Learn to Fly

Flight has always fascinated man. The freedom of soaring in the air is exhilarating. The College of Gaming now offers flight school and aerospace physics with it's flight sim course offerings. No longer will you fear the skies as you strap yourself in a cockpit of an F-18 Hornet. Look for this course soon over at the College of Gaming!

Flight sims are probably the game I want to play the most yet I am so frustrated in trying to learn everything. I remember trying out the Top Gun game over at the NES when I was a kid. It wasn't much of a game as it felt like a cutscene. My plane would fly though I had control over it. My plane would get shot in around a minute of playtime. I would repeat this scene for about 10 more times before I just popped in Mario instead.

Fast forward to when I got a little older...around 5th grade. We now had a PC and I think we had a this game, Fleet Defender - another flight sim where you pilot a F-14 Tomcat. Though I'll admit I'm not so sure if this was the game as I just checked the screenshots now and it looked somewhat like what I played more than a decade ago. The thing about this plane is that there are 2 pilots, so you could always hit the autopilot and let your co-pilot do the annoying stuff of take off and landings while you maneuvered the plane and shoot missiles. I never really learned how to land the plane though I did manage to lean how to do a takeoff. The first few missions are a tutorial and if you fail the tutorial you won't even go to the real combat missions. Talk about realistic...

Enter 2009 when I got IL-2 Sturmovik. This is an old game but it did come with a weekend sale pack on Steam several months ago. So the first problem is again I have no manual and the tutorial is not only boring it is complicated as hell. My first experience is strapping in my plane and feeling dizzy with all the dials, counters, meters and flashing lights. My first problem was to start the damn plane. So I managed to find the start switch which made the propellers turn. However it then took me several minutes to learn that I had to actually increase the power of the propellers to actually have it move forward. So I made the rotors go 100% my plane speeding on the runway. I pull the stick back to let my plane fly only to find out I pulled to hard and my tail hits the ground causing my plane to flip and crash killing me even before I actually left the ground. I tried several times to at least learn to take off which just ended in terrible takeoff "accidents". If I were in the Red Army and managed to survive my initial crash, I bet some Commissar would shoot my head just as an example for other pilots. The moral lesson to this story is to always read manuals for really complicated games.

I managed to grab the manual over at replacementdocs.com and my jaw dropped when I looked inside. It was like a pilots manual about how to fly the plane and how a plane aerodynamically moves. The manual looks just as complex as my Organic Chemistry class in college.

Why are flight sims so damn difficult? Couldn't they have placed some sort of good tutorial to learn the damn basics? No wonder there are almost no flight sims out nowadays.