, not like Kerbal let us say. (But of course I couldn't screenshot that.)

The pilot, Stan, upgrades his skill a little, as does the reliability of the plane itself, and the skills of a couple of mission controllers. I must however point out here that piloting, which I was training him in, turned out to not be the skill he would be using but rather LEADERSHIP! -- as a one man crew piloting the thing that caused the Six Million Dollar Man to crash (because it's notoriously unstable: this drop test was essentially the same thing.) Who was he supposed to be leading??!?!

I will also mention that I only needed four flight controllers, which I already knew and expected -- but the game didn't tell me one of them would be involved in "propulsion" for a project that didn't need propulsion since this was an unpowered deadstick drop! Fortunately I had had enough sense (and cashflow) to train one flight controller each season on a specialty. What I didn't know, though in fairness this might have been in the manual, was that the overall mission controller doesn't use any of the single stats a person could be trained in (despite one of the stats sounding like it's exactly that skill with different wording), but... an average of the skills of whomever is assigned there maybe??

The sound for the mission seemed a little weak compared to the original BARIS by the way, but that might be due to a combination of nostalgia and a lack of rocketry.