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[SwiftSpear]

I'm looking for a pair of top down flight combat titles from the period after colored sprite games were fairly popular. Both games I remember having fairly reasonable graphics, something on par to early to mid SNES era quality. Originally these titles I played as demos on PC from one of those 2 dollar demo disks you used to be able to buy at dollar stores, and I was wondering if anyone knew if they had reached abandon ware state. While I remember the graphics and gameplay in fair detail my memory has never been sharp for names or titles so I'm hoping someone might be able to attach descriptions to my forgotten names.

First game: You played the part of a deep space bounty hunter cruising the solar system for fortune and exploration. The game started you in an ship somewhat reminiscent of a star wars xwing from the top down view. Your primary ships weapon was a lazer cannon of some sort and it could be set up in various styles, single fire forward, wing fire, or triple fire. You could also get missiles that were either dumbfire or seeking. The core of the game was manipulating the stats of your craft through distributing ship energy from your power cell. You could obtain a device that allowed you to collect energy from destroyed ships and you had to distribute among your shields, weapons, engines, and other various ship functions. I recall you could distribute shields unevenly, for instance you could have more forward shields and less side shields, or more rear, and less forward, or other configurations. The flight times between planets was fairly large and the planets them selfs visually were comically small compared to your ship, some being less then the ship's wing span. When you flew to a planet it's population, usually consisting of a single person, would radio you and either just chat a little or provide you with a mission or some other piece of important information. It wasn't strictly a combat game, while you could dogfight with other space craft to pirate their energy released on destruction, and indeed many missions required you do destroy a ship or fight an opponent, many missions it was left up to you weather you solved the problem at hand diplomatically or by force, which was part of what made the game interesting to me in the first place. I never played the full version but it seemed like a game with a play scale that could potentially be as large as a long term RPG, with some very interesting plot lines and galaxies to explore. If anyone knows the title or state of the game I'm describing here I'd love to find out

Second game: This game, also a non scrolling top down flight combat title, was quite different from the other. I can't remember anything about the name of the game at all. The gameplay was very interesting though. Essentially you chose a ship, set up it's equipment, and then were implanted in a fairly large 2D map absolutely stuffed with enemy fighters, ground based turrets, defense installations, and targets. When setting up your ship you had a choice of several different types of bombs. I specifically remember cluster bombs which took up a large amount of cargo space but would absolutely devastate an area of ground where they landed, making them extremely efficient for taking out dense fields of enemy ground based defenses. missiles were useful for destroying enemy aircraft from long range since they were seeking and Rambo tactics could get huge amounts of bogies on your tail very easily that needed to be dispatched. One of the things I remember expressly was the difficulty of the game, I don't think I ever actually completed the demo mission in full, I recall that you had to be extremely sneaky and mean with the tactics and strategies you used. Unlike most flight combat games you couldn't just rush in guns blazing and blow up crap to your hearts content. Flying in straight lines for any reasonable period of time would get you blasted, flying over defenses too dense would get you easily blasted, flying by too many enemy air forces would get you blasted, it was a game of picking your fights and then running off to regroup over and over and over until you had whittled away all your targets to the point where you could easily destroy them from the outside to the inside. I recall the premise of the game being to destroy some sort of enemy power generator or something, but I really don't remember it too much more then that. I remember you had a choice in ships, you could either choose fast flying, low hitpoint and low cargo ships, or slower ships with more hitpoints and cargo, with various combinations possible, I believe turn rate was a factor as well, and ships that could turn faster were preferable because they had a far easier time dodging fire, which was a integral part of the game. Once again, if anyone can attach a title from my description or even find a similar title it would be much obliged.

[Eagle of Fire]

Solar Winds for the first game, and I'm guessing Raptor for the second.

[SwiftSpear]

Ya, solar winds is the first one. Unfortunately it's still in a state of being sold apparently after 13 years, and neither ebay nor amazon has a listing. If anyone knows of a place that it still can be obtained feel free to PM me.

The second title I'm looking for isn't raptor. While raptor looks cool, it's a scroller, the game I'm looking for granted you free access in 2 dimensions to a large rectangular map, it didn't just scroll towards the top of the screen.

[Dave]

Solar Winds games are all still sold.
Rejected.

The second one is still unknown...suggestions?

[Luchsen]

Zone 66?