Top Ten Games of All Time - 7: Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991)

It’s been hours. Fraught, imperilled, long, long hours. 

From the base in south-east England we crossed the channel, and not too long after entering Nazi-controlled French airspace we were set upon by waves of German Messerschmitt Bf109s and Focke-Wulf 190s. From the cockpit I made sure all engines were just touching the redline, just enough speed to give myself and my five wingmen a fighting chance. The P-48 escort fighters could only go so far, and those that were not shredded by the Luftwaffe cannons turned for home. On our own now. This is it. 

Checking the engines one last time I frantically begin switching between gun positions, the maddening thunk-thunk-thunk of enemy fire hammering my bomber. By the grace of whatever God looks after us flyboys we make it to the target and I switch to the bombardier position, line up my crosshairs, and let the 2000-pounders fall. I don’t even care if they hit the target now, some goddamn railyard. I just want to get back to England in one piece. I jump into the cockpit again, turn the autopilot off, and bank hard left. A radio message tells me we’ve destroyed buildings in our target area. Hoo-fucking-ray. 

The elation is short-lived: a message also informs me my wingman has been hit. I glance behind us, and see the flaming wreck hurtling toward the ground. Parachutes. With any luck those boys will make it home. My attention has to be on my own aircraft. We’ve taken too much fire. The right outboard engine is done. I feather the props and hope the old girl has enough juice to get us home. I stare out the front. The channel is not even visible yet. I take her down to 10,000 feet. The other engines are okay, but our fuel is looking shaky. Please, God, just let us get over the channel. I can handle a forced landing as long as it’s on British soil. Hell, at this point I’ll try our luck ditching in the channel, as long as it’s swimming distance from shore. 

The left outboard engine begins to release great puffed-up clouds of black smoke. I watch them trailing away into the blue sky behind us. And I also notice a lone Fw190 hovering out there, just beyond the range of our tail-gun. The engine seems to be holding, for now. Come on, old girl, don’t let me down. 

A little melodramatic perhaps? Maybe. But such was the sense of realism I felt playing LucasArts’ 1991 WWII flight simulator, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. Affectionately known to us flyboys as ‘SWOTL’, the simple graphics and limited sound effects were no match for the sheer beauty of the design of this game. For starters, the view was cockpit-only. There was no ability to switch between third-person and first-person view. This made the dogfighting especially hairy, as depending on what type of aircraft you chose, the visibility could be downright non-existent. 

The freedom of choice was fantastic. You could dive in for a quick dogfight, pitting your flying skills against one or several opponents of varying skill levels. You could choose to have wingmen or go it alone. You could fly a campaign as an American, wheeling a shiny silver P-51 Mustang over Nazi-occupied Europe, or you could see what it was like from the other side and become a German Luftwaffe recruit desperately trying to down a few B-17 Flying Fortress bombers in an experimental German jet fighter in the dying days of the Third Reich. You tracked your pilot’s progress by way of a status screen where you would be awarded medals based on your accumulated ‘points’ – basically how many enemy planes you shot down.

The game had some truly awesome replay-value. Not only did every mission play out differently, and I mean EVERY damn mission, there was a Mission Editor too. You could design easy ‘training’ missions to hone your skills, or brutally difficult suicide runs pitting a single fighter against unlimited waves of Veteran-level Luftwaffe jet fighters. It allowed massive amounts of creativity. There was also a really challenging Campaign mode where you took control of the American or German air war from 1943-onwards, the only goal being, win the war.

The controls were simple – joystick left and right, up and down. This game did not even have rudders, but it was totally fine, amazingly realistic physics for a flight sim made in 1991. 

I’ve never quite experienced the same level of thrill since this game. There really was nothing close to it for me, at that age, playing this game. The incredible feeling of relief when my bullet-riddled, smoking hulk of a bomber was finally ‘feet dry’ over England, and on one engine I’d guide her in, the merciful little sound effect it would make as your wheels touched down. And the game seemed to realise this: it would not automatically quit you out of the mission upon landing. It would leave you there to savour the moment, the room suddenly quiet after long hours of the steady drone of the B-17 engines. And I mean hours. You had the option to speed up time (5x, 10x, 100x) for the long flight home from occupied Europe to England, but if your bomber was damaged you didn’t dare do it – if you were not present, to keep an eye on the engines, fuel gauge, etc, you could risk your plane nose-diving, and that was something you did not want happening at 100-times normal speed. 

I’ve never been a huge flight-simulator fan. It has something to do with the fact that flight sims are much better on PC, and I’m a console gamer. But I think, ultimately, it has more to do with the fact that no flight sim I’ve ever played since has had the same impact on me, as SWOTL did, all those years ago. It damn near scored higher on this list, but it’s got a worthy place at number seven.

Top Ten Games of All Time - 8: Syndicate (1993)

Syndicate was developed by Bullfrog Productions and released in 1993.

Syndicate uniquely ranks among my favourite games for one reason and one reason only: it gave me my first taste of open-world gaming. The ability to approach mission objectives in any way you saw fit was completely new to me, and I was immediately hooked. You were given an objective, and then set loose in a Cyberpunk-inspired game world that was as challenging as it was rewarding. 

And Syndicate’s game world was one of the best I’ve ever encountered. A future where corporations slice and dice up the world up into territories and when they enter into ‘hostile takeovers’ they mean exactly that – they send in ruthless cyborg ‘Agents’ to eliminate the competition. As the shadowy head of one of these corporations it’s your task to take over the entire world, sector by sector, using these agents for missions including hostage snatch and grabs, assassinations, or all-out massacres of every enemy agent in the place.

As you undertake these various missions you must also take control of your corporation’s research and development – the game’s clever way of progression giving you the ability to equip your squad of agents with new and devastating weapons (oh, those miniguns…salivate) and upgrades to their cybernetic enhancements to make them faster and tougher to kill.

The game was presented as a map of the world, divided into sections, and you take your squad in to complete a single mission in each province. Succeed, and the province is yours, so eventually the sections of the globe turn to whatever colour you have selected for your corporation. The game itself is a very cool isometric view of futuristic cities (complete with Bladerunner-esque billboards), military bases, and funky floating installations, and you direct your squad of four agents using a simple point-and-click interface. 

One of the most interesting and challenging aspects is that you are supposed to be viewing all this from an airship floating above the location, so you cannot see your agents, or the enemy agents, if you direct them to move behind a building or through a narrow alley. This made some of the missions downright nerve-wracking, hearing gunfire open up and not being able to see what was happening. 

Another really interesting aspect to the game was the complete lack of punishment if your squad happened to gun down some of the many civilians wandering about the various cities. On the one hand you never needed to worry about them being caught in the crossfire (which happened a lot) but on the other hand if you wanted to round up a horde of innocents using a ‘Persuadertron’ (a gadget that would put anyone within range under mind control, forcing them to follow your squad like lost puppies), and then mercilessly mow them down with a minigun, the game would do nothing to stop you.

Just a word about the graphics. They are truly remarkable and were quite unique. As you’ll see from the in-mission screengrabs, they stand up well even now, a quarter-century after the game’s release. There are not many games from the early nineties you can say that about. 

Sound design was a brilliant part of this game too. I will never forget the roar of those miniguns, but everything was spot on. I will also never forget the scream sound effects when enemies were on fire. It really was a pretty brutal game.

The only real drawback was that there was no real reward for finishing the game. This was especially galling given that the final mission was among the most punishingly difficult I have ever encountered in any game, ever. My first attempt to complete it ended after about five seconds as enemy agents swarmed in and gunned my hapless squad down before I had time to click on anything. This was the first game I’ve sat back and gone, ‘Oh, okay, game, that’s how it’s gonna be? Alright then. Let’s do this.’

But the difficulty of the missions progressed well in general (there was no difficulty setting selection) and you really needed to manage the RPG elements such as the R&D (and the taxation of provinces, which paid for it). In later missions you would come up against multiple squads of heavily-armed agents. If you went in with shotguns you were mincemeat. This required some trial-and-error to get the right mix of research for weapons and upgrading your agents, but thankfully the game had a great save system with ten slots and you could save before and after each mission.

Syndicate was also my first introduction to DLC. Not long after its release, Bullfrog put out an expansion called American Revolt, where you basically got to replay the North American continent section of the world map with new missions. Needless to say I dove right in to that.

The very fact that simply compiling this article, doing screengrabs etc, had me wanting to begin a new game and play this one all over again, is testament to how great this game is. Its sequel, Syndicate Wars, was not a bad game, but it was more geared toward consoles and was damn disappointing when compared to this one. The story, gameplay, UI, almost everything about Syndicate just fires on all cylinders. It’s a truly great game that actually does stand the test of time, and is a no-brainer for inclusion in this list.