Another fun bug caused the enemy AI to do your work for you. A rogue enemy plane would suddenly reject his mother country and start shooting down his own teammates. That is, until his wings fell off the plane since he was firing his guns. Then he'd kamikaze his plane into the ground, which would launch the plane into outer space that the MicroProse executives probably didn't find nearly as funny as I do.Brand would stress out about defending the game at the weekly meetings, but that didn't mean that he thought concerns about European Air War's progress were unfounded. Facing a mountain of bugs and a project ready for the chopping block, he was relieved when another developer was added to the team, effectively halving the abuse Brand would have to deal with on a weekly basis. We'll call the new developer "Tim."
Tim knew what he was getting into when he came aboard the project. He knew about the bugs, about the budget, and about the impending cancellation of the whole thing. And with the major issues, you'd figure he'd start with any one of them. Maybe the one with the wings falling off whenever guns were fired. Especially considering the game is called "European Air War." If the wings ("air") and guns ("war") come off the plane, the game title should just be reduced to "European," or perhaps "European Wingless Plane Amidst Nazi Battle Simulator." You could start up a game and watch Nazis shoot each others' planes down until yours crashed.
A very funny piece on the development of a PC game, European Air War. (The comments, many by other game programmers, are worth reading too.)
I've played a lot of MicroProse games, but not this one. To my surprise, it's still being sold on Amazon for $20 new, which is pretty amazing for a game released in 1998. There's also a fairly substantial webring for it, with plenty of amateur developers offering skins and scenery add-ons, etc, so I assume they eventually ironed out the bugs.
I'd still like to try it, but not for 20 bucks. This sounds like a mission for Kazaa or eMule.
Via Gadgetopia