Having just ordered a Saitek X52 joystick, I’ve been browsing the Internet for good flight games today, and it seems to me that the genre now adays is not only very sparse, but also extremely polarized: All the games I found are either mindless arcade games (usually made in Flash) or super-pedantic hard core simulations. Neither really appeals to me, what I’m looking for is a more mainstream flight sim. Allow me to extrapolate.
Compare Call of Duty 4, STALKER, and SWAT 4. All these games are modern-day shooters, but they’re completely different from each other. CoD4 is the most mainstream one, playable with a console controller and all about action, adrenaline, and tightly scripted spectacle. When you get shot, you can duck back into cover for a moment to regain your health, you will rarely run out of ammunition, and you don’t really have to make any decisions, just follow your team and shoot anything that moves. It’s great fun, but it’s a pure action game.
SWAT 4, at the opposite end of the scale, is really hard core. There’s no way to heal yourself during a mission, you have to use your team very intelligently for coordinated assault tactics or you’ll be shot to pieces, and when you reload, your half-spent magazine remains in your inventory rather than mysteriously being merged with an abstract ammunition pool. It also has a strong emphasis on actual police protocol such as incapacitating the victims as well as the perpetrators, arresting criminals rather than killing them, etc.
Somewhere between these two approaches to the shooter genre sits STALKER. It’s a fairly approachable game in that you don’t control anybody but your own avatar, and at least on the reasonable difficulty settings, you have a pretty good chance of surviving a large fight if you keep your head down – even single man against a whole squad of soldiers or bandits, you’ll generally make it through alright.
But STALKER does have a carefully chosen selection of elements that adds to the realism and supports the notion that you’re trying to survive in a very dangerous environment: You bleed when damaged, you have to manage your radiation levels, your weapons will jam, you can look down your iron sights for greater accuracy, you can upgrade your guns with weapon mods, your inventory is limited by weight, and your health will not regenerate unless you eat or use medical supplies.
What I’m looking for is a STALKER of flight simulators. A game that only includes enough elements of the simulation to make you feel like you’re actually flying a plane. Stalling is important to include, but it would be nice if it weren’t as easy to stall as in IL-2, and it would be nice if stalling doesn’t spin you around and crash you into the ocean. I don’t need black-outs or red-outs, but it’d be nice if climbing at least reduces your speed and diving increases it. If ammo is limited, I’d like to have very large amounts so you have to fly quite badly to run out, and I certainly don’t want to run out of fuel in the middle of a mission. Starting on a runway and having to turn on your engine and take off is a great immersive touch, but please prevent me from crashing my plane during take-off unless I’m deliberately trying to – in fact taking off really doesn’t need to be more complicated then putting your plan into full throttle and pulling back on your control stick.
And so on and so forth. I don’t need a glorified shooter, but I don’t want ultra-realism. I need a mainstream simulation. I need the STALKER of flight sims. And I really want to play a helicopter game, because I’m completely nostalgic for Thunderhawk 2.
Well then, let me offer to you a few recommendations:
X-Wing Alliance:
Yes, it’s sci-fi, yes, it’s space, and yes, it’s very old.
But! It’s very pretty, because it’s the only star wars flight sim game around, and that means a lot of star wars geeks have redone all the models for all the craft in the game. And all the backgrounds are high res, because it’s a space game. So it should all be good, especially if you crank up the resolution and the AA, and the Anisotropic filtering!
3 years ago I played it some, with a mouse and keyboard, where I emulated a joystick with my mouse, I got about halfway through, and it was very enjoyable. The missions are very good, and very well written, but also challenging and mature, as is the case with many older games.
Next…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdRjs6SjJ7U&feature=related
Ace Combat 6. I’ve been wanting to try it out ever since I heard about the series, but sadly, I don’t have a 360. I always highly enjoyed japanese style flight games, though they were mostly shmups when I was younger. But, it seems to only be available on consoles, and sadly, I don’t feel I can afford one of those.
As for other games…there was one…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Skies_(video_game)
Crimson skies! Nyaha! This just proves that it’s been a good 8 years since I was really really into gaming XD
Not sure it’ll give you what you’re looking for, but it was supposed to be good at the time….
Also, now that you’ve purchased a joystick, I’m obliged to mentioned the mechwarrior series to you…they have a lot of elements and complexity to them, but I don’t think anything earlier than mechwarrior 3 is truly playable in it’s own right today. It’s not that the gameplay isn’t deep, or that the interface is somehow horribly flawed – but the story is geekier than dune, without the charm of sandworms and blue-eyed beautiful fremen women, and the graphics are downright puny.
But yeah, if you get the time, give it a try. Probably start with either mechwarrior 3 or mechwarrior 4: mercernaries.
Also, if you’re absolutely dying for chopper nostalgia…here’s something you may or may not find appealing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Strike:_Return_to_the_Gulf#Nuclear_Strike
I remember trying the demo for this, once, a long time ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOPHBxCVTGs&feature=related
Here’s a little snippet of what it looks like.
Again…I’m not sure I would take the advice of myself when I was 13…but the game, in my memory, was downright fun. It also appears to be doing locked-perspective “isometric-like” 3d rendering, which is a feature I don’t remember ever encountering in another game :O
Which, I mean…we all know is theoretically possible, but it’s still nice to see, since it’s one of the rendering techniques I believe would be supperior for rendering many types of gameplay. But that’s a side-note.
I hope some of this is useful =]
Try Freespace 2, it’s freeware now and oldschool but highly recomended sci-fi spaceflight sim…unless you’re looking for an actual sim with an aeroplane
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/27473.html
I actually bought Freespace 2 for 6 bucks from GoG recently, and I plan to download the demo of the BSG mod/game Beyond The Red Line soonish.
But Ace Combat is not for me. Too Japanese.
Mads: Sorry I didn’t reply to you first, I just noticed your comment had been caught for moderation.
The Ace Combat series is really not for me, I tried it on Xbox 360, but it’s way too chaotic and confusing. In theory it’s exactly what I’m looking for, but in practice it’s just too… well, too Japanese. It’s the only way I can describe it.
I know, I’m being very hard to please
X-Wing Alliance, I will look into. I didn’t think about it because it’s so old, but if you say the graphics have been kept up-to-date by the community, I should give it a shot. I’m checking out Freespace 2 first though, which also has a million billion mods (no exaggeration), and I still have a half-completed Darkstar One savegame lying around, plus if I get really starved for space sims I never did make it very far into Freelancer, so I think I’m pretty well set for space games for now.
Crimson Skies was epic. Loved it. Bought it. Lent it to a friend. Never saw it again. Asked him for it recently but he finally came clean and admitted that he’d lost it. Now I’m waiting for the sequel.
A sequel better happen.
I remember the Strike series! Specifically Jungle Strike, I played it in the youth club when I was but a wee lad, on the rare occasions that one of the older kids deigned to load it up for me (damn you, MS DOS!) I remembered it with great nostalgia as well, but earlier this year I actually downloaded it from The Underdogs and… well, it didn’t hold up very well to time
For now it’s moderately-complicated IL-2 and Freespace 2 for me. I also found the demo for a modern flight combat game called Lock On which looks reasonably accessible, and I think I’ll be tracking down a copy of Gunship from 2000 for my helicopter fix, as I’ve heard many good things about it. I also recently remembered that I used to lust after Yager because of the lush futuristic landscapes, so I’ll probably try to find that as well.
I declare this christmas the season of flight games!
Just to make you aware, the difference between jungle strike and nuclear strike is pretty mind-blowing. One is sprite based, the other is 3d…so they ought to be quite different.
But other than that, yes, you are being very hard to please!
I also just recalled SAR, Search and Rescue…I believe it might actually be a danish game, though I’m not sure. Also hella old tho. Chopper game, where you fly around saving people…It might be fun? I never did try it though…
And then there’s the lander series. Also, again, very old, but it did actually come out in a 3d version at some point. The game is simple in theory: You have a tiny little lander prope with a single jet mounted on the belly of the craft, and you must use it to complete various missions.
But it’s tricky; because as you only have the one jet, you have to use little jet nozzles for stearing rather than rudders…and you basically tilt the craft around to push it where you want it to go. It’s similar to a chopper game in that way, but the focus is obviously quite different. Still, what with having a joystick around now, I should mention it because of it’s unique gameplay.
Ooh I would really like a chopper game about saving people! I’ll look into it, though if it’s too old and ugly I have more modern, pretty games to play
I played Mech Warrior 4 once. Didn’t really fancy it for whatever reason. Admittedly that was with keyboard controls though.
My joystick has arrived btw. It’s a HOTAS, so it creates a strong sense of presence. It has a shitload of buttons though, so it’s a bit intimidating
My favourite feature is the mode selector that has an LED that changes colour when you switch modes. It’s fairly superfluous, but it rocks.
heheh it’s all about the feeling you get, not where or how that feeling got there
And as I recall, it’s from the late 90′es, full 3d…
There was also a game that allowed you to fly around a sim city made in sim city 3000 in a chopper…god, if only I knew about modern games what I know about old ones XD
SimCopter. That one’s come up a lot lately for whatever reason. It was mentioned both on OTP and RPS recently.
Just got my arse kicked by a destroyer in Freespace 2 – apparently I make a better fighter pilot than bomber pilot. Accidentally installed the game on my Windows partition and then filled up the drive with mods. Now I don’t even have enough disk space to save the pilot profile. Gotta figure out how to move the game.
Freespace 2 ==> Descent? Conflict Freespace? I liked that, also, I spent HOURS in FRED (the level editor) to make my own awesome level.
I’m not sure what you mean.
I played Beyond the Red Line last night, what an incredible demo. It’s hard to believe it was made by a group of fans. The last fight in the second proper mission was way too hard though, I ran out of ammo before I’d even reduced his hull integrity to 90%.
I think I’ll check out XWA next, but I’ve downloaded enough Freespace 2 mods to last me well into 2009
lol nice =]
So how’s it working out so far?
What did you think about the control scheme of beyond the red line?
Very well, I’m having lots of fun with it. It’s very different from Freelancer, which is surprising as I was expecting just a slightly more complex version of that game. This is much more like Battlestar Galactica, an actual military space game, so making a BSG game with its engine seems like a perfect fit.
It has a good story with lots of cool details, decent variation in missions, ships, and weapons, and a simple control scheme with an enormous amount of detail (like shifting your shields around or balancing power between guns, shields, and engines).
BtRL’s control scheme was great. Very fluid, very powerful, and very loyal to the series. In fact the whole game was very loyal to the series, especially in the brilliant sound design.