Falcon 4.0 ~ Updated~ (Falcon 4.0 (PC))

Member Name: philmar

Product:	Falcon 4.0 (PC)
Date:	25/09/00 (505 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Awesome gameplay and graphics with continual development

Disadvantages: Incredibly buggy

Flying seems to have fascinated man for ever, which I suspect is why flight simulators have been popular on computers ever since they have been capable of displaying the graphics. Only a very few actually get to experience controlling an aircraft and so the simulator has to be the next best thing.

There are some people out there (me included) who think that Falcon 4.0 from Microprose is at the top of the current offerings. It does have it's good and bad sides though, when it's good it is fantastic however it's bad side is very very bad. The fact is Microprose and Hasbro released a very unfinished and buggy product which has a tendency to crash a lot and needs quite a high performance machine to run, this heinous crime was compounded by them dropping support after a couple of patches which don't fix all the problems. This needless to say has angered a lot of people. So how can I possibly say that Falcon 4.0 is the best of the current flight simulators? Well With a good spec machine and the patches the game runs smoothly, apart from that the graphics are awesome and the realism second to none. You are flying F16's in South Korea while North Korea launches an attack. You have the usual options of training missions, single combat missions and 3 full blown campaigns. The graphics really do make the game, others have control realism in abundance, just the views from the aircraft combined with the control realism in Falcon make it an incredible game.

The point it really hit me as to how superb a game this is, was when I was flying a mission to attack armour which was attacking into South Korea. Looking around the virtual cockpit while heading for my first waypoint I could see the whole virtual world operating around me, off in the distance were South Korean aircraft attacking other formations, getting obscured by smoke from burning vehicles and buildings and being lit by explosions from the ongoing battle. The Falcon 4.0 game world c
ontinues in real-time around you, so the campaigns don't solely depend on your actions, whole other battles are taking place right along the front line. Thousands of units moving, fighting and dying independently.

Falcon 4.0, however incredible, is not for the feint hearted. The manual, which comes with it, is over hundred pages. All of which is in English, none of this multi language malarkey. The manual doesn't just tell you how to fly the game; it also goes into great detail over the real world theory describing flight envelopes, manoeuvres and allsorts. Just about every key on the keyboard has a function; some of them have more than one function with various combinations of the ctrl, alt and shift keys.

What Microprose could never have foreseen and what makes Falcon so great now is that when support was ended for the product a disgruntled programmer released the source code on the Internet, effectively making it open source. So at this very minute some very talented people are developing Falcon way beyond it's final release. Bugs are being fixed, graphics improved and whole new theatres developed including the Falklands, Balkans and middle east. For the first time a flight simulator is being developed to the users needs by the users. If you have Falcon and didn't know any of this take a look at:

http://f4c.krawall.de/page.php?SEITE=links.php

They are even developing the program so that you can fly other aircraft!

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