Well, my PR preview of IL2 showed up yesterday. Some stability problems, a few hassles getting it going - but I finally found the "magic settings" and it runs now.

My initial impression is "SHAZAM!" with a few minor irritations. These are:

1. Did they not have windex in 1944? All these planes have hellish amounts of gak on the windows and especially in the IL2 mission strafing tanks in the winter, it's tough to see.

2. Same winter mission brings up another point. Sky is light blue, there's a LOT of fogging/low level clouds, and the ground is white. Crash, crash, crash... into the snow I go. Gak on windows makes it worse. You just can't see the horizon. I've taken to flying by instrumentation until I spot targets, so I'm doing alright.

3. The game is doing something weird with sound settings. Drops wav balance to zero at random, and you have to exit the game and fiddle with the mixer to correct it. SBlive card.

And the good stuff:

1. IL2 flies like a tank with wings. This is good, because it basically IS a tank with wings.

2. If there's one activity I love dearly in flight sims, it's strafing armor. That's why I was so disgusted at the lack of a decent A-10 game. Well, the IL2 is specifically designed to pound cannon rounds into tanks, so I'm in heaven.

3. The clouds are perfection. Run the "clouds and forest" demo track. It gave me wood... mahogany. Also, the twisting contrails and stuff in the bomber intercept mission are very noteworthy. +10 wow points.

4. Seen the forests? That's a SHITLOAD of trees down there. When can we have a helicopter game with "real" forests like that!!??

So, there's my initial 60-second impression.

Anybody else working with this one? Want to compare notes?

Sorry Aszurom, I never play flight sims. Tom does, but I haven't heard him mention having this one. The strafing sounds neat. I think that's something I would like, flying near the ground and hitting targets. Do you do that much in the game?

well, it's hard to say exactly what the mission balance is going to be. The build they're distributing has 4 missions:

1. Russian - Tear up tanks on a snowy field with your IL2
2. Russian - Fly a Yak9 and kill He111 bombers
3. German - Fly a Bf109 and escort bombers
4. German - Fly a Bf109 and kill IL2's that are tearing up the tanks.

Attempting to use the Quick Mission designer lets me pick planes and such, but crashes with a "Data file corrupt" error. Gosh, I wish I could check out some of the other planes. Maybe it was my own selection of "flyable" plane that isn't included... I'll check that out.

I also discovered that pressing CTRL-1 will kill the cockpit graphics... NICE. Now I can fly without the window smear. Doing MUCH better now.

A note on the padlock... this game has the best damn padlock I've ever used. It pops up a little wireframe diagram of your plane and the ground at the bottom of the screen, so you always know which way your nose is pointed and where the target is in relation to it. No more crashing because I'm staring out the side window.

The gunnery model is pretty accurate, if "hard = accuracy". If your target's wing markings aren't legible, you're out of range to shoot... sure, the bullets will fly out there, but about 1:500 will have a hope of hitting.

With flight sims, I'm a terrible nit-picker. That said, this one impresses me greatly.

"If there's one activity I love dearly in flight sims, it's strafing armor. That's why I was so disgusted at the lack of a decent A-10 game. Well, the IL2 is specifically designed to pound cannon rounds into tanks, so I'm in heaven."

Me, too! I haven't played a flight sim for a while, and my favorite part has always been the ground pounding, so I'm glad to hear that IL2 is coming along nicely. Nobody has really done this right, though it was fun to shoot up columns of trucks with a P-47 in EAW. Now, if someone will please, please, watch some gun films and get the graphics right for knocking out a locomotive!

Dude... the train models in this game look better than most train games. (not that there're a lot of train games, but...)

Think "Combat Mission" and you've got a good idea how much detail is in the ground units.

Oh, my. I can see I'm going to spend a fair amount of time soon turning good Krups steel into recyclable material for the Rodina.

Do the locomotives give off that nice blast of steam when the boiler is pierced?

Wow, thanks for the mini report Aszurom! I'm looking forward to IL2, myself. It sounds like it may be able to live up to the hype, too. Ground pounding is fun. Too bad no one has come through with an A-10 sim. I was bummed when the Jane's offering was canned.

Do you get a sense at all for what the campaign is going to be like?

"Sorry Aszurom, I never play flight sims. Tom does, but I haven't heard him mention having this one."

Yeah, Mr. Chick, what is up with this? I thought you were a pretty big flight sim fan, but no word from you on BoB, B-17, or CFS2? I suppose CFS2 was out before Q23, but I'm surprised you don't post your thoughts on any of these sims. Have you given the genre up?

Oh, my... maybe there really is something to all this talk of the death of flight sims. Previously I had thought it to be just an empty rumor started by one of the staff writers at CGW ... cough! Gordon cough! Berg cough! ... so that he wouldn't be required to write his monthly column. But, of course, I could be wrong here... ;)

Absolutely no sense of what the campaign structure is going to be like. Only 4 missions and 4 demo tracks are provided. However, I think it's neat that you can save your own flights in those four missions as demo tracks... because I'm going to have some perfect screenshots as a result. :-)

NOW, here's the part that gets my wang woody... MULTIPLAYER. You can have a 16 PLAYER coop session! If you opt for just a dogfight arena, then it supports 32. My opinion on deathmatching is "who gives a shit", so bring on the coop!

If CFS2 had done coop right, I'd still be playing it. As it is, I gave it a week and shelved it. Last night was Aces High until 3am, and Saturday night turned into an 8am session of the same. If you want a truly kickass MMOFS, it's the one.

"Oh, my... maybe there really is something to all this talk of the death of flight sims. Previously I had thought it to be just an empty rumor started by one of the staff writers at CGW ... cough! Gordon cough! Berg cough! ... so that he wouldn't be required to write his monthly column. But, of course, I could be wrong here... ;)"

Asshole. ;-)

Yes, Gordo killed flight sims for me. The bastard.

Actually, I haven't gotten any review assignments for any of those sims, so I haven't spent any time with them yet. But BoB especially is sitting high on my "gotta get around to trying" list. I *adored* MiG Alley. The weird thing is, I don't have a computer set up with a joystick! Sacrilege!

-Tom

"Asshole. ;-)"

*smoochie*

"Actually, I haven't gotten any review assignments for any of those sims, so I haven't spent any time with them"

This is the part where I'm supposed to lay into you like a rabid dog and acuse you of being out of touch with sim enthusiast of all ages, creeds, and color. Or something. But I don't have the energy so I would appreciate it if you would just flog yourself three times before bed each night this week, k?

I drove the f-15 to the levy but the levy was dry and those gordo boys were singing bye-bye...

"This is the part where I'm supposed to lay into you like a rabid dog and acuse you of being out of touch with sim enthusiast of all ages, creeds, and color."

We did give EAW a brief try a month or so ago at Shoot Club.

But I think the last sim I really bit into was Comanche vs. Havoc. Before they canned my Retroview column at IGN, I had planned on revisiting stuff like Longbow 2 and even Tornaedo (DOS willing). But these days, I have no excuse to return to my flight simming roots. Microprose's F-117 was the reason I got my first non-Apple computer. And how here I am with none of the joysticks in the house hooked up...

-Tom

I was planning on heading up to the store after work today to pick up BoB. So, I grabbed the demo last night to see what it was all about... and I'm glad I did. I like Mig Alley a LOT, but I'll be taking a pass on BoB. Graphics are kinda fugly, the framerate is harsh, and the flight model just doesn't do it for me. Guess I'll save the dough for B&W and Tribes2.

My thought after playing the demo was "I should whip out EAW, because I remember it being better than this thing."

"Graphics are kinda fugly, the framerate is harsh, and the flight model just doesn't do it for me."

These were my thoughts exactly when I first installed!

You have to tweak the graphics and generally mess around with the options before it looks good and plays ok. I had it running fine on my P3 550 and wouldn't dream of passing on it. You should buy it from a place that takes returns, just in case. The biggest problem for me was how close you are in the cockpit. You can zoom back, but it's not a sticky setting, so you have to keep adjusting it or just give in. But that's not a deal breaker for me.

"But these days, I have no excuse to return to my flight simming roots."

Yes, I hear you. To be honest, I don't have a joystick hooked up to either of my machines. ;) Of course, that's only because I have my wheel hooked up and am still obsessing on GPL and N4. This has been going on since Christmas!

However, I fully expect to play flight sims again in the near future. I guess I haven't been bitten by the multiplayer bug, too. For me, flight sims will always be an off line, single player sport. Without something like a virtual squadron, I think it would be hard to generate enough interest.

Fire up EAW again, and stick all the upgrades on it. I just did... my god, what a good good good game that is/was. 1280x1024 at a flawless framerate, and with new ground and plane textures it's good enough to release again today. Granted, the AI pilots are as "evil" as I'd like them to be since I'm rarely getting shot up too badly, but still. Then again, I'm flying a P51B against waves of 110's, so it's not exactly a fair fight anyway.

I did grab BoB, just to see if it was really as bad as the demo made it look. YES IT IS. No matter what rez I run it at or what I do with the graphics options, it's got a CONSTANT stutter in the gfx engine that refuses to be resolved. I checked usenet and there are a ton of messages about this item. Well, back she goes tomorrow... I hardly knew ye.