Jolt Country

I posted a review in part on Caltrops about Microsoft Flight. It's a free game available on Steam and allows you to practice flying a small plane around Hawaii, trying stunts and attempting (not always successfully) to land.

Ben, you have flying experience, if you can, try getting this game and trying it out and tell me how the game compares to the real thing of flying an actual plane.

Works pretty good bro!

How do you compare it to "escape the room" games?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:How do you compare it to "escape the room" games?

You can actually do something tangible almost immediately and you get actual results.

The example escape game someone pointed to here gives some game where you go looking around, then you came to a drawer with 4 symbols on it. Now, I know that one; select some number of these symbols in (the correct) order. If it's 4 symbols that means you've got 16 different tries. If it's 5, you've got 20. There's no way to tell unless you hit the right combination. I don't know, I just find it tedious.

Even in the game I did - Teleporter Test - which is essentially the same thing, get out of a locked room, or rather, the reverse, figure out how to get back to an inaccessible room, there were several other interesting puzzles to do at the same time.

Now I know why it's tedious. It has a limited number of things you can do and puts you in that situation from the beginning. Half-Life 2 has a number of similar puzzles where you're effectively trapped in an area until you find a method to escape. One is the "teeter totter" area where you see how the physics engine works; you have to put trash items on one end of a board suspended across a fulcrum so that it has to weigh enough to lift the other end so you can jump across to a platform too high to reach from the ground. But you don't get dumped into that at the beginning of the game.

Duke Nukem 3D has a similar one, you're at a construction shed with four buttons, press the right number of them and a cover drops, allowing you to blow up the building. But this isn't the first thing you come upon, you can see what you've selected so you can simply try the combinations until one of them works. But since each selection can only be on or off, there are only 7 combinations you have to try (the default combination of all off clearly doesn't activate it.)

Those games do have frustrations in trying to solve various puzzles in them, but with respect to "locked room" puzzles, (1) it's not the entire game, and (2) it's not the first immediate thing you have to solve.

I cannot and will not try "Microsoft Flight", but assuming that the navigational and communication systems haven't been too far "dumbed down" from Microsoft Flight Simulator X (which is probably a terrible assumption), then the answer is the same as with FSX:

For simulating the visceral experience of flying, it gets an F, but that's not really its fault.

For simulating the mechanics of flying and navigation, it gets an A -- you can learn all you need to know about stick 'n' rudder and getting from one place to another with it.

For simulating the communication aspects (talking with ATC and what have you), it gets a C. Gives you a taste, but only a very vanilla one.

pinback wrote:Please Enjoy The New And Improved:
http://moltobenny.com

Your site is still black "...in protest!"

----
"Above all else... We shall go on..."
"...And continue!"

I'm still protesting.

pinback wrote:I'm still protesting.

What are you protesting? I can guess a half-dozen to a dozen things, most being seriously obscene and a few being strange.

Tdarcos wrote:

pinback wrote:I'm still protesting.

What are you protesting? I can guess a half-dozen to a dozen things, most being seriously obscene and a few being strange.

Gimme your top three and I'll pick my favorite. Then that is what I will be protesting.