09.06.05

DS2 done and Flight Sims

Posted in General at 6:52 pm by jw

Finished Dungeon Seige 2 on the weekend.  The story has an interesting twist at the end – haven’t made my mind up yet if I actually like it or not.  Started on the Veteran level but only made it part way through the first mission before I realized that I have a bunch of games piled up waiting to play and spending a few more weeks to finish on the tougher levels can wait, for now.

So, I dug out my Flight Sims again, which continue to draw me back into them for some strange reason.  My wife swears she’s never letting me anywhere near a real life airplane though while she watches me go through some voluntary and involuntary acrobatics. 

My biggest problem with civilian flight sims is the real lack of drive to actually do anything.  Sure you can fly pretty much anywhere in the world you want to in FS2004 but without a good reason to actually fly a certain route you’re pretty much lost for goals.  Well, I got my hands on Airliner Pilot and a demo of FSPassengers and had some fun messing around with them.  Here’s my take on them:

FSPassengers
I think I actually killed more passengers than I got safely to their destination in FSPassengers (which is all the fault of a stupid Beechcraft that didn’t clear the runway fast enough at LAX).  Overall I managed to have a lot more success with this product than I did with Airliner Pilot, but it seems a lot more simplistic.  It’s fun bringing on passengers, hearing the hostess go through the flight safety routine and loving the apparent Kiwi accents on everyone but at least in the demo it still seemed pretty open ended on where you actually are supposed to fly your passengers.  I’ll have to check around some and see if the full version actually assigns you routes to go with or not because jumping in a 737 full of passengers at San Francisco and choosing where to fly really just doesn’t seem like a realistic scenario.

Airliner Pilot
This seems a lot more involved, but I didn’t have much success actually completing a flight.  Every time I tried, the electronics on my Dash-8 cut out at some point and that’s pretty much game over for trying to do anything useful (nothing works very well after that).  I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s what happens when I get too far off course but it’s annoying because the whole simulation seems rather interesting until the point I lose power.

I also jumped onto FlightSim.com and grabbed a whole bunch of interesting landings which have been entertaining for me, and confirming my wife’s fears about my piloting skillz as I park aircraft all over the landscape.  I will say I have no idea how any sane pilot could land at the old Hong Kong airport from the northern approach though.  Just seems completely impossible to me unless you’re taking a huge dive or jumping sideways a half mile just prior to touchdown.

Lastly I played a little with Wings Over Vietnam which was kinda fun but runs a little like an arcade game when put up against something like Falcon 4.0, which is another game I’m yet to master.  It was vaguely satisfying though to jump into a plane, shoot down a half dozen MIGs and leave with a successful mission though, even while figuring out the keyboard/joystick controls as I was dogfighting (well, the obvious joystick controls I had pretty much down first of course).

In my reading, I finished 3001: Final Odyssey and wasn’t terribly impressed.  Clarke seems much better at short stories than full blown novels and especially a series.  When whole chapters are copied verbatim from previous books it really disappoints and the plot was really pretty simplistic.  Now I’m working on Deus Irae and then I’m going to have to go ebook shopping again!

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