Corncob 3D / Corncob Deluxe - ADG Episode 314
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- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- An indie flight sim? How is such a thing even possible?! Answer: Aliens! o_O
Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Corncob 3D, also known as Corncob Deluxe (despite what the internet may tell you), an independently developed shareware combat flight simulator developed by Kevin Stokes and George Welch of Pie-in-the-Sky Software, originally self-published in early 1992 but ultimately picked up by MVP Software to get it into retail boxes in 1994.
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* It turns out that a few years ago the game went fully freeware and even had its source code made public! The trouble is that this information and the site it was loaded onto barely got any attention, thus getting completely buried by the algorithms to be and thus didn't come up in any searches I made about the game while getting this video together. You can find all of the downloads for the game, the Other Worlds Campaign, and the source code, at the following link: tidegear.net/corncob/index.html
* If you'd like to grab a copy of the shareware version, here's the place to get it from the DOS Games website: www.dosgames.com/game/corncob-3d
* That "wobbling" effect you keep seeing happens any time you approach a flashing sphere object, which is often (though not always) the main objective you need to take out for a mission.
* The thing I find confusing about the lack of advanced joystick support is that the game clearly has the ability to interpret analog rudder positions, yet there don't appear to be any controls to affect such a change...? It's possible the devs wanted to put advanced joystick controls in but either never got around to it or ran into difficulties trying to get the necessary tools/docs to do it. :P
* The "bullet scattering" effect you get with the left shift key actually DOES have one particular use in terms of dealing with the deathballs, as once you get a deathball in front of you, scattering bullets everywhere makes it much easier to hit them than trying to be precise with the normal method of firing. :B
* One feature I forgot to talk about is the ability to remote control your plane while you're standing on the ground, as you don't necessarily have to eject from a wrecked plane, but I never found a good reason to do this. The theory is that your plane would distract the enemy while you yourself went in to take out an important target... but then what? You're stuck on the ground, surrounded by enemies, can't run very fast, and the rescue van CAN get destroyed if you try to summon it with enemies between it and you. You are FAR more helpless on the ground than in your plane. :P
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Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
ADG on Pixelmusement: www.pixelships.com/adg
Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: www.pixelships.com/adg/index2....
Kris' Patreon Page: / kasick
@Pixelmusement on Twitter: / pixelmusement
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Chapters:
00:00 Title
05:31 Game Stats
07:47 Gameplay
17:48 Overall
18:56 DOSBox Configuration
20:19 Credits 
Игры
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The game page flipping was written for slow video hardware, because in DOSBox, massive flickering occurs above a certain cycle count. In DOSBox-X you can eliminate the flicker by setting vmemdelay to at least 800 to emulate the slow video memory of the time period. It has the same flicker problem on faster hardware as "Catacombs Abyss".
One of my favorite games as a kid! We loved jumping out of the plane, and remote controlling it and flying into the enemy.
...oh yeah, I completely forgot that was even a thing just because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how that would ever be useful during any of the missions! :P
This game is like a happy seisure. I remember it freaking me out a bit as a kid. The abstract shapes and sounds seemed other worldly. Great game! Neat original concept too, should be remastered!
I would love a modern VR remake of this! I liked the weird backstory and with my father being involved in R/C aviation when I played it, I knew the F4U Corsair and liked that plane. So this game was very appealing.
The visuals are, in retrospect, an acid trip made into a game and the weird sound fits perfectly. Very creative use of the Adlib’s capabilities.
As someone who played this growing up, the problem you had with the death balls is exactly what the flak function of the machine gun is for. You just push that button and poof, no more death balls in front of you. No need to worry about little things like “accuracy”
Would've been nice to have figured THAT out sooner... :P
@@Pixelmusement So what you're saying is this game gave you some flak? ;)
The developer has actually declared the full game and expansion as freeware and also gave permission to someone named TideGear to publicly host the source code for the game
Do you have any links to affirm this? My searches for the state of the game didn't come across anything other than shareware downloads and abandonware sites.
@@Pixelmusement I posted a link to TideGear's site, but the comment was removed...
That's not a good sign. If the comment was just held for review I could approve it, but if it was auto-removed by RUclips that means the link was flagged a security risk or inappropriate by the system earlier on for some reason. :/
@@Pixelmusement it seems to be that youtube has gone ridiculously sensitive for any links. It instantly auto-removed any of my comments when I shared my bandcamp but then it also deleted my second comment when I tried to reply again but without any links. That was furious.
If you can't get the link to go through then just describe a method of searching on Google or such which will pull up the result quickly and easily. :B
I loved that game so much back then. It was so well made and free. Probably the best flight sim of that era.
Having seen LGR's take on this game a long time ago, I knew this one had to be interesting. Good to see the main Pixelusement series still going strong and looking forward to that ADG Mod episode! 🔥
I loved Corncob 3D! I played it so much as a teen. It was difficult to figure out but they put a lot of detail into it. They did release the source code for it.
I had the shareware version of this back in the day. It was made by the same guys who eventually released the Pie in the Sky 3D Game Creation System.
ADG mentions that as well.
@@daveloomis Had countless hours of enjoyment out of the GCS, so while it was janky I got my money's worth.
My cousins had a shareware disk of this game that didn't work on their XT clone, but worked great on our 386SX. I always thought it was a neat little game, and eventually found a copy of the MVP software "Corncob Deluxe" physical version that I still have to this day. It was on a crappy little shareware rack at a dollar store if I recall right.
Crazy how now the game is impossible to find. Glad I made an image of my original floppy, because the thing is missing the shutter and probably going to be corrupt sooner than later.
I finally actually "beat" the original campaigns within the last year. The missions are tough but it's doable. Don't want to spoil the ending of the game, but it gets super trippy in the last "mission!"
I tried the "Other Worlds" campaign and it is BRUTALLY hard. The easiest campaign has radically different gravity compared to Earth and I couldn't even beat a single objective.
I was fascinated by this game, spent hours exploring the world and its wacky physics and missions. I never got very far because of the time limit!
This game was something different when I was young. Even if all I did was play the shareware, I had a good time figuring out this strange beast. This was the first game where the goal was mission objectives instead of something more general like get to the end of the level. I also liked the idea of jumping out of the plane and running on foot.
This game is SO creative and easy to overlook. The other "pie in the sky: 3d engine" games are mostly wanna be doom shooters.
Thanks for this video. I'm happy to see this game finally getting some attention, as it really is the only proper shareware flight simulator which ever got much wide distribution. Unfortunately, I don't agree with your statement that the missions are really creative and variegated; for the most part, the missions take the form of "fly somewhere and blow up the stuff there", and the things to be blown up are usually either just an orb or a very small number of other possible targets, which makes the missions pretty monotonous after a while. The standout mission (not necessarily in terms of quality, but at least in terms of being _different_ ) is the "remote control" mission where you have to blow up several orbs that can only be destroyed with kamikaze planes; on that mission, you need to land at an airbase where several planes are parked and fly them into those orbs, one at a time, via remote control, meaning with you standing on the ground and barely being able to see the plane in the distance. Most of the other missions are rather sloppy and generic, but the game is still good for a few hours of fun as it's definitely a unique experience.
This was one of the first shareware games I was gifted on floppy disk! Oddly, on our family PC, all of the dialogue boxes only showed asterisks instead of proper text. Installing it on other people's PCs using the exact same disk, they all displayed correctly. Never figured out the conflict there - that PC is long gone now - and the dialogue boxes work fine for me these days in DOSBox.
It's fun to mess around with and there's some nostalgia there for me because of that, but I absolutely agree that it's extremely difficult to actually play properly. As you said though, an impressive amount of work and detail went into it, which I can appreciate. Great review as always, great to have clarification on those confusing version details too!
A problem that unusual usually comes down to an intermittent single-pin problem, such as a connector on a floppy drive or hard drive or such not making a 100% perfect connection. There was a similar issue in Mom's original 486DX2/66 compy where the CD-ROM would occasionally generate single-bit errors leading to weird things happening in any games I tried to play on it, or outright crashes/hangs, and the guy who put the computer together for her kept claiming the software I was trying to run was simply too powerful. Experience ultimately taught me that the guy working on Mom's compy didn't actually know what he was doing. :P
@@Pixelmusement Interesting, thanks for the insight! Looking back I suspect that may have been the cause of some other quirky issues with that desktop as well. Incidentally, it was also a 486DX2/66, though over time it was upgraded from 8 MB of RAM to a whopping 16 MB!
Corncob? Huh. I thought you covered this one already.
Maybe I'm misremembering and it was LG-
"copy provided by-"
Well that settles it! :D
Hmm... an expansion pack... to a game previously covered... A mod video... Is it that weird X-MEN FPS total conversion mod for Quake? Don't tell me! I want to be surprised!
I played the crap out of this game as a teenager. One of the really wild things about the installer for this game, it shipped all the images as compressed JPGs, that the installer uncompressed them into 256 color images.
Ah, yes, the weirdest game young me ever found on a shareware compilation CD long ago.
The flashbacks of destroying SAM radars at Tripoli in _F19_ and _F117_ games are strong with this one. I am getting a hunch that the game engine you mentioned is responsible for those two games. _[after a quick check]_ Nope, _F19_ was released much earlier.
It's somewhat reassuring to know that the issues people had in getting the game to run weren't just limited to me. One of my shareware discs had this game and it always sounded so cool, but it just never wanted to run.
Pie in the sky software wow… I remember all the crappy first person shooters made on their engine. You should cover the game terminal terror lol.
This looks both hilarious and awesome.
It's hilarisome! :D
This would make a great choice for a remake
Seriously fun game! I played it with a modern HOTAS controller on dosbox and it was very fun.
How...? I couldn't get the game to recognize more than 2 axes at a time. :(
@@Pixelmusement I fiddled with a config option for controllers. The kind of joystick/throttle I had may also help. It took me a good 30 minutes to get it working. I wouldn't know what the silver bullet would be for you but if you haven't messed with any configs, try that.
I messed with ALL of the config options without success, not to mention the Corncob documentation makes no mention of any of this... Though there's always the possibility that the Other Worlds expansion adds better joystick support, as I did not get a chance to try that expansion out. :P
@@Pixelmusement I played on the standard non Other Worlds version of the game. Whenever I play it again, I'll see if there's anything you might have messed. There has to be something that allows me to have a decent joystick experience.
For some moments it looks like Stunts but in the air...
Thumbs up
I read the video title as Catacomb 3D/Catacomb Deluxe. Then I heard you say the game name, and I remember you've already covered at least some of the Catacomb games. I don't remember if you covered Catacomb 3D though.
I have covered ALL of the Catacomb games! :D (Original: ruclips.net/video/w9m-G4eMPzE/видео.html ) (All The 3D Ones: ruclips.net/video/GtGoGWsCEbc/видео.html )
Would love to see you check out Assault Trooper. An old DOS game that's essentially an early tactical shooter.
liked, subscribed commented
The deluxe version is without the time limit?
It's... more complicated than that. No, the Deluxe Edition doesn't have a time limit, but it's IDENTICAL to the later shareware release, whereas the earlier shareware release has more content but is time limited, and the expansion is pretty much the bulk of the entire game and designed to work with the later shareware release.
Are you going to do one about Bananoid???? 😅😝🤣😂
I think they dug up Bananoids in one of the shovelware diggers episodes
@@yopachi Really???
I could've sworn you did this already, but maybe it's just mengele effect and it's a lgr vid.
Suckin' Grits on rt66? LOL No, it's not that. I mean, it's BETTER than vanilla Redneck Rampage, but not by much.
(this is me making a wild guess for next week)
Do dungeon keeper 2 skullkeep