The Flight-Sim Follies

My simulation is now nearly feature complete and should be going gold Real Soon Now. Features include: full DirectX8 graphics, a complex object and physics model, industry-leading flight models, full weapon modeling, a true strategically-driven campaign model, the capability to physically misalign joystick potentiometers, and the ability to randomly seek out Active Directory Schema on the Internet, renaming all of them to "scharmersrools.com".

Although the simulation currently only includes a cube with a "penis" texture spinning above a blue background, it is entirely open to modification - flight models, weapon parameters; EVERYTHING can be modded by the community. Don't like the way that the F-105 behaves in the sim? That's GOOD, because there IS no F-105 in the sim, so you can add it yourself with the tools that may or may not be included with sim six months after its release. (For those of your complaining that it's not the community's job to make up for the absence of features and contents in a sim you bought for, say, $50, I say that I am a small development house without a lot of financial backing; and furthermore I say that your attitude IS KILLING FLIGHT SIMS!)

The sky is the absolute limit with SCHARMERS FLIGHT COMBAT PROJECT X SQUADRON. My motto in the design: "If you don't like it, fix it yourself!"

Ads for SCHARMERS FLIGHT COMBAT PROJECT X SQUARON will be running soon - look for Steve Bauman, Tom Chick, and Andy Mahood to be drooling over them in the next month's gaming rags!

Suck it down.

Your stock is rising, No. 2. Recently, I've been a little short on funds, and I just had to have a new game - in this case, Forgotten Battles. So I do what I always do - grab the dogs out of my current game collection, and trade them in at EB. The lucky contestants included Divine Divinity, Strike Fighters: Project 1, and - this is important - a handful of Playstation 1 games. Why am I telling you all of this? Simple: one of the PS1 games - a Wal-Mart special by the name of Driver 2 - netted me a cool $9 bucks in trade value. Not bad for a crappy three-year-old PS1 game. Strike Fighters, on the other hand, netted me a whopping $4, and both the flight-sim savvy EB clerk and I agreed that it was more than it was worth, considering the number of returns of the sim. It's a sad commentary when an old PS1 game brings twice as much as a practically brand-new sim. Based on the information I've been able to collect from my EB cronies, Strike Fighters was DOA the moment it was released in its Wal-Mart version. Is this a general indication of how PC flight-sims are dying? Nope. This particular EB is currently sold-out on two games: Freelancer (which just absolutely r0x0rs, BTW), and Forgotten Battles. In fact, they sold 20 FB's in two days, and have holds for more. Remember, flight-sim creators: create a superior sim, and people will buy it. Foist unfinished dreck on us, and we'll be returning your game in droves.

Things get broken Dept. Of course, they also get fixed. Take the case of Combat Flight Sim 3. It was disturbingly broken on release last year. OK, maybe not as busted up as [enough bashing that sim for one day, Chase - Ed.], but definitely not in good shape. In my own experience, I wasn't too disappointed with CFS3. The only major problems I had with it was that the sim absolutely HATED anti-aliasing and that too high of resolutions would freak the graphics out. Nobody expected M$ to fix the sim - CFS2 users are still waiting for the myriad fixes that sim needs - but lo and behold we received one. Side note: "Tucker Hatfield" doesn't sound like the name a sim designer should have. It's more appropriate to, say, a NASCAR driver. Then again, "Andy Hollis" is a perfect name for a sim guy, but he's the one who abandoned us to drive cars around. Go figure.

Anyway, the patch for CFS3 seems to have fixed most of the surface problems - mainly stability -- the sim was having. I put it to a test by running it in 1024x768, 32-bit, Quincunx AA and 2x Ansiotroping - and then piled on by having GetRight doing a download (over dial-up) in the background. With the exception of a few chirps and skips, CFS3 performed admirably on medium tweaked settings. Of course, the patch didn't fix the real issue of CFS3 being a total and utter failure in accurately representing the true nature of the WW2 ETO Air War; but hey, it's fun taking the Jug out to sink endless amounts of German shipping in the English Channel in a heavy-bomber-free environment. That's my reaction, though, and there were definitely some others, which segues us nicely to the next section:

Cont'd -->