psykosis_fc's Full Review: Crimson Skies for Windows
***UPDATE***
After getting fed up with the gui memory leak and other in-game performance issues, I decided to play with my swap file settings. The game requires a minimum of 250Mb's worth of swapfile which I had when I got the game. Zipper highly recommends letting Windows manage the swapfile, but history and experience with the Win9x architecture has shown me that a dynamic swap file presents a big performance hit. I had been running with a Windoze managed swap file when I wrote this review. Today, I disabled the swap file, defraged that hard drive (again) and re-enabled a 300Mb fixed swap file--what a difference! The game not only loads faster, but the menues are actually useable--for a time. There is still an aweful memory leak in the game itself, and I still have to restart the game every 5 missions or so. The performance difference is so dramatic that I almost gave another star to the review, but the fact that it *still* has a memory leak and other performance issues keeps me from raising my rating. I'll hopefully get to change my mind when a good patch is released.
****
Well, after reading the epinions posted and actually looking forward to this title's release since it was announced, I finally picked this title up last week to check it out. And I wanted to write an epinion for Allkaiser, since the game totally honked on hic compo. So. What do I think after playing for about 15 hours and finishing the single player?
Two words come to mind; mixed emotions. Kinda like watching your mother-in-law driving off a cliff in your new Porsche... Depending on the in-law, it could be a fiar trade, and in the case of Crimson Skies the good barely outweighs the bad.
The good: I didn't know this before buying the game, but a websearch for fansites looking for patches, performance tips and general info turned up alot of websites and no less than 3 webrings. I knew the game was okay, but this many unofficial websites within weeks of the game hitting the shelves was kindof unusual (for CS, it's unusual. For a game like Halo, it's expected). Turns out that CS was a pen and pencil game, not too unlike the old AutoDuel or BattleTech (now, if only someone would make a computer game out of Ogre...)--Cool! No wonder the backstory and characters are above average, Zipper didn't have to do a whole lotta work to come up with it. The voiceacting was well above average, but quite cheezy in an over the top kinda way. I'm hoping that's what the developers were hoping for. I agree with another reviewer, the lead does sound like TheTick, but the Tick means to, not sure that Nathan Zachary does. Sound is actually pretty darn good as a whole, with positional audio on a surround setup providing good feedback to where stuff is around you. Missions are for the most part, well done and paced, getting progressively more challenging as missions go on. My gripe with the missions was that there is no real way to tell what kind of plane you'll need before the mission. Alot of the missions that require stunt flying have hazards that are so narrow, a few planes can't navigate them. Good news is that if you fail a mission enough times, there's the option of skipping the mission and moving on in the storyline--nice if you want to shoot more baddies down, but hate the difficult stunt flying stuff. If you skip a mission that pays money, you won't get anything though. Good thing repairs and armaments are free; the only thing you really need money for is for custom planes.
One of the cooler things in the game are the cutscenes which are presented as 30's-ish news reels, complete with cheezy announcer voice. They are retouched rendered scenes with film scratches, grains and flashes that speak volumes for technology behind the film plugin for Photoshop--it really looks pretty authentic in a couple of shots. Not bad at all, and does alot to lend itself to the theme of the game as a whole.
Graphics are okay, but nothing spectacular with the exception of the fogging. There are a couple of missions in an area Called SkyHaven that have really good fog and cloud effects with mountain peaks that poke up above the cloud layer and fog shrouding some low-lying canyons making for very hairy dogfights if you choose to lead your attackers to these places--nothings more amuzing than to watch the AI pilots try to follow you into an area regardless of how impossible the manuever for them and then watch them bounce aimlessly off of hard objects and explode. Almost as much fun as stuffing a car into roadside obstacles in Need For Speed:Porsche2000 and then watching them flip and bounce in the rear view mirror. Then again, I'm pretty sadistic, so I guess that's not a surprise. I can think of several combat sims that could definitely use volumetric clouds to seriously enhance gameplay. Airplane models are surprisingly original and thankfully look nothing like "normal" aircraft, and all have a decent balance of strengths and weaknesses. I experienced no graphical glitches whatsoever (having performed my sacrifice to the DirectX gods this week), but I did experience several performance issues. Which brings me to the bad...
The Bad: The most standout issue I've got with this game is performance. The full install of the game takes a whopping 850Mb of space. The swap file for the game takes a whopping 250Mb. Any game that takes over a gig of hard drive space better haul azz. I originally couldn't get the game to launch, since my swap file was fixed at 200Mb. I disabled the swap file, defraged the hard drive and set the swap file back to letting WinME manage it. You'd think that a machine that's running at close to 1200Mhz with 256Mb of PC150 RAM and an UltraATA100 drive wouldn't have too much trouble with the game. Not. The hard drive CONSTANTLY thrashes, swapping even drop down text to and from it's swap file. Why in god's sake did these programmers choose to use a fixed 250Mb swap file even though I've got enough RAM to just about eliminate the need for a swap file altogether? Windows is the same way (gotta love MS). Also, the more missions you fly, the choppier things get. If you fail a mission and return to your cabin to build a new plane, then the game comes to a crawl. Even the cutscenes will drag along like the film they look like was running through a projector slowly. I learned to quit the game, restart the machine and get back to it than to struggle. The game also thrashes the hard drive for about 3 full minutes when it's closed, presumably cleaning up the 250Mb's worth of temp files it uses. Arg. Sloppy, sloppy programming....
Another of my gripes is actually gameplay related. While you can buy customized planes (and this feature is pretty cool, but it's ofset by the annoying wait 'till the info in the dropdown menues are swapped to disk), there is no way to customize the planes you already have. While some of the plane designs boast as many as 8 forward firing guns ranging from 30cal to 70cal, there is no way to fire them all at once, for all intents and purposes making them additional ammo storage. I was really wishing for a way to remove some of the guns on these planes and adding either a larger engine, more armor or more hard points, but alas the only way to do this is by building a whole new plane and you can't sell the planes that you pirate, win or steal in the game.
I'm not sure how many people were responsible for programming this game, but it's a prime example of sloppy, lazy and amateurish programming that has become an industry standard. I worked for Psygnosis for a while (hence the source of my handle), so I sincerely appreciate and understand the work that goes into making a title like this. But, I can remember when a game with a simular style of gameplay as much depth played on an Amiga with 16Mb of RAM with nary a slowdown and took up less than 5Mb of space on the HDD with no swapping (Rocketeer, 1987). That's when programmers HAD to be elegent and efficient coders. Their project timelines were no different, why has programming gotten so sloppy? Are our computers too fast that programmers can afford to waste this power? But I digress...
I'm sure the multiplayer in this game is fun as h3ll, but I'm on a 56k dialup and frankly didn't want to expose myself to the pain that is online gaming through an analog connection. The ability to build your own plane and shoot geeks down is at least as cool as building your own mech in MW3 or building your own car in i76 and blasting the poop outta peeps online. What would've been even cooler is a class system, whereby the plane you flew was classified according to cost.... Maybe an idea for league play? Hhhmmm.
Bottom Line: If you've read the CS website, these reviews, the back of the box and a magazine article or two and are still interested....go buy it. It's really a fun game. The dogfighting isn't a whole lot different than Freespace or WingCommander. Although the planes do stall and using the rudders helps *alot* in dogfighting, the flight model is still far from a flight sim. I think Zipper did a good job at making the flight model fun to fly, yet still retaining some semblance of an airplane feel. Sounds like if you are using anything but a 3dFX-based vid card, you might have video problems as well, but those problems could be driver based. You'll also have annoying performance issues that probably won't go away until there is a good patch released if at all. All and all though, the game *is* worthwhile, and there's nothing in recent memory other than Interstate 76 that comes close to delivering a simular gameplay experience.
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