After a long absence, (and a trip of about 11,000 miles) Gus Carroll returns with a brief review of an interesting flight game. Read on and you'll discover that there are some nonstandard weapons here that I doubt any wargamer has ever used before. Although this program isn't exactly combat related, it's something that could hone your up computer flying ability not to mention being a lot of fun. The idea of the entire game is that you are a stunt pilot and the Stunt Coordinator keeps handing out these oddball stunts for you to do for a movie. The program starts out with fairly easy stunts that get progressively more difficult and sometimes more ridiculous. There are various types of flying vehicles for you to use (including a duck) and lots of very interesting stunts to try out. (Ever fly THROUGH a tunnel, with a train coming through the other way in F-15 III?) Once you have completed the stunt, you can then go back and edit the final film by taking the output from the various cameras and combining them into a single final production. You can also add music and other sound effects, including you own voice, if you have a Sound Blaster or compatible sound card. The editing part of the program seems to be about as complex as a lot of the computer oriented graphics editing programs. Some of the various scenarios are: You're flying along and get hungry, decide to land in a little town and taxi up to a burger joint. You're flying along and decide to land in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. You're a sheriff and you must land your aircraft in front of a fleeing robber. You are tasked to land ON TOP of a skyscraper with a very small roof (you actually have to stall it in). You're an Angry Duck intent upon taking revenge upon the police department in a small town and you do so by bombing the police cars with eggs. You have the option of saving your better stunts to tape (well, actually to disk but the program "pretend' it's going to tape). These tapes can then be shown in the screening room. The program will utilize most of the sound cards like Sound Blaster and the sound produced is very good (speech, sound effects, etc.) It will also run in 570K of free RAM but if you have more, the program will load up many of the scenarios and make it much faster when you change actions and such. I have 16 Meg of RAM in my machine and it will sit there loading for about 20 seconds upon initialization and from then on the only disk accesses seem to be when you are saving/retrieving a "video tape". You can also create your own stunts and save them for future use by the players. There is a broad selection of aircraft (flying vehicles/critters) from which to choose when you create your stunts or just go out to practice flying. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 640K (need 570K of free RAM) 2 MB or more of RAM is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 386SX 16 MHz processor (386 DX 33 MHz or faster is recommended) VGA 256-color and color monitor Hard Disk Drive (requires 13 MB of free disk space) PC DOS/ MS DOS (supports 3.3 to 5.0) RECOMMENDED OPTIONS Joystick Mouse With 100% Microsoft Compatible Driver The Sound Source, Tandy Sound (DAC), PS/1 Audio Card, Thunder Board, Sound Blaster, Roland MT32/LAPC-2 Or AdLib Sound Card Extended Or Expanded Memory Back to Cry Havoc #7 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com