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Crimson Skies
by Jim "Twitch" Tittle

Yeee Haaaw! It’s Burt Rutan’s innovative designs . . .with guns! That is Crimson Skies in capsule, but there is much more to this fun simulation. That’s fun with a capital “F” too.

The P-61's counterpart

Being a hardcore flight sim addict with WWII as my favorite era, I DO get weary of the rhetoric with all our discussions of what is “real” and all the hacks to make things better. Well, forget “real” for a while and loosen up. Indulge yourself in pure fancy.

The scenario is late 1930’s in a type of confederated Un-united States. Air pirates roam the skies searching for booty but must contend with other pirates and establishment-types. You are stationed aboard an airship with a hangar deck and fly with a group of pirates through some 25 missions. The missions take place all over the country and test not only your shooting talents but also, at times, your stunt flying skills.

For example, you may have to rescue a damsel in distress by flying low over a moving train; or, you may be required to fly through a hanger and bail out to steal an enemy prototype. There is treasure to salvage and airships to destroy---personally speaking, I’ve been itching to bust a blimp since Red Baron.

You fight Russian, British and American air warriors. Your antagonists have perfect geographic accents as they taunt and cajole you over the radio during the no-holds-barred air brawls. Yes, the Americans have New York and Southern accents too! I wish historical flight sims had that!

Installing the huge 800 MB program is easy and straight-forward: all the usual preference adjustments can be made to key commands, joystick buttons, screen resolution, and sound. You can use high graphics detail and not see stuttered visual performance even on an older machine. I run a 32MB graphics card so I’m sure that helps.

Mission loading times are not too excessive considering all the texture data involved. Once loaded, not only is the terrain beautiful, but the planes are too. It should run on as low as a 300 MhZ machine with a good video card. I set some detail to medium with no appreciable visual degradation. It doesn’t ruin the graphics to gain some frame rate.

Briefing map

There are many instant missions that can be infinitely customized. Once you build a plane you can use it both in the campaign mode and the instant mission mode so the variations are almost endless.

The scenery is rich and varied. You can fly from Hawaii to Manhattan with all the correct geographical details and buildings. Again, if a fantasy sim can do it, historical sim makers can too. Clouds are well done and haze layers are realistically rendered as well. There are even night missions that we historical simmers love also.

 

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