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| | Publisher: MacSoft  Genre: Flight Sim | | Mac OS X: Not Supported Mac OS Classic: System 7.5
CPU: 603e @ 200 MHz RAM: 32 MB 4x CD-ROM |
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Falcon 4.0 is a flawed product. There is no escaping that. A brilliant F-16 fighter simulation that looks stunning and brings flight simulators to a whole new level of complexity and realism, Falcon 4.0 is ahead of its time in ways both good and bad.The good? Near-photorealistic graphics. Artificial intelligence for both wingmen and enemies that actually works. A variety of arenas to build and test your skills, including instant action air and ground battles, dogfights against network or computer opponents, 31 training missions and an impressive campaign mode that drops you in the middle of a huge conflict in the Korean peninsula. The bad news? Few machines have the horsepower to do this game justice. Campaign mode is extremely taxing, even on the fastest systems available. The newsgroups are full of horror stories from people with new blue and white G3s dealing with 3-5 fps speeds in campaign mode. Luckily, that occurs only when there's a lot of activity around you -- tank battles below and air battles above. For much of the time, even my G3/233 performs more than adequately. Unfortunately, it's usually those times when you're surrounded by activity that you really, really need a responsive aircraft. It's not just framerates that suffer from Falcon's demands. Loading missions will tax your patience, though the graphic showing your progression from briefing to preflight to the taxiway helps keep your mind off the long load time. Memory helps -- lots of memory. Falcon seems to work best with at least 100 megs allocated to it. The specs call for a minimum of 32 megs of RAM, but that's a joke. Even the 64 meg recommended would hardly do it. With 128 megs, I can give Falcon the 100 megs it wants on top of what the system takes up. For decent performance, that's probably the minimum.  |
But not only are today's computers not quite prepared for Falcon, Falcon wasn't exactly ready to be shipped. No one can blame Westlake Interactive, the company that ported Falcon 4.0 for MacSoft. Westlake has been characteristically responsive. The game has only been out a short time, and Westlake has already put out two updates, 1.06b and 1.06c.You really have to feel for early buyers on the PC side. Version 1.06 had a nearly fatal number of bugs. It's difficult to imagine what version 1.0 looked like. A much-anticipated version 1.07 is due soon on the PC side, which should fix many of the outstanding problems. Look for Westlake to have Macs up to speed shortly after the fix is out. What kind of bugs are we talking about? Well, if you breath funny, you risk a crash (1.06b and c resolved many of these crashes, but force-quits are still far too common). Flying an unpatched version, you explode on takeoff in the training missions. My favorite bug at this point though -- favorite because it is so awful, but somehow amusing -- is the "Archer, inbound!" your wingman screams at you, immediately after a heatseeking missile slams into your jet.
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