Old game, very uneven difficulty level

[kschang77]

There are a lot of games that saddle you with what I call a "ball and chain" mission, where you're tied to one spot or limited mobility and had a very strict time limit.

All the previous missions I can resolve after one or two tries, but the Rabaul Raid is a total joke, as it's very commonly reported, in all platforms, that this mission is nearly impossible after many missions before. I died a couple times on Guardalcanal but I can fix that with a cheat code (yes, I use cheatcode when it gets too frustrating), but when not even a cheatcode will resolve the problem, the mission is not designed correctly.

The setup for Rabaul is as follows: You and 3 other Corsairs are there to raid the Rabaul base and soften them up for the bombers. However, you also cannot let the Japanese defenders take off as if too many planes attack the bombers, you lose. In the meanwhile AAA is spraying the sky. So what do you do?

The tips on various forums seems to suggest that you should leave your squadron on aggressive attack (red) and use shield (taunt) and the charge attack. Some even suggest you circle near where you start, just over the hill, and let the Japanese planes come to you. It may not be a bad idea as if you slow down you can just play chicken with them. You have to deal with THREE WAVES of the defending planes, then it's a matter of pounding the AA defenses after you resolve the 3 waves. You can lob rockets at the base from a distance if you wish.

After that it's apparently escorting the bombers to hit a few ships, where the same scenario seem to happen... too many air defenders and you are tied via ball and chain to the bombers.

Not that I expect this problem to ever get fixed, but it's still ridiculous that nobody in Q&A saw this problem before release.

[Apparoid]

i wouldnt recomend the steam version id recomend the wii or ps3 versions on those 2 missions after rebaul is the impossible one in those rebaul is one of those really easy missions

[kschang77]

Well, let's just say if an noob can't even beat the mission WITH cheatcodes on, the mission is obviously broken. Well, onto Blazing Angels 2, unless there's a cheatcode that gets me an automatic win so I can skip this mission...

[Megato0n]

Sorry to necro this, but I found a way to get past it without using cheats (which I couldn't get to work). I went into the data file, then missions (the file without the underscore in front of it), and opened it with notepad. Then, I scrolled down until I found the Rabaul mission. Next, I changed the part where it says "Rabaul\.test" to "Dunkirk2\.test". Now, when you restart your game and open the Rabaul mission, it will instead play "Dunkirk evacuation" BUT you still get the Rabaul achievements.

Edit: if you want Ace, change the requirements (just below what we just did) to something really low. See my artwork page for a picture.

[kschang77]

Thanks for the tip.