A combat flight simulator featuring the venerable F-16 Fighting Falcon over the Korean Peninsula. With over 31 training missions and a 600-plus page manual, 1998's Falcon 4.0 was not for the casual flight sim player.
Just when the Macintosh combat flight simulator market is growing stale, Falcon 4.0 flies onto the scene. Four years in the making, Falcon 4.0 sets a new standard for impressive visuals and realism. The graphics, physics, and multitude of functions achieve what the designers and developers set out to do: simulate an F-16.
The premise of Falcon 4.0 is simple. Tensions in Korea have escalated to the point of war, and you’re responsible for dispensing a healthy dose of justice. Your first task, though, is to master the controls of your F-16. Falcon 4.0’s learning curve matches a 7G climb, and you’re going to black out before you reach the end.
Thankfully, MacSoft ships several printed training guides, including a 400-page Flight Handbook, a map of Korea, and a chart of well over 100 keyboard commands. You’ll greatly appreciate these references; it would be a nightmare to learn to fly the F-16 through PDF files.
The training manuals progressively expose you to all of the F-16’s controls. The first section of the Flight Handbook is a companion to 31 simple tutorials. These missions begin with basic maneuvers and move on to all other aspects of the F-16. Lessons teach the functions of the interactive switches and dials in the cockpit and address the extensive radio system — you’ll learn how to send commands to your wingman and how to find the nearest refueling tanker.
Falcon 4.0’s graphics are a remarkable engineering feat. The terrain is a pleasing trade-off between photorealistic quality and designing the program to fit on one CD. Above 3,000 feet, the mountains and valleys are smooth. Close to the ground, square texture maps become visible, but they aren’t distracting. The program also renders planes and other vehicles expertly. The hardware-accelerated graphics such as smoke trails, lens flares, and clouds are all gorgeous. The glass in the cockpit even reflects the surroundings, making it hard to grow tired of just looking around.
The physics in Falcon 4.0 round out the experience. The jets react very much in accordance with Newtonian physics. If you prefer arcade-style gameplay, you can trade realism for quick maneuverability and steer wherever you want without much concern for speed, weight, or gravity.
The game types in Falcon 4.0 are more diverse than in other flight sims. The options include Instant Action, Dogfight, and Campaign. Dogfight and Instant Action require little preparation — they place you in the middle of a fight. In the most planning-intensive mode, Campaign, you can select your missions, targets, and flight paths. You can also download missions other players have designed or create your own missions within the game. With all these different ways to play, it’ll take hundreds of flights to even start to exhaust Falcon 4.0’s possibilities.
The multiplayer features of Falcon 4.0 offer more variety than other simulators. For example, you aren’t limited to dogfights in network play. Campaign mode is more fun with another player as your wingman or even as an enemy planning strikes against your base. However, the networking functions of Falcon 4.0 have some shortcomings. Internet battles work fairly well on a modem, but there’s no simple way to find existing games. Another difficulty is that on LANs, Falcon 4.0 only supports TCP/IP connections, so AppleTalk users are out of luck.
Falcon 4.0 suffered from bugs in the earlier PC release, but fortunately the Mac version doesn’t share these. Nevertheless, the porting company, Westlake Interactive, released a maintenance patch a few days after the game shipped. It’s annoying to have to patch a shipping product, but in the games market, that’s life. That said, the few bugs left after the update don’t detract from gameplay.
As is common with cutting-edge games, the company understates Falcon 4.0’s requirements. For the best performance, you need plenty of RAM, a G3, and a Rage 128 or Voodoo2 video card. In addition to high system requirements, Falcon 4.0 requires an InputSprocket-compatible joystick or flight stick. A true pilot wouldn’t want to play with a mouse or keyboard.
Although Falcon 4.0 is merely a game, we like to think that it’s the closest you’ll get to climbing into an F-16 and flying the unfriendly skies at Mach speeds without becoming a real top gun. With its impressive visuals, realistic physics, and action-packed missions, Falcon 4.0 lets you engage MiGs, liberate nations, and win medals — and you can pause to take a breath once in a while.
Stern, Zach. (September 1999). Falcon 4.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 48-49).
MicroProse
Games
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2021-12-14 / 
2023-07-12 / 
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Falcon4_1_0_6.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
