Introduction

Welcome to Tiger's Bane, a game of modern helicopter combat. The action takes place on multiple side-scrolling maps, but is slightly more realistic and tactically oriented than your average shoot-em-up.

Tiger's Bane has been in development for around 4 years, in one form or another. It started life as "Flying Tigers" under the Dark Unicorn Productions label, before finally ending up as "Tiger's Bane" from Longbow Digital Arts. It was first released for the Amiga® computer at the end of 1997, and now is available for Microsoft® Windows 95® and NT 4.0®. There's nothing technologically ground breaking about the game now, but we think it is still fun to play, and hope you will think so too!

Inspirations for the game were numerous, including Choplifter®, JetStrike®, Gunship 2000®, and Desert Strike®. I wanted a game that could capture some of the realism of multi-helicopter air combat and combined-arms ground combat in a side-view environment without being overly fast and furious, and also without hurting the gameplay with too much hard core simulation realism.

The Operations in Tiger's Bane are designed first to be fun, and second to be replayable. Most Operations (except Training) contain about twice as many missions as you will actually get to play in one game. They are usually chosen randomly, but some branches in the mission tree are based on your performance up to that point. Within each mission there are also random factors at work, so one time there might be an air threat, and another time there might be an extra mobile SAM launcher.

Have fun, and I hope you enjoy the game!

Seumas McNally
Lead Programmer