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Pole to Pole Flight Sim addon
Rather more ambitious in terms of scale than Discover Europe, Pole to Pole takes you on a 20,000 mile journey from the North Pole down through Canada, the US and South America. A new aircraft is provided in the pack, the Aero Commander 680.
Feeling like Michael Palin we strapped in and took off on a very long journey.
The Aero Commander 680 is a twin engine plane and quite different from the Piper Pacer. The exterior model and cockpit are very good. Most of the instruments are visible without opening extra panels, although the GPS can be opened by itself, it’s visible in the cockpit, just. Then again, I use a 1680x1050 monitor for Flight Sim, so you might need to use the extra panel on smaller sizes or a second monitor.
Just like Discover Europe, there is a PDF manual with details of all the flights with particular points of interest. Our only criticism is that we’d have liked to have seen an overall map.
As the flights are saved flights there is no obligation to fly them in order so you can jump to flights that interest you, or try again if a landing goes badly. Don’t forget that you can also save flights yourself, useful if you’re limited to shorter time than the flights.
Notable locations include Castlegar airport in Canada, with a very challenging approach due to mountains on all sides, and St Maarten with a low approach over a popular tourist beach. To see how low, watch this Youtube video or see the Wikipedia page with photos and warnings about jet blast. The travelogue helpfully includes a link to landing charts for Castlegar from IVAO, an impressive enthusiasts site for Canadian airspace.
One of the reasons I like Pole to Pole is that I learnt some important lessons about flying, specifically setting the correct mixture for the engines. If Flight Simulator is not set to adjust this automatically, you will need to reduce the mixture as you climb. Not knowing this I struggled to reach the altitude required to get over some mountains. My thanks to Jane Whittaker at First Class Simulations for explaining so patiently.
Pole to Pole should keep any flight sim enthusiast occupied for some time and has certainly expanded both my knowledge of interesting airports around the world and my flying skills.
Pole to Pole costs £25 and requires Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 or X.
Discover Europe Flight Sim addon
Following the current trend for add-ons offering more than just new aircraft, Discover Europe is a collection of saved flights making round trip of Europe covering 11,000 miles in 64 flights produced by First Class Simulations.
There is a new aircraft supplied, the Piper Pacer. This is a high wing monoplane, so there is nothing in the way of getting a good view out of the window.
Apart from our usual moan of the lack of printed manuals there is a better than average amount of documentation available. There are three manuals covering installation, pilots notes and a tutorial. The latter covers the important topics of where gauges and controls are in the Pacer and the appropriate speeds. Images showing the routes and a quick reference for the Pacer cockpit are also included.
The Pacer model is very good with plenty of detail. The choice of this aircraft dating from Fifties means that the cockpit is quite basic, though there is an autopilot for altitude and heading. The Pacer is good for this kind of touring as it is easy to fly and quite forgiving, but a newer aircraft would have offered more helpful navigational aids, and maybe a slightly higher cruising speed.
The most important gauges are well placed but the very large control yoke does obscure the Vertical Speed Indicator, Turn and Slip gauge and the Horizontal Situation Indicator. The latter is a little annoying because the HSI is used to set the autopilot heading.
There is a separate instrument panel that can be enabled to see the instruments that are not easy to see in the 3D cockpit. The most important of these the autopilot and the fuel gauges. The radio controls are easy to see but using the ATC window means the frequencies are changed automatically anyway.
The low speed is good for the sightseeing parts of the flights but does present a bit of a problem with the longer sections of the flights. This is mainly due to a shortcoming in Flight Simulator with speeding up time.
All of the Discover Europe flights come with a Flight Plan so you receive guidance from the Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). Each instruction must be acknowledged. If not, the ATC asks twice more and then cancels the flight plan. The trouble is that the ATC commands don’t cancel the acceleration and there is no keyboard shortcut either. This makes it impossible to respond in time at higher acceleration settings.
It is possible to re enable the flight plan but it is annoying. The best solution is to pause the game as quickly as possible after an ATC request and then change the simulation rate.
Something like the Aero Commander 680 from Pole to Pole (also by First Class) would have offered a faster cruise speed but without spoiling the view as much using a low winged aircraft.
The biggest problem with Discover Europe is the price. The Piper Pacer model is very good, but the saved flights are relatively easy to create yourself with an atlas, which makes the £25 price tag feel quite steep. Even so, Discover Europe is a great way to explore Flight Simulator.
Flight Sim X addon Commuter Xpress
The problem with non combat flight simulators is that it can be hard to maintain a sense of challenge and progression. Commuter Xpress 2 is a solution to this problem with a variety of airline commuter routes and the aircraft that serve them.
Unlike many Flight Simulator add-ons it adds more than mew aircraft. Commuter Xpress 2 has a small program that you start first instead of Flight Simulator. This has a series of drop down menus for choosing the airline, route and the aircraft to fly. A summary of the flight plan appears on the right. Clicking Fly Now starts Flight Simulator with the flight plan loaded and the aircraft ready at the departure airport. Given the possible combinations, it is a much better idea than using missions in Flight Simulator.
There are six aircraft on offer in Commuter Xpress 2: Bombardier CRJ-900, DeHavilland DHC-8-200 “Dash 8”, Dornier 328 Prop, Dornier 328 Jet, Embrarer ERJ-190 and the Saab 340B. With a mix of propeller and jet powered aircraft there should be enough to keep the most enthusiastic flight sim fan entertained for some time.
All of the aircraft are very well modelled with moving parts and the correct aircraft liveries, but most of the time playing the game is spent inside the cockpit and these are equally well designed. The Dornier Jet is probably my favourite airliner in Commuter express, thanks to its well designed cockpit with multifunction displays (known in the trade as a glass cockpit). It helps playing on a high resolution monitor, our test machine has a 1400 x 1050 widescreen display. There is a huge amount of information on the display on the left in the screenshot, which replaces the Head Up Display (HUD) found in military simulations. The lack of this is often frustrating in civilian aircraft because the information is then split between several instruments.
Commuter Xpress 2 also takes full advantage of the Air Traffic Control feature in Flight Simulator. Keeping on top of all directions and changing between different controllers adds an extra level of challenge to the game.
One area where a little more help could be given is setting up the instrument landing system (ILS) although the ATC directions make sure the aircraft is lined up for the correct runway the ILS offers guidance for the final descent to avoid overshooting or falling short. All the information was found in the Flight Simulator help files. The Flight Simulator map also includes all the required information of which frequencies to use for which runways.
While we’d always prefer a paper manual, the PDF manual is well written with plenty of background information on the aircraft. There is also a separate panel guide for each aircraft. Better maps of the airports would be also helpful. Even thought the information is available in Flight Simulator it would be good to have a printable version.
As useful as the flight planner is, it doesn’t really offer that much more than Flight Simulator does in the Free Flight planner. Despite this the knowledge that these are real flight plans makes for a much more enjoyable experience, as well as the challenge of meeting the flight time. I also found it motivated me to learn more about the autopilot and landing systems. If you’re not into combat flying and need something new for Flight Simulator, this is an worthwhile purchase.
The official website along with the option to buy as an instant download for £19.24 instead of £25 for the boxed version can be found here.
An example of good hardware design
A friend has had to send his XBox 360 back to Microsoft for repairs, and the instructions for doing so recommended removing the hard disk first.
I had visions of taking the whole thing apart, as you would for a desktop or notebook PC but was very pleasantly surprised to find that this isn’t the case.
The hard disk fits on the top of the unit and is removed by pressing a button and lifting it from the case. Simple but effective.
Fun games from Kongregate
As much as I enjoy games like Ka-50 Black Shark for their depth and challenge, there are times when I want something that doesn’t take quite so long to load.
It probably take 5 to 10 minutes to get going in Black Shark and similar games when you account for loading the game and then the mission or save. Frankly I don’t have the patience at the end of the day when I can only allow 30 minutes for a quick blast.
A faster and cheaper alternative that can be just as much fun, is to enter the world of online flash games. There is an important warning though, it is possible to spend (should that be waste?) huge amounts of time on these sites.
I’ve found more than enough good quality flash games to keep me happy at Kongregate.
Protector has kept me interested for ages. It’s a strategy game where you have to place units on a map to stop monsters from getting past. It sounds simple but there are right and wrong ways of doing it, as I’ve found out the hard way.
Warfare 1917 was good but didn’t last long enough for me. It is a good alternative to the fantasy setting that is use for so many of these games.
Gemcraft is similar to Protector but I’ve found it a lot more challenging.
Another way I’ve dealt with this is to restrict myself to really old games and rely on the relative speed of my newer computer. Deus Ex served quite well for a while. At nine years old it was really quick, even on the highest quality settings. The same goes for Morrowind.
You could go even further back in time and play some old DOS games with D-Fend Reloaded. A large collection of games can be found at Abandonia.com
Ka-50 Black Shark screen grabs
What did I do at lunch? Fly a Russian attack helicopter.
First I went for the instant action button and got the arcade version of the game.
A nice touch but I’m really after the proper action. So back to the training video. I selected the one of starting the helicopter. This is because I can’t be bothered to keep switching between the Flight Guide and the keyboard shortcut list. Much easier to let the instructor take care of the complicated stuff. Even on the third time through, I’m still not keeping up with the instructions. Though at least this time I remembered to turn on the power to the ejector seat system (more on that later)
Here you can see the cockpit. The centre display is the TV based targeting system and the one to the right is the advanced moving map. So far I’ve been able to turn them on. There are more controls to the left, right, above, and in fact behind the pilot too.
The Ka-50 is very responsive, much more so that the Huey that I flew in Med-Evac or Sea King in Search and Rescue 4. The manual recommends using the trim control, which I shall find in the shortcut guide soon. However, as long as you’re careful it’s not a hard helicopter to control.
And here’s the Black Shark in flight. I did manage to land a couple of times but thought I would end up with the ejector seat.
If you thought that ejection might be a little risky from a helicopter with the blades over the pilot, you would be right. Luckily the designers spotted this and came up with quite a novel solution.
There are explosive bolts fitted to the blades designed to fling them out of harms way. As the picture to the right shows it all seems to have worked ok.
Hopefully I should start to learn how to fire some weapons soon.
Ka-50 Black Shark very first impressions
A reputation for being able to land helicopters and aircraft in (mostly) one piece rewarded me with a copy of Ka-50 Black Shark earlier this week.
The Black Shark is the Russian alternative to the Apache attack helicopter. An added challenge for the simulation is that it is only a single seat, so you have to fly and fight at the same time.
Installation was nice and simple and I have been impressed with the graphics and performance. I set the resolution to match my gaming notebook (affectionately called ‘The Beast’ thanks to 22in monitor) at 1680x1050. Black Shark exceeded my expectations by playing fine at this rather extreme setting without having to turn anything else down.
I decided to give the training missions a go and it quickly became clear that this is a proper simulation. There is a start button for each of the two engines, but pressing this is just one step of 35! Thankfully there is a quick start-up button if you don’t have a checklist to hand.
Speaking of checklists, there is an impressive amount of documentation available to help play the game. PDFs for my downloaded version of course.
| Quick Start | 56 |
| GUI manual | 162 |
| Flight Manual | 383 |
| Keyboard shortcuts - simulation | 9 |
| Keyboard shortcuts – game | 5 |
| Total | 615 |
The keyboard shortcuts in both the PDFs and in game have one problem, modifiers such as Shift or Ctrl are listed after the key rather than before as we are normally used to. Given that there is a distinction between the left and right Shift, Ctrl and Alt, this may take some adjustment.
I’ll be back in flight at lunch so there’ll be more detail soon, and hopefully some screengrabs.
New games for Windows 7….
Well, Windows XP games that got cut out of Vista that are returning. They are Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers and Internet Spades.
As the names suggest they are online multiplayer. A very cool feature is that the computer will take over if a human opponent drops out. There’s no mention of how it will decide on the skill level. That could present a problem with the statistics tracker in the Games Explorer if the replacement is too good.
Still going strong – Moraff’s games
I got a press release this morning about some new tilesets for a MahJongg game made by Software Diversions, home of the Moraff games.
I don’t know how many people know this but Moraff was very big in the good old days of DOS. Moraff’s Revenge was one of the very first 3D role playing games and I remember spending many happy hours playing Moraff’s Blast, an Arkonoid like game (although Popcorn was my favourite). Time to dig out DOSBox.
Enjoying game music
Without really meaning to, I found some good music to listen to while working, music from games. It makes quite a lot of sense really when you think about it. Game music is written to help the gamer enjoy the game without distracting them, so it’s perfect background music.
Myself, I’m listening to the tracks from some of the Might and Magic series of games, 6-9 to be precise. As they were created some time ago, the music was supplied on a combined audio and data CD. Extracting the music couldn’t have been easier with the ripping tab in Windows Media Player, although I had to put the track information myself.
It seems that these games were at something of a sweet spot for general listening. Earlier games often used MIDI, which was very atmospheric in games like Dark Forces but loses something for day to day use. Some games have a decent collection of mp3s, X2 The Threat was one, but I’ve found that many use a system to change the music to react to events. The resulting files are too small to be of any use in this way.
Having said that, there may be a small renaissance of game music. Some idle web searching produced DirectSong, a website offering albums for Elder Scrolls III and IV, Guild Wars and Dungeon Siege II among others. Annoyingly there is no mention of price before signing up, which is enough for me to go elsewhere, but it’s a good idea none the less.
As a slight aside, one of my favourite games of all times, No One Lives Forever, came with a small album’s worth of music on the second install CD. In fact you can even download the source code for the game now from the official site. In fact, I’ve just discovered that you can download the music, and quite a few more extra tracks too, from indiespace.com. I think I shall do so now.
Does anyone else have any favourite music from games?
