I've had a hankering for a flight sim for a while. Not something where I sit looking at autopilot for 5 hours as I cross the Atlantic at night to not "Pull Up" when I'm told, killing my precious cargo of NPCs. I want to use missiles to do that!
And so the research started... and soon stopped.
I'd have thought that a decent combat flight sim would be a hotly contested arena, at the very least a mod or two to strap sidewinders on my Cessna in MS Flight Sim seemed reasonable, but apparently not.
Diving in at the top is DCS World - a mega combat flight sim that appears faithful to the last. I say appears as the faithfulness seems to run right down the cost of the aircraft. Sure there are a couple of shitty aircraft for free, but I reckon my backside is going to be handed to me if I fly in one of those.
And the price of a "real" aircraft is eyewatering. What's more, faithfulness is good and all, but I'm not an experienced combat pilot - death will be swift.
So that's out, what's next...
There are two out there apparently, both on sale too... Ace Combat 7 and Project Wingman (loosely based on AC7)
Let's get the first one I bought out of the way first then...
This thing looks fantastic! And really, it plays well too, mostly. But...
Here I am looking at the menu screens, and it's a confusing mess - surely it's picking the aircraft, picking a bunch of weapons, and rolling into combat. Clearly, I've been at high altitude too long as I seemed to set flight time and again without anything other than my sharp wit to fend off the bogies.
And I'm sat staring at a load of aircraft I can't fly too - screw you rookie, you're driving the little baggage cart around until you earn your wings! Pffft, I just paid for them.
So I rage quit - this is not going to give me instant gratification.
Ace Combat 7 it is then.
I reckon it also looks great, I think on balance I prefer PW though.
50Gb of download later... I'm in, oh yes.
Oh no.
What's this? You're a 3Pm game? Piss Poor Port. No mouse control, in the menus. OK. I can live with that, your budget was immense, I'm assuming you saved the investment for the gaming!
But wait, my aging (and it is aging, I'm trying flying before buying a flight controller) controller isn't supported. A quick check and ah yes.. when you didn't bother to port the game in any way other than the basics - you didn't bother supporting any PC peripherals... So it's xBox controller, some flight stick (that also works on the xBox) or a keyboard.
I think Steam has me logged at 7 minutes before I requested a refund - if they can't be bothered to allow controller mapping, then how much effort went into the rest of the game... don't tell me, I like complaining.
So here we are, one too expensive, one that's got a UI created using crayons, and one that has the care factor of a six-week-old mosquito.
So where does that leave me? With an ongoing flight sim itch, that's where....
Options are IL17 - I have that, I wanted jets'n'stuff but it might serve. I also think that somewhere I have Wings Over Vietnam - which amazingly is coming up for its 18th birthday - should rock on a current PC then.
All I'm looking for is a relive of the experience I had with a really old game - Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, maybe with some ground attack thrown in. how hard can it be!
