A-10 Cuba!

After an inital amount of heartache lasting about a month, I finally got A-10 Cuba installed on my hard drive properly. You see, the game required a patch before even being installed/, and I failed to notice part of the patch after I unzipped it. It was a small file intended to edit my registry files, and not running it makes your joystick incompatable with the game. In other words, my first impressions of the game were abismal at best.

After installation was through, I settled down to play what I would consider THE most realistic combat flight sim out. SU-27 was very good, but A-10 Cuba! takes the trophy away hands down.

First of all, the game is polygon based, which immediately led to an increased frame rate. There are multiple options for graphics settings, and even with everything maxed out the frame rate was silky smooth.

The flight engine is superb. Flaps have multiple settings, at 0 degrees through 30 degrees deployed with increments every ten degrees. The landing gear takes a few moments to deploy, and a symbol tells you if the gear is in, out, or in between.

If you get a little frisky with the joystick on takeoff or landing and manage to scrape a wing along the ground, the tip of the wing will rip off as your plane is suddenly skewed to the side. Once, for an experiment, I rocked the plane back and forth during a high speed taxi down the runway. First, the plane took it, but then suddenly the plane started skidding along the runway at an angle. I went to an external view, and was astounded to see that my right main gear had collapsed beneath th plane and was crumpled up. I forged on to see if I could wreck any more of the gear. Within seconds of the same ill treatment to the plane the other two wheels had collapsed under the plane, and I laid immobile on the runway.

Another example of the realism was when I once was making a strafing run against a column of tanks. I pulled up a second too late, and ended up hitting my left wing and underbelly along the ground. I spun around, lost control, and skidded along the ground. I immediately went to the external view, and watched as my heavy plane slid sideways a way up a small hill. After it stopped, the plane slid back down and came to a rest at the foot of the hill.

"Hmm", I said to myself. Sitting immobile in a crashed plane in front of a column of tanks I had just been strafing didn't sound like the safest place to be. Suddenly I realised something. Every weapon that I had asked for during the initial setup of my plane was on my plane. With a bright idea, I selected my sidewinders and fired. I watched as a sidewinder slid off of its rail and dug straight into the hill a yard from my wing. In the small explosion of the missile my already damaged plane blew up spectacularly.

In a final hats off to the flight engine, I have one last example. If you really max out the plane in terms of speed the nose will start to rise, forcing you attempt to keep it level. Why? The wings were built (in real life) with a certain amount of lift in mind for a certain speed range. If you exceed that speed range, the wings provide more and more lift, until finally the plane starts to become difficult to control. You don't see that one in ATF or USNF 97!

I have a two unfortunate things to report about this otherwise awesome flight sim. The first is that there is no mission editor. There is no way to extend the life of the game beyond the initial missions. The second shortfall is in the missions themselves. There are only 4 training missions, and 12 real missions. As a result, the replay value of this game quickly falls to the floor, never to get up again. The one redeeming feature of these missions is that they are SO hard. I have beaten the first of the progressively difficult set of 12 missions, but cannot even beat mission 2 (mind you, you can chose to play any mission at any time, you do not need to play them in order).