Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe by Lucasgames, 1990, nice Game ! aka SWOTL ;-) I want a REMAKE of that game !!! please visit secret-weapons-... for more Infos
I remember playing this when I was a young lad. My friend's dad had it on his computer. He was quite proud of his German heritage. I honestly credit this game with sparking my lifelong obsession with all things WWII
It's been ages since I saw these screens for the last time! back in the 90s I played this sim a lot. I eventually became an expert in shooting down planes at long distance by mastering deflection shooting techniques... I also loved the packaging and manual of this game but I lent it to a friend of mine and lost track of it after some time... back in the day, first thing I did when I purchased a game was to make a copy of the original disks just in case (diskettes and also floppy drives could fail at no notice). I've recently built a super socket 7 retro PC with windows 98, hope I can find the copies. Can't wait to give it a try after 30 years. Thanks for posting the video ;)
I played the absolute shit out of this game back in the day. It sparked a love for military history and flight sims and I went on to join the RAF years later.
That's sounds "Tally ho..." Here is a study of the Mk 108 at "work", made by your RAF- ancestors. Enjoy the show... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-91LUxqn1QY0.html
One of my all time favorites. I bought it and my first CD rom drive for the computer at Radio Shack back in the early 90's. We used to have an old group that met up on the old Prodogy network , named "The SWOTL Group". I still have the game with all the boxes and all the expansion planes.
Say! I have played this game on my ancient 386SX back in the days when MS-DOS was the king! This was one of the BEST games! Thanks for bringing this video for us to enjoy our old memories!
Back in that time I was the owner of BraSoft, LucasFilm Brazilian republisher and I am a pilot since I was 18. It is too bad that Larry Holland decided not to make SWOTL2.
I got this in game in a LucasArts 3 pack back in the day. You got Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour Battle of Britain and SWOTL. SWOTL was by far my favorite. I loved the ME 262 an HO 229. I remember going to the air and space museum in Washingto DC and getting to see the Enola Gay and an ME 262 in person. I was in heaven.
YES!!!! We went to Washington and did the same thing. We even went to the Smithsonian's "Open House" where they kept the GO229, FW190 and ME163 all because of that Lucasfilm video game.
Geil! Da kommen viele Erinnerungen hoch! Meine Lieblingsmaschine war die Go-229! Wie oft hab ich das Spiel damals gespielt... Hatte sogar beim Schüleraustausch in England ein Extentionpack mit weiteren Flugzeugen (Do-335 und He-162, P-80, etc) gekauft! Als ich nach Hause kam, waren die Dateien auf der Diskette aber alle am Arsch...
I loved this game, played it for countless hours. getting that '17 home all tore up, tearing into a formation in a FW190 with the 30mm cannon. damn it was good.
Thank you KawaKasper for posting it and William Burns for sharing your comments and information. SWOTL is the best flight game of all times (and I played all of them). I enjoyed hundreds of hours playing SWOTL.
The best collection of the "Secret Weapons" is at the Air & Space museum next to Dulles Airport near DC. Sadly the Go229 is still sitting in it's sled with the wings off waiting for restoration as it has been since my first visit but you can see it. ME-163 at the entrance to the space shuttle wing. DO-335 (gigantic plane, beautiful restoration), only existing Arado 234 bomber. me-262 is at the old location on the dc mall. It's not in the game but I think their best piece is an He 219 night fighter. No Me 109 but they have a nice fw 190f.
My biggest memory of this childhood-consuming game was flying underneath a B-17 in an HE 162, and then just randomly dying. If I recall correctly, I was flabbergasted by the fact that apparently the B-17 dropping a fuel tank had managed to kill me with it.
Man o man the hours i spent playing this when i was a little kid. Fields of Glory, Red Baron, Battle of Britain. My mom was very distured that I was a Luftwaffe Ace haha.
I don't know how many Gravis joysticks I went through back in the day. Had Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour, LHX Attack Chopper, F-17 Stealth Fighter and of course all the Wing Commanders.
Loved this back in the day. Remember going on bombing runs in B-17 and then checking out the ground view with the replay feature. Wish there was a way to speed it up back to your home runway after mission was over. I remember flying for 15-20 minutes to make it home. Great ww2 sim!
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat ruled. I had SWOTL and all the expansion discs. I tried one or two campaigns, always trying to fly from base to the target. Twenty enemy fighters were always at the base while I was taking off, and I was able to shoot down ten or twelve of them... with a B17. (!) :) Those were the days.
I understand this very well! Btw. Here is the true effect, if a single Mk 108 round hit your plane. Tested by the brit. RAF. Enjoy the reality... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-91LUxqn1QY0.html
Thanks for the video and awesome memories it brought back :). I have so many fond memories of playing this game for hours and days on end and staying up till all hours of the night. I use to have an Amiga 500 and 2000 (actually still have my 2000 in the garage) and I had the previous game Battle of Britain. I was so looking forward to Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe coming to the Amiga as the graphics would have been so much better. But alas it never was ported over and it was the reason why I bought a PC for as I so wanted to play this game and that's how I ended up in the PC world. I still have the original game on floppy disk, including all the tour of duties in their original boxes and complete with everything they originally came with. I also have the CD version as well which is complete. Plus I have the big book strategy guide that you could buy back then. I still hope after many years that one day they make a remake of this awesome game but with updated graphics.
quante ore passate con questo! Posso dire che ha dato inizio alla mia carriera di pilota virtuale! Un affettuoso ricordo al mio vecchio 286 che a malapena lo faceva girare
WOW! This brings back a few memories! I remember going to the game store after school and coveting the box for months on end, desperately wanting to fly the aircraft included; esp the B17 - I was into that plane at the time after having just made a model kit of it. Eventually I managed to save up enough to buy it, installed it on my Amstrad 8086 PC (cant remember the full spec) and it was crappy! My PC couldn't handle the greatness of this game. So I learned how a PC worked and eventually built my own PC (I think I was 11 or 12) that could handle it - YAY 40 MB HDD :). Essentially this game got me into IT and God knows how many years later I'm an IT director. If it weren't for SWOTL I probably wouldn't be. I find it amazing to think the impact this game has had on me - so thanks to all involved (apart from the guy who invented to code wheel ;) ) I owe you guys a debt of gratitude. P.S. I still fly sims to this day, but this will always be my favorite.
omg... give me this in FullHD, maybe better sound and some... no wait, thats it, leave all the rest in :) This game together with the earliest Comanche, Aces over the Pacific / Europe... Strike Commander... Privateer... damn I feel bad now... :/
This is the flight sim that i enjoyed the most in all the years of gaming. At the time it was a masterpiece. No WW2 flight sim comes close to it. Aaahh the good old days. :-D
Gotta love those cockpit views! I remember playing this on my ole Amgia 500. How did we ever distinguish the planes we were shooting at from the background!! LOL
Battleground Europe is the closest game to a modern upgrade of WWll games like these. I've played it for 8years online and they just keep making it bigger and better.
Pardon me, but this game *was* produced for the 16 bit market. If you could play it on your PC, your PC was a 16 bit machine. If we're talking 8 bit machines then it's the Commodore 64 and such. This game's predecessor, "Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain" came out for the 16 bit Amiga. But then I found out that SWOTL would not be released for Amiga, so it was time for me to switch to PC gaming. I played SWOTL on a 386 SX-33 Mhz.
I still play this game in the dosbox emulator. This isnt a full sim that when time advances it get old, its a mix of arcade and simulator, a mix that i dont see in modern games like IL-2(i have it) or games like ace combat, totally arcade. The playable formula of the game is cool. The points, the ranking, the pilots that you can create to help you and that can die, the immersion with the tours of duty of the pilots where they can die... it gets quick to action and out of it to( a key)
been waiting for Lucas to update this game with better graphics,, i still have the manuel to this game sitting right here on my desk. I used to play this game for hours till the sun would come up and i was so car sick ide be falling out of my chair. i still remember some missions i was on,
Finest Hour was also good but the long range missions into German territory...that made SWOTL special...that was terror and exhilaration when you survived with a shot-up ride, smoke pouring out and flames flickering in the engine cowling. Kill fuel to extinguish flames and glide for a few then fire it up and keep limping home...all with FWs or Me109s in your rear view..if I can just just make The Channel.... AWESOME!
...and the fact that being able to glide a bird with a shot-out engine a few hundred extra meters could mean the difference between escape and capture. In BOB1940, both British and Germans alike who ditched in the channel were assumed rescued by friendly seaplanes...even if just a few feet off either coast. In SWOTL, the front line in the continent could be far more hotly contested.
aaah, this brings back memories. this was one of the first games I played as a young boy alongside DOOM and Aces of the Pacific, and I remember just how happy I was to be able to man any gunner position in the B-17 and the surprise I felt when I shot up someone's chute for the first time. thanks for the video!
Good memories- and I've still yet to find a sim where destroying the oil reserves or production plants would have an actual impact on the enemies you faced later.
Ahhh, I remember the aces series, Aces over europe, and Aces over the pacific, instant classics, and still provide cheap entertainment. I still break out the old windows 95 comp and atari 4 a qucik fix :P
Ahhh, I loved this game to death. The opening music is fantastic. It's both fun and evil at the same time! This was one of the first games that had a German-based campaign, too.
The flight sim to end all flight sims! Possibly the greatest game I have ever played. I compare all flight sims to this one. I loved the x-wing and tie fighter games(i still play them), but this is the one that started it all. I had the 3.5 floppy version(I still have the manual). I found a torrent since i cant load from my floppys and put on dosbox, but it doesn't work right there. I wish they would remake this with no changes except updated graphics!
Doesn't this still rank up there with the best flight sims of all time? I seriously loved this game. I know it wasn't super accurate in terms of the panels and the game play - honestly it was arcade-like. But where this game really made you excited was when you got to command a B-17.... and you got to switch between gunner positions & bombardier. That was so awesome.
+Sviolinist Not to take anything away from SWOTL, which was an absolute revolution, but there are still sims where you can switch between multiple crew positions in bombers (gunner, pilot, bombadier).
The game's AI was totally unfair. Flying a B-17, your gunturrets hit nothing when firing on auto. So you had to constantly switch between turrets to shoot at enemy planes. This worked fine, as long as you weren't near the target because then you'd also have to *pilot* the damned thing and once you got over the target area, you had to concentrate on the Norden bombsight. Meanwhile, enemy fighters were still attacking and if you didn't adress these with your gunturrets (disrupting your attention to the bombsight) then they would score hit after hit. So you had two choices, keep switching between the different stations, stay intact but 9 out of 10 you would miss your target. Or you could stay with the bombsight, ignore the enemy bullets and grenades tearing through your plane, drop the bombs at exactly the right time then try to get back to base which was rather difficult with half your engines on fire etc.Sometimes I thought 'screw it,' stayed with the bombsight, pressed bomb release then I had to bail out. Which was a nice change because now you could see your pplane and bombs slowly travel down to the target.Later I found out that the best way to make sure a target was destroyed, was to fly a P-47 loaded with bombs, max out on speed, try to hit the target with enemy fighters in hot pursuit. Usually I missed because I was more busy trying to dodge their fire. But after dropping the bombs my plane was lighter and more maneuvrable so then I tore down all the buildings and groundartillery with my .50 machineguns.And if you chose FW-190s or other prop planes as Germans, you always encountered B-17s. If you thought, gee, I'd like to do some B-17 blasting with my Me-262, you were in for a nasty surprise. Now there weren't B-17s attacking but fighter bombers which were very difficult to shoot down flying a jetfighter. The Me-262 of course was never designed to combat more nimble, slower aircraft. It was designed as a 'blitzbomber' (or so Hitler wanted it) but it excelled at shooting down B-17s. But like I said, the game wouldn't let you most times. If you chose Me-262 you'd find yourself almost invariably up against fighterbombers.
phil style All I was saying was that it was pretty amazing to be able to switch to all the positions as I remember. I mean that was mind blowing to me as a kid.
All you had to do to defeat enemy AI was pull into the vertical, wait for them to disengage, then roll back in and pounce. I flew one campaign until I had a score greater than Eric Hartmann :)
I was obsessed with this game because my friend had it and my lame ass 386 couldnt even begin to run it... I've waited all these years to see that it was just another medicore DOS flying shmup
Personally, I think all it really had in common with SWOTL was 1) the setting, and 2) the people who made it. So, by the same logic, I'm not my own person, but a sequel to my older brother because we have the same parents.
SWOTL was good, but Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain was much better IMHO. I still have the original game - box, manuals, 5.25 floppies and all, even though the last time I played it was more than 23 years ago. I'd love to see that game remade using the current technology, alas LucasArts is a shell of what it once was.
Still can work with VDM Sound, which is a nice trip down memory lane. Only problem: I can't get takeoffs to work. It accelerates, but it stays firmly planted on the ground. Can't remember how to get it airborne.
