by Bob "Groucho" Marks

Hey. We can talk, right? I mean, we've flown missions in rag wings from France back in 1917, popped bad guys over Korea in the early fifties, and, um, back to Korea just lately. We're simulated combat vets. Virtually bloodied.

I know you are, or you wouldn't be here at this site reading this. We drive high performance death machines. We swagger. We BAD. So why, you're asking, is space being taken up- again- for a look at a civvie ass-and-trash hauling sim like Fly!?

Well, let me tell you why, Ace. Fly! (that exclamation point is going to get really annoying, so I'm gonna ignore it from here on out- agreed?) is- in its own pacifist way- as challenging, exhilarating, infuriating, addictive, and engaging as most kill 'em all sims out there. Did I mention "as buggy as most" also? Oops. Left one out.

I have blown far too many hours lately on Fly- hours that could have been better spent honing my Falcon weapons juggling techniques, working on my cockpit, or even (gasp) with the family. That's not to say that I'm hanging up my g-suit for good, or that Fly is perfect- no way Jose`- but I think it conveys the complexities of modern aviation better than most of the code out there. For those of you (and you know who you are) with abbreviated attention spans, I bring you The Short Version:

Affirmative

• Superior avionics and systems modeling
• Gorgeous interior graphics
• Impressive, almost-real-time importable weather effects
• Best clouds yet
• Decent, intuitive ATC and radio
• Great sound effects
• Lots of airports world wide

Negative

• Nonexistent damage modeling
• Generally boring, sometimes inaccurate terrain
• No way to induce possibility of failures
• More bugs than Rob Zombie's hair
• Sometimes unconvincing flight model
• Spotty flight model

Click to continue

What It Takes

This is one BIG sim, so those of you who are processor, memory, or hard drive challenged need to look elsewhere. Right on the box it states that it needs a 200 MHz Pentium minimum with a recommended 333 PII- and we know how conservative those marketing guys who write the box copy are. Ahem.

From what I can gather by reading the news groups, anything below a 100 MHz bus machine might as well be a Kodak Carousel slide viewer. On my PIII 550 / 196 MB / V3 3000 AGP Fly is like liquid silk. There is much sniping and outright artillery barrages between the various video card camps- Fly supports 32 bit cards- but I can only review what I can see on my own machine. Besides- who wants to get dragged into a video card pissing contest- I'd rather argue about religion. Suffice to say it runs nice.

If you are like me and hate loading CDs- and Fly has three of them- you can load the whole shebang on your drive…all 1600 MB of it. Yep, 1.6 Gig- good thing my hard drive echoes when I yell into it. Fly is a beast. But launch into the program and you soon see why.

Go Configure

The setup screens in Fly are about as intuitive as they come- with all the usual control, graphics, and sound management. The Realism window lets you set stuff like accurate engine startup procedures (there is a command that walks you through it, even if this is selected), auto mixture and prop, ground traction, icing, and other traffic. There is not, however, any way to induce random (or not-so-random) system failures. I think that this is a major oversight…dealing with something breaking is part of the fun in sims, especially in ones that nobody shoots at you.

When you are ready to Fly! (oh gawd), you can choose from a set of several "canned" scenarios or plan your own trip in the - what else- Flight Planning window. Pick from a whole shipload of airports, select waypoints, choose your steed and payload for weight and balance, and pick the weather.

The weather is very cool, with the ability to select rain, t-storms, and snow. You can even download near-real time weather by importing METAR files. A utility called Tweak! makes that task easy and painless. But oh, man, it can be buggy. Hurricane / TS Dennis METAR data played hell with Fly- some airports in the grip of Dennis would make the sim do weird things too numerous to mention here. When it did work, however, Dennis was a playground of king-hell crosswinds, rain, and lightning. Very cool.

Go to Systems Modeling