Prepare for Impact!

"This 3D game has been developed in the context of an international, aviation safety research project (http://hcilab.uniud.it/aviation), aimed at exploring possible new approaches to safety education. The game reproduces the experience of real-world aircraft emergencies from the passenger’s viewpoint, with the highest fidelity allowed by today’s mobile devices.

In each virtual emergency experience, the player can try first-hand right and wrong actions that a passenger can take, and see the positive or negative consequences those actions have. Your goal is to take all the right decisions to come out from the plane unharmed as fast as possible.

The game also offers the option of publishing your best evacuation results on world leaderboards. The different levels of "Prepare for Impact" depict major types of emergencies, such as in-flight decompression, ground collision, runway overrun, water landing, and crash landing.

Moreover, they are able to simulate the different threats that can make aircraft evacuation more complex, such as fire, smoke in the cabin, water, unusable exits, and others. "


I chanced upon this. Doesn't help my flying anxieties at all, but I guess there is some 'edutainment' in safety briefing and escape simulations out of tight spots and also prepares for the 'drop everything and get out in the safest manner as possible" in the form of a timed score.

What do you all think?

Nostalgia: Commanche 3

Commanche 3 is a helicopter sim by Novalogic, which uses 'voxels' for rendering the landscape, which created a really awesome landscape for flying for its time.

Some of the voxels are, for the lack of a better word to described it - 'puffy' and sort of clip a bit so when you land on the ground and they dig in a bit, creating a visual effect just like tall grass does to a helicopter landing gear.

Although it wasn't exactly realistic and based on a non-existant helicopter (the Commanche project was stopped I believe), it was the most fun I had with a helicopter simulator, and just have many days going through it imagining I'm driving Airwolf, flying low over the landscape, hovering in place to observe the enemy and calling for artillery or unleashing the chopper's firepower on them.

The landscape loops; that means if you see a rice field below you and keep continuing in that direction, then you will see it again. There are sceneries like trees. It was a very nice game/sim that balances play,simulation and fun quite well. I love the espionage / intelligence gathering missions - it's basically Airwolf.


Quite a lot of thought went into the game as well, as there are even auto rotations in the event of an engine failure (although the engine takes damage, it doesn't really just fail completely - you can limp the aircraft home) the manual states that you can actually turn off the engine mid air, autorotate to the ground, gear down and flare slightly on landing, and do it right you could actually get away with some gear and frame damage.

Trying to describe the game with words I can only do so much, the experience for Commanche 3 was so vivid and great that I cannot fully describe this into words.

I no longer have the sim, and I miss it much.

Novalogic ruined the 4th version (Commanche 4) with a stupid mouse-driven shoot-em-up-helicopter-simulator that just doesn't work, it was too time demanding, and most of the time I just don't know what was happening.

Been Playing Kerbal Space Program

Interesting game as hell. After initial false launches and falling back onto Earth, I figured out the proper launch maneuvers and finally put barely a capsule into orbit (after spending too much fuel). Subsequent flights I got better and got more efficient.

It's an awesome simulation - check it out. I would not call it realistic simulator but I did learn a lot about space flight trajectories, orbiting manuevers, etc from it. You can actually get to the "Mun" and other planets in that solar system, however. I never actually got there, yet.

Download the demo version: http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com