by Richard (Flex) Hawley
Sabre Ace: Virgin Interactive
I wanted to like this one so I spent some time with it.
Even if you don't mind dumbing down your flying style for "a bit of fun" the overall quality of the sim is let down badly by the really poor 3DFX landscape. It's really fuzzy at anything except high altitude. At low level if you don't keep checking you altimeter you just can't tell if you're near the ground or not. The fuzzy brown, green, blue smear looks pretty much the same at 10 ft and 1000 ft. This is only broken up by the odd mis-aligned join in the "terrain".
Okay, apart from the bad 3DFX rendering the aircraft look great. What about combat? This is what it's all about. Five minutes of this sim and you quickly miss the comforts of radar and virtual padlocks. It uses a snap view type system that is surprisingly quite easy to use, in fact one of the nicer types I've used. Also you can toggle the "Lock Enemy" which will snap your view around if your visual target enters another view plane, this is confusing if you're not used to it. In fact I forgot this feature and just relied on manual view switching.
Objects seemed to scale correctly which is unusual, most flight sims cheat a little and scale their 3D objects by say a factor of 2 to make them easier to see at greater distance. In Saber Ace you spend a lot of time tracking dots around the sky, if you close the range too rapidly you only get to make out the shape of an airplane as it goes whizzing right past your canopy. (There may have been an option to change the scale I missed.)
So to assist long range identification a "colour coding" feature is available, this means that friendliest are easily distinguished by means of a flashing green dot.
I can safely say low speed stalls are modeled, reducing airspeed results in one wing or the other dropping followed by the rest of the airframe. I never found out how difficult it was to recover as I always smacked into this big fuzzy blue/brown blob thing. (If that's supposed to be a beach then whatever you do, don't go there for a holiday.) All aircraft handling felt a bit too "bouncy" than what I'd imagine, I really had to concentrate hard on not over controlling the stick the pull my sights up onto targets.
Saber Ace picks up points for the sound, the quality of the whining turbines and machine guns are well above average. Good overall presentation, good view system, nice choice of aircraft terrible terrain graphics.
Flying Corps Gold
Right-o-chaps, listen up, what we need here is a couple of Lewis guns, some grenades and a little bit of luck. Looking near identical to the earlier release it offers two new features, network head to head play, a paint scheme system and 3D accelerator support. Okay that's three things but the paint scheme is really part of the network combat thrills and spills.
The same fog-of-war terrain is present from the earlier 3D patch version making ground features difficult to see at high altitude. The cloud transition while no longer supposed to cause slow-down looks a bit odd (holy polygons) but who cares about such minor things? Well YOU might if you're into the suspension of disbelief. This is not a major re-working of Flying Corps, it's more of a tune-up with an extra aircraft thrown in.
Back to the networking, going head to head you notice a momentary "warping" of your opponent, actually it's more of a stutter. This is running on a direct connection? No one could tell me if this was a serial or IPX network connection. It if was serial then either there is some inefficient code in the DirectPlay serial driver (as I've noticed something similar in my own games) or position updates intervals are widely spaced (if you update positions at 15fps on a "snapshot" 3D system running at 30fps then you would see such stuttering).
If you went out and bought Flying Corps when the 3D accel' patch came out then you would be hard pushed to justify buying essentially the same product all over again. (Ed. Note: Empire and Rowan have pointed out that existing FC users will be able to upgrade to FC Gold at a very reasonable rate. Additionally, Empire has promised that the final 3dfx patch and the multiplayer patch would be free to existing FC owners when FC Gold is released.)
Control Devices
Thrustmaster first dabbled with PC game pads last year with the "PhazerPad" which was/is a very nice digital controller but a bit limited in use. Introducing the new RAGE 3D, an aggressive name for what is an aggressive device. The main part of the controller is the "thumb roller" which is said to use some patented "Hall-Effect" sensor. Tested with the excellent "Moto Racer" it offered precise control over its full range, (considerably less bulky than ) allowing gentle banking into curves and full opposite steer for tight switchback bends. What's more it converts to a digital pad at the flick of a switch.
There's a cluster of six buttons on the right hand side, two top triggers and two bottom triggers (same functions but for different holding styles). All buttons are programmable with Thrustmapper software.
You can plug in up to 4 of these units at once on a standard PC. Gravis have always had a more competitively priced range of flexible joypads but the RAGE's 3D analoge/digital capability coupled with it's very comfortable design makes it worth paying that little bit extra.
Suncom - Split Throttle
In the wired and wacky world of noble throttle controllers Suncoms' Strike Fighter Dual Throttle system is one ugly muddy-funster. Though it can be used with any joystick it complements Suncoms' F15 stick. It's a large unit that takes up more desk space than any other throttle controller out there today.
Programming is identical to the F15 Strike Fighter stick, you press a button, record the keyboard stroke and assign it to a position. No additional software is required. For more info go to SUNCOM Throttle or to SUNCOM.
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Last Updated Sept.8th, 1997