My Flight Sim History, Part 1

When I was about 5 years old, bashing away at my father's Apple ][ , my father booted up a copy of Bruce Artwick's original flight simulator for me to have fun with. At that time, with the primitive graphics and wireframe outlines, I only recognized the runway and amused myself looking at the dials on the instruments watching them spin round and round. After a succesful take off in to oblivion (the map was only so large) and not knowing where the airport was I remembered typing in "A-I-R-P-O-R-T" to see if the computer got what I was trying to say. Of course, it didn't.. and that was it. I was having more fun with other games, namely, Hard Hat Mack, SeaFox, BreakOut and some sort of PacMan clone (I do not remember what it was called, but it sure wasn't PacMan), amongst plenty others.

Then we got a 286 computer. In 1990s, it came with Windows 3.0, which was state of the art. The 286 had been around for much earlier, but it was only after the price went down that we could get one. And there it was, among the dozens of games I got, was a diskette labeled "Flight Simulator 3.0".

That familiar startup screen - Runway 36, Meigs Field.

Flight Simulator 3.0. I actually (tried) learning VOR navigation with this one.

FS3 was what really got me hooked. The first FS, well yeah that was fun too, but it was the wrong time, I was about 5, it was on an Apple ][, and it's more like a novelty. FS3 was light years ahead in comparison. It had 640x480 graphics, it had nice vector graphics, it had color, it had buildings, and it had a whole world of airports to explore (north America). I also had manual for FS3, which I read it over and over the pages became so worn. I treasured that manual; I still have it today.

I cannot recall how many hours I put into FS3, even choosing it over other games of the time because my fascination with flight and planes are so strong. Eventually I figured out that there are other places besides Chicago Meigs Field, and make use of the airports list to explore places. I practiced takeoffs and landings, I show it off to many of my poor friends, whom, many of them was disinterested with my toying around with a computer plane that doesn't shoot missiles and things. I did get convert a few friends who eventually became simheads. At that time my passion for planes are going overdrive too, everything is airplane themed about my life, including a shirt and cap that my mother bought and sowed on various badges telling me that it was a pilot uniform. Although it had a shuttle on it. And I loved it.


Back to the FS3. The sim had one annoying feature in that the planes flew totally unrealistically because of the simplistic flight dynamics. It flew on rails, basically. And the plane will continuously move forwards in flight, no matter what you try to do, even in a stall. It will move slowly, but it will be forwards. The very basic flight dynamics also meant that you will go upwards if you point the nose up, and down if you point the nose down, but not nose up downwards and not nose down upwards, which makes landings totally unrealistic, because with every landing, you slam the nose wheel into the ground. I couldn't figure out how to make planes land like the real-world planes, and bugged my poor father to no end wondering out loud about the problem, which he had no real solution for. This and a box of an older FS2 I found at a computer shop compounded the problem because it had a screenshot of a Cessna in flight at the end of the runway, in a nose up altitude, as if flaring for touch down (it was a box marketing trick, you see, and poor 7 year old me thought that FS2 had that feature.)

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.