Post Mortem

HELLO! ANYONE HERE?

Wow, this place is quiet. I thought at least one flight sim fan would have thrown up his thoughts on Falcon 4 long before I got here. It was the most hyped and anticipated flight sim of the last five years. Two years after it's release it's still the benchmark that serious sims are judged against.

And that's a problem. This won't be news to anyone who follows the flight sim genre but Falcon 4 is a dead product. Just before Christmas, Hasbro Interactive pulled the plug on all the Microprose flight sims and fired the teams that created Falcon 4 and European Air War. It followed EA's decision to kill the much-anticipated Jane's A-10 project late in it's development cycle and put Andy Hollis' legendary flight sim team to work on the next generation of Ultima Online. For the first time I can remember there are no flight sims under development by Jane's Combat Simulations. Most recently, Looking Glass (creators of the Flight Unlimited series) closed their doors.

After thousands of hours replaying the Desert Storm campaign, flight sim fans are getting a feel for being on the Iraqi side in the battle of the marketplace. SSI remains dedicated to the Flanker series, but since the CEO of parent Mattel lost her job over the performance of the software division it's future is tenuous at best. Microsoft will release Combat Flight Sim II this year but it's hopes are pinned on the fantasy Crimson Skies title. That's about it. Not too long ago flight sims were the hottest genre in PC gaming. What went wrong?

The answer lies inside the Falcon 4.0 box now available at the low, low price of just $19.99 at a Wal-Mart near you. At that price I can imagine a shopper deliberating between this gorgeously packaged flight sim and the latest Deer Hunter title. On second thought, I don't have to imagine-I know a few people who have bought Falcon 4 this way and to a person they swear they will never buy another sim again.

It's hard to blame them. For as amazing as Falcon 4.0 is in many areas it's brilliance is buried under a mountain of almost indecipherable procedures to do anything in the sim. Microprose took great pride in modeling the systems of the real F-16 as deeply as the secrecy restrictions would allow. But not too many people I know have a real F-16 cockpit in their rec room, or the hundreds of hours of real flight training a real F-16 pilot has before they strap on the Falcon for the first time. To attempt to play this program with anything less than a top-drawer throttle and stick combo and a thorough understanding of mapping keyboard commands to the stick controls is begging for frustration. It's an ironic twist because one of the hallmarks of the F-16 development was the first scientific examination of cockpit resource management in a fighter aircraft. Translating everything to the PC makes the sim more difficult to use than the real plane.

The level of complexity is compounded by the absence of interactive tutorials in the program. There is a list of scripted missions for performing basic maneuvers and using weapons. But all they do is put you in the airplane and turn you loose. The only way to understand what you are doing is to either memorize the manual or develop your speed reading skills to read the relevant passages in the middle of a dogfight. (And yes, that's the manual, not a suburban LA phone book. I applaud the Falcon 4 team for creating a textbook on fighter combat theory and practice but it doesn't do a damn thing to make their program easier to use.)

Releasing a buggy program didn't help, either. You are being warned: The retail version of Falcon 4.0 has enough bugs to send the Orkin man screaming into the night. The good news is the team stayed with the product and released patches right up to the end. The bad news is it took almost two years to make it useable, and there are still some serious flaws. At any resolution I run the program at, the Heads-Up Display and the pop-up command boxes are unreadable gibberish because the text and graphics are too small to be rendered accurately.

But when-or if-you get past that the appeal of Falcon 4.0 becomes clear. The flight model is well nigh on perfect. I'm not a F-16 pilot, but a few years ago someone who is let me try out the sims the Air Force uses to train their pilots. At least in the basic flight model the simulation you can buy is as accurate as the program they use. The F-16 is a relatively easy airplane to stall and Falcon 4.0 is quick to let you discover why the unofficial nickname for the F-16 is "Lawn Dart". The weapons modeling also reeks of authenticity. If you fly the airplane properly it is one of the most formidable fighting aircraft in the world. If you don't your life expectancy can be measured with a stopwatch. Microprose also deserves credit for developing AI that adds to the sense of realism and for vastly improving wingman AI with the final patch. If you wade through the learning cliff-err, curve, you will also be rewarded with a fully dynamic campaign-the Holy Grail of combat sim developers. (In English a dynamic campaign means your actions and failures in each mission can change the course of the war.)

The graphics of Falcon 4.0 look dated next to Flanker 2 or Jane's USAF because, well, they are. But aside from the cockpit display bug this is still a program that is easy on the eyes, and the passage of time has made the once formidable system requirements more palpable.

The criticisms I've made here aren't unique to Falcon 4. By varying degrees they apply to all of the recent serious flight sims I've bought. They are lovingly modeled after the airplanes they want to simulate, too much so in my book. Back in the day of SU-27 Flanker, Falcon 3 and Sid Meyer's F-15 hardware capabilities restricted what the design teams could do. When that changed the developers gave their market what begged for, programs that modeled every button and switch in the airplane.

But what they forgot was this: The people who bought those early sims weren't veteran pilots who came to PC flying with a fat logbook of real life air combat time. The early games succeeded because they allowed people who had never been behind the controls of any airplane to feel what a real F-16 flew like without having to devote your life to it. As they learned more they wanted more depth, and programs like Falcon 4.0 delivered. But they left behind the millions of newcomers who mistakenly believed that these were games and playing them was supposed to be fun. Until the flight sim community returns to that essential truth, the genre will continue it's slow tailspin into the ground.

-Brian Igo