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Airport 2000 Volume 2
By Bob "Groucho" MarksFly the Fuzzy Skies
One of the worst- the awful Wilco 737 panel.
Airport 2000 adds to the front-office misery by making you use FS98 legacy "photo real" cockpits in these adventures. Photo real is one of those sim buzz phrases that makes my skin crawl. Sort of like "digital satellite terrain" and "wide appeal flight modeling". They look just like that: a picture was taken of a cockpit, colorized with PhotoShop, and populated with a weird and very unsatisfying mix of FS98 and FS2K instrumentation. Labels are hard to read too.
The left side of your co-pilot’s head. At least I think it is
Any interior view you may want is rendered, as long as that view is only 12 o’clock. All other vistas are absent, with the exception of the decidedly creepy-looking left side of the co-pilot’s head at your three o-clock. Eeew.
The Wilco panel. You paid for this dated mess too
Nikolay Poriazov’s freeware panel. Everything works as it should
As a whole, the pits included with the airplanes in AP2K are horrible-looking affairs that any self-respecting freeware panel developer would be ashamed to post for downloading. I suggest that Wilco go out and hire any self-respecting freeware panel developer before foisting Volume 3 on the public. Sure, they offer such amenities as critical airspeed callouts and flight control confirmations, but there are dozens of far superior panels out there that do the same thing, and for free.
The Wilco attempt at a King Air. Please.
MS FS2K Pro King Air. Nice.
The various aircraft include the Airbus A320, MD-83, Raytheon King Air 350, Boeing 737 and 767, and BAe 146, and are a mixed bag externally. While looking like the holdovers from FS98-era graphics that they are, most are adequate. The MD-83 looks pretty ratty, however. And once again, my central theme keeps repeating in my head: you can download MUCH prettier aircraft off the web for free. Hell, the King Air that Microsoft included in the MS2K Pro Edition is far nicer visually that the AP2K version. In the case of the AP2K King Air, you can see the lights through the nacelles at night! Maybe I'm nitpicking now, but it is still inexcusably sloppy. My God, you are paying for this!
