Yesterday we spoke to Dana Henry, PR representative for Microprose products at Hasbro. Dana was confident that F4 would go gold yesterday.

However, at an early morning IRC chat session, Gilman Louie and others on the F4 team confirmed that Falcon did not go gold on Friday. But they were only a whisker away, looking at potential candidates even while the chat continued. As a result, we're pretty confident that F4 will indeed go gold this weekend for a shipment late next week.

In the meantime, here are a few shots from the last beta within the Tactical Engagement module.

Mission Builder from the last beta. Blue menu is a graphics glitch.

The TACTICAL ENGAGEMENT module will allow us to build our own full campaigns. I've had a chance to spend a few moments in the module the last couple of days, and it looks like Microprose is giving us what will be the most advanced tool ever released to the public for mission design! Here are some of Dan Crenshaw's previous comments:

The Tactical Engagement module allows players to set up a mission, with full direction of the ground forces, orders, routes etc. It allows the players to set up the opposition’s forces similarly. Once the mission begins, the AI takes over and the war begins. Anything you are not flying will get run by the AI. Even if you set up successive missions and don't get home in time to fly the next one, it will take off and fly the mission.

Of course you can always hop out of your current flight, and into the new one whenever you like (except during egress or landing, though you can leave these flights if you wish and the AI will take over). Now you and your AI or human cooperative multi-player pilots must perform your tasks to help ensure victory. If you are very bold, you can fly low and watch what the forces are doing and even witness a land battle.

Mission Builder from the last beta..

Furthermore, as is becoming an industry standard, you will be able to make your mission and send it to your friends to see how well they do. Or make an ACMI tape and let them watch the action (tapes are 100K per minute).

The flexibility of this module will allow you to do anything from create quick and easy training missions or short sorties, to developing a whole campaign setting. You can also work off the base of established missions to create your own. The AI will work with or against you in an intelligent manner.

While I'm fairly sure that you can't alter the position of cities and airfields, etc. in Korea, you can actually develop an entire campaign setting. If you design larger scale objectives that take many missions to complete, you have a new campaign. If the goals are substantial enough and the forces pitted against one another well matched, you have created an entirely new F4 campaign which you can fly on your own or cooperatively with your friends.

Success in the engagement you create will depend on meeting the objectives you assign. Like the campaigns supplied by MPS on release of F4, the missions run in real time and will continue to play out even when you are not in an aircraft.

Add Battalion

In the Campaign

Once you watch a campaign and start to play with the Tactical Engagement section, you will quickly realize you can create a war of the same magnitude as the campaign if you were so inclined. You can use TE to set up competitions with Win Conditions. You can use it to train, or just learn or test tactics (both air and ground). You can make the missions as easy or as difficult as you like, as cut and dried or complex as you want. Solo or multi-player, cooperative or H2H, the possibilities are virtually endless.

For Dan's campaign briefing see Campaign