I can remember the same arguments about consoles having computer games in their death-throes back in the Atari 2600 and Intellivision days. It just ain't so! ColecoVision was VERY cool when it came out, but it went away. Meanwhile computers are still here.
Will the next generation of consoles be as good as computers? They will probably be about as good as a cheap computer the day the console is released. So was the ColecoVision. But then the next day a new CPU came out while the ColecoVision got older and older for two or three years. Consoles NEVER quite catch-up. You just can't get the hardware for $200, and neither can Microsoft and Nintendo. Consoles won't catch computers until they really honestly become computers themselves.
What will happen I think is that we will start to see a convergence between computers and consoles. TVs are now of a comparable resolution to computer monitors. Consoles won't defeat computers. Rather, consoles will become computers. Every time I see an X-Box I remember that it runs essentially on a stripped-down version of Windows XP. The convergence is coming. But that won't save the flight simulator because that isn't what the problem is. I'll grant you that one problem is that consoles don't come with joysticks. THAT is a problem because so many OTHER games get ported onto multiple platforms.
But even when the computer and the console merge you will have different models in different price ranges. Someone with a $2500 computer will do better than someone with a $400 computer. And the high-speed games will be made for the higher-end computers with the idea that people will catch-up. Nothing really changes. It’s a big cycle. If you hang out with computers for 20 years you see it all go full-circle again.
Just for clarification - I'm not against 'full real.' I prefer 'full real.' I can remember playing Battle of Britain (the Lucas Arts title) and figuring out that it took exactly three bullets to shoot-down a plane. Then I made a mission with as many enemy planes as possible and flew it over and over again until I could shoot down as many planes as I had bullets for at three shots each. I don't remember how many planes that was. It was something like 40. That wasn't real by ANY stretch of the imagination. Nor was the ability to instantly saddle-up out of a full break-turn.
My first flight simulator (not including the Red Baron arcade game with stick-figure planes that I sunk a fortune into) was on a Radio Shack Color Computer 2. I don't remember the name of it. It might have just been called 'Flight Simulator.' You had a list of airports on a map. You took off, flew somewhere, and landed. You needed to watch your altitude too, because there was absolutely NOTHING between airbases. You had no ground objects at all. And because everything was a stick-figure you didn't even have different colors between the sky and ground. You had the horizon and that was it. Talk about boring!! And then I lost the map!! But I flew it anyway because it was all there was.
Then I got a Color Computer 3 and a Commodore 64 and flew titles like Aces High and Microsoft Flight Simulator (remember the WWI part of that?).
Back in those days the games were entirely too easy. But somewhere along the way the computer hardware caught up and we had systems that could accurately model the physics of flight. From what I've read the AFM in RB3D was pretty darn close to the real thing, minus the ubering of course. But did we stop trying to make those physics harder? No - we overmodeled stalling and speed loss in turns. We made planes bouncy in the middle so that you couldn't keep them on target. Not only isn't that fun, but it isn't realistic either.
You know what the best flight model ever on any game was? Great War Four. Excellent job Razman! I wish I could still fly it. Too bad glide wrappers don't work well online.
I've read I don't even know how many books by and/or about people who actually flew in aerial combat. I consider what they call 'real' to be 'real.' If they say a game is too easy, I say it is too easy. If they say it is too hard, I say it is too hard. And every one of them says that modern flight simulators are harder than real life. I don't want to fly something harder than Chuck Yeager's P51. Rather I want to fly something EXACTLY LIKE Chuck Yeager's P51. I want to feel what Adolf Galland felt. I want to see what he saw and have the same understandings he had. I can't get that in a book. Books are great for story-telling but you don't get the same feel you get actually doing it. Flight simulators for me have always been a way to reach out and touch history. You can't ride the Titanic down, but you CAN hop into a 1916 Sopwith Pup and shoot down Albatross DIIIs.
What I would like to see is a movement back toward making flight sims as realistic as possible instead of just trying to make them harder. Once they were too easy. Now we've gone too far the other way. That's all I'm trying to say. I'd like to see it come back to the middle.
Now look at what I've done! I've spent all my time talking about Flight Models. Views are just as big of a problem. TrackIR helps, but it still isn't where we need to be. What ever happened to headsets that panned your view as you turn your head? They came out with the headsets, but nobody supported them in games. I can't believe the hardware can't support it. I'd give up a few hexagons for a view system like that. Imagine looking over your wing by moving your head around the wing and looking down!! Now THAT is realistic! Until that type of system is commercially available though we are stuck with bad view systems and will have to make trade-offs between not being able to find anything (and not knowing whether or not it is a foe until you bump into it) and having radar in 1916. Neither is perfect. But I can tell you with absolute certainty which is harder.
