Flight Simulator

UP, UP, AND AWAY

A Review of Flight Simulator

by Mark W. Frantz

PC gaming has had it’s fair share of dynasties over the years. The King’s

Quest Series, The Bard’s Tale, and Hardball are a few examples. But

perhaps the oldest and most renowned of these is Microsoft’s Flight

Simulator. In it’s fifth incarnation, Flight Simulator has gotten another

facelift. Sporting advanced graphics and new levels of realism, this old

dog has learned some new tricks, and has once again set the standard of

realism for the flight simulator industry.

FS5 is not really a game, it is more of a software toy. The basic engine

of the game is flight. There are no missiles, guns, or enemies. The only

excitement generated from this game is swerving ten feet from the Empire

State Building, or landing on the Golden Gate Bridge. But where the

simulator really starts to kick is realism. This is probably the closest

thing to real flying next to actually taking off in a Cessna. Everything

matters, from the wind, to gravity. If a gust of wind hits your plane at

5,000 feet, you’ll begin to pitch. If it’s strong enough, you may even

flip over. That’s realism.

The basic facets of the game are solid. Installation was a snap, and the

requirements to get the game up and running are quite low. Sound effects

are what you might expect, ranging only from the whirr of the engine to the

smashing windows as you plow into the ground or a nearby building. Game

controls are easy to learn, yet hard to master. You can use a joystick,

keyboard, or mouse to control your flights. I recommend a joystick or

flight yoke.

The graphics, although not picture perfect, are well suited to the game.

Granted, it’s not SVGA (and if it is, it’s not as good as I thought), but

they are very well done considering the amount of area covered by them in

only 10 megs. Notable landmarks from the various areas can be found, such

as the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the areas without

specifically created graphics, computer generated graphics simulate the

terrain, with the exception of bodies of water. This allows you to

navigate across the country by water.

That in itself is a unique aspect. Each area, including New York, Los

Angeles, San Francisco, and many others, all connect. It is conceivable

to fly from New York to the Great Lakes, then head due west and eventually

hit Mount Rainier and Seattle. I found that to be the most unique and

wonderful part of the package. As a bonus, scenery sets fit right into this

world like a puzzle piece. Say you get a Philadelphia scenery pack, you

can then fly south from New York right into Philadelphia.

But how does it fly? Well, it’s easy to get in the air, but it’s

difficult to master flying. In other words, if you just want to get off

the ground and fly around, you can. But it’ll take some practice in

navigating and piloting to take off from La Guardia in New York City and

land 3000 miles away in San Francisco.

Flying itself is realistic in

itself. No hairpin turns like the ones you can pull off in that Zero

fighter. You bank too much and you’ll go into a spin and crash faster than

you can think. And if you try to turn on a dime in a Lear Jet, you tend to

end up on the ground, without your gear down.

Lear jet? , you wonder. FS5 offers four different planes to fly, each

with it’s own control panel and unique characteristics. The Cessna is the

traditional sight seeing plane. It does well at low altitudes and does not

go terribly fast. The slick Lear Jet offers faster speed with its jet

engines. My personal favorite, the glider, is an engineless craft which

must be towed into the air. With it, you must ride with the winds and the

thermals, or you’ll drop very quickly. And the Sopwith Camel offers very

slow, low to the ground flying.

If you want to just skip right past the takeoffs and approaches, you can

use one of the many presaved situations, which put you in the air on

approach to one landmark or another. For example, one situation places you

on approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, with the aircraft carrier Nimitz

directly in front of you. Another one leads you on a tour of New York City.

There are many others to choose from, each from a different area in the

virtual world.

Also included with the simulator is a crop dusting game, which, although

adding diversity to the program, I found to be less than stellar. I found

it much more interesting to fly past the more notable landmarks. I must

admit, I couldn’t resist flying INTO some of the more famous landmarks.

Hey, who hasn’t wanted to crash right into the Statue of Liberty in a Lear

Jet?

There are very few flaws in the game. It does have unlimited playability,

because you can basically fly anywhere in the world. One of the more

sophisticated aspects which I never could get a handle on, though, was the

navigational radios.

They are there to help guide you on your way to

different airports, but I never could get them to function the way I

wanted. This is somewhat trivial though, because it’s just as easy to fly

by landmarks and compass readings.

In the dozen or so years since the original Flight Simulator debuted,

Microsoft has done an outstanding job supporting this product, and every

release made the product better. This dedication to it’s product has made

it the best selling game in history. Once again, Microsoft has done a

great job in bringing an old game into the nineties, and once again set the

standard for non combat flight simulators to follow. Bravo!

Gamer’s Zone Scorecard

Product:	Flight Simulator
Company:	Microsoft Home One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399
Cost:	n/a

System Requirements:

MS-DOS or PC-DOS,
80386 Processor or higher,
2 MB RAM, 530Kb Conventional
14 MB free space
Mouse and VGA or SVGA

Breakdown:

Fun Factor 4
Graphics 4
Sound 2
Interface 5
Replayability 5

Overall Score: