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Airport 2000 Volume 2
by Bob "Groucho" MarksIt’s well-known that MSFS2K is a heavily burdened victim of legacy bloat. There are a couple of upstart civsims out there---Fly! and Flight Unlimited III, for example---that simply smoke Microsoft’s simulator cash cow when it comes to immersion and code efficiency. There are many areas where FS2K is in dire need of help; the lack of a dynamic environment chief among them. Companies like Wilco and Abacus have based most of their business on creating add-ons for Microsoft’s Flight Sim series.
This is somewhat of a mystery market to a simple man like yours truly. The best point of FS2K is its open code base structure. New aircraft, panels, canned adventures, and scenery are openly encouraged. Plenty of people have risen to the challenge by creating some beautiful work for gratis, nada, nothing, without recompense. That’s right, for free. It’s all out there on the Internet free for the downloading. Personally, my favorite site for civsim add-ons is http://www.flightsim.com, but there are a few others out there.
So, what do you get when you cough up $40.00(USD) for a professionally produced program like Wilco’s Airport 2000 Vol. 2? Greater realism? Gorgeous vistas? A razor-sharp code that yields all of these immersive pluses with nary a single frame-per-second loss?
Nope. What you really get are some attractive yet insubstantial airports, coupled with some bland and broken ‘adventures’ and aircraft left over from FS98. In other words, you get an installer. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. If you are 100% incompetent when it comes to basic Windows 98/ME skills Airport 2000 rocks. Most sim fans, however, understand the basics of directories and ZIP file downloading and extracting, so AP2K is almost immediately redundant. All right, I’ll admit that the manual is pretty nice.
Boston’s Logan International
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