Tag Archives: civil aviation

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Flight Simulator II

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Flight Simulator II from subLOGIC was an important piece of software for our family. Not only was it a “game” that my father enjoyed (though he continues to insist to this day that it is “not a game”) but it also directly or indirectly kickstarted the writing careers of three Davisons.

Yes, indeed, after my Dad had his enthusiastic praise of both the Atari 8-bit and ST versions of Flight Simulator II published in the UK’s Page 6 magazine, both my brother and, much later, I started contributing articles to the publication. My brother is, at the time of writing, a person of considerable importance over at IGN and I, well, I get paid to write about cute anime girls. And we can trace all that back to Flight Simulator II!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Essentials, N64

N64 Essentials: Pilotwings 64

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I grew up with flight simulators, primarily due to my father being both a proper propellerhead and a writer for a computing magazine — in other words, we got a lot of review copies of such games.

One thing that struck me about the genre was that it was rather rare to see games based around just flying; instead, prolific developers such as MicroProse tended to emphasise the military angle, simulating exciting aircraft such as the F-16 “Fighting Falcon”, the F-15 “Strike Eagle” and the somewhat-less-exciting-but-appeared-in-a-movie A-6 Intruder.

There was Microsoft Flight Simulator, of course — or subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator as it was known in the early days — but that was slow-paced, rather complicated and, according to my father “not a game”. Clearly there was room for something in between the two extremes.

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