A Fleet of Flight Simulators to Give Wings to the Imagination

If you’re tired of the wet weather washing out your plans, take flight in your living room. Computer flight simulations let you fly a small seaplane in San Francisco, an F-51 Mustang in Korea or an F-22 fighter jet in Bosnia. Or for an even more futuristic ride, you can kick the tires on an experimental U.S. fighter or take a joy ride on a spaceship.

With flight sims, the sky is not the limit, as more space shooting games come out, combining sci-fi adventure and interplanetary flight. One of the more fantastic titles is Wing Commander: Prophecy (Origin/EA; $55), the fifth in the series, with a plot that borders on “Star Trek” rip-off. You fly as Lt. Lance Casey, a young Luke Skywalker type, who is helping the Confederation battle a strange alien race. The flying missions are interspersed with well-acted (though sometimes overly long) movie scenes, setting the stage for each flight and letting you know whom to trust (your pal Zero) and whom to avoid (the brooding Blair).

The ship’s cockpit is simple and sleek, and the in-flight graphics are impressive, especially if you have a 3-D card. Stars twinkle, afterburners flare, and the base ships look stunning when you fly by. Sometimes you get the chills, feeling like you’ve really been dropped into a science-fiction flick. The only problem is that you can’t save the game mid-flight, meaning you often have to play the same sequences over and over.

Also verging on fantasy is Joint Strike Fighter (Eidos; $50), a flight sim based on a U.S. military jet that isn’t due into service until 2008! The JSF is supposed to have multiple capabilities, including longer range, stealth and adept air-to-air or air-to-ground combat. It’s difficult to judge the game on realism, but flying the experimental craft is a hoot. Dogfight mode lets you jump into the action quickly, and the controls are complex but easy to master.

Most of the flight sim hype has surrounded F-22 simulations based on the latest Lockheed Martin jet, which is still being tested. You can choose from three decent games: iF-22 (Interactive Magic; $50), F-22 Raptor (NovaLogic; $45) and F-22 Air Dominance Fighter (DID; $50). iF-22 was a bit flaky on my computer, causing it to crash often, but it offers dynamic campaigns that give you new variables each mission. F-22 Air Dominance has the best-looking graphics but can be difficult to learn. And F-22 Raptor is the most simple, and lets you speed up game-play during lulls in missions.

Sabre Ace (Virgin; $30) also will give you simplistic game-play, but in a Korean War setting of the ‘50s. The terrain looks less impressive than the other sims’, and the responsiveness doesn’t feel as quick. But training missions can help you grasp the basics in a hurry.

And if fantasy isn’t your bag, you can fly small civilian craft around the San Francisco Bay Area in Flight Unlimited II (Eidos; $50). No shooting or bombing or hyperspace--just a happy-go-lucky flight with great textural detail and realistic radio signals from area airports. You can buzz the Transamerica building with a Piper or zoom under the Golden Gate Bridge in a De Havilland Beaver Seaplane. And if you’ve just got to have more rain, you can fly through a thunderstorm, with lightning crashing and water streaking your windshield in all-too-real effects.

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Mark Glaser is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and critic. You can reach him at glaze@sprintmail.com