I started off my last review with a one-line summary that captured
the entire flavor of the game quickly for those with short attention
spans. I liked that approach so much, I'm going to try it again.
Hmmm. How about: Crimson Skies - A rousing, swashbuckler
adventure and an enormous, bug-ridden pain in the ass! With
lines like that one, I can't understand why game companies don't
hire me to write their box text.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear (with much waddling of
jowls), I am not a big aircraft buff, either of near WWII - the era of
Crimson Skies - or any other era. I played Aces of the Pacific
about 8 years ago, then moved on to Wing Commander. As a
whole, I found that I liked having shields more than not, and I've
never looked back since. A friend of mine was once trying to sell
me on the beauty of the Aces flight model. "See? See? The Zero
is more maneuverable, but the Corsair is faster and has a lower
stall speed." Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe
I've gotten it completely wrong; I wasn't listening. I was watching
Monty Python - he had an incredibly complete Monty Python
videotape collection. My point is that I'm likely to write things
some of you (meaning dweebs and shut-ins) will find stupid
(meaning historically inaccurate). In my defense, I can only quote
William Shatner, "You want some dope airfare or a fly rental car?
Then you know what to do, dog!" No, no, not that William Shatner
quote - the other one, "Get a life. Move out of your parents'
basement." Fortunately for me, Crimson Skies is not supposed to
be a historically accurate combat flight simulator. It's more of an
action/arcade/adventure kind of thing that has thrown most of the
real physics of flying out the window. Airplane designs that have
never seen the light of day populate these skies, including dual
fuselage, push-driven biplanes with counter-rotating propellers,
and zeppelins that behave more like aircraft carriers. I could be
wrong; maybe somebody somewhere did build such planes.
Dweebs, shut-ins, any comments?
Transport yourself back to 1937. No, not our 1937, stupid - some
other 1937. A 1937 in which the great depression has torn the USA
into fragmented city-states, fracturing the transcontinental railroad
that was the backbone of commerce and trade across the US. Sort
of a post-apocalyptic US, only sans the apocalypse. Without
railroads to move goods around, another method of conveyance
had to be found. Fortunately, the National Football League was
still many years off, so the blimps were available. Well-born the
era of the zeppelin, despite the existence of both trucks and ships
that you frequently see during the missions, and with them
naturally came air pirates to hijack them. That's you, Nathan
Zachary, leader of a group of a group of air pirates known as the
Fortune Hunters, roguishly handsome, devil-may-care,
pencil-moustached, baggy flying breeches and long, silk flying
ascot, terror of the skies, secret affection of the ladies, daredevil,
and soldier-of-fortune. Oh wait, that's my resume.
Your mission (actually missions, about 25 of them) is to dogfight,
bomb, recon, dogfight, defend, dogfight, hijack, and dogfight your
way across these unfriendly skies (awww, I was hoping I wasn't
going to use that one). These missions sometimes change in flight
through scripted events, and that's where I ran into the first
problem. Well, actually that's where I ran into the second
problem, but the first problem is so big I figure I'll leave it to it's
own paragraph a little later in the review. This problem is that the
scripted events are scripted to run in a certain order, but you can
do stuff in a different order. While this doesn't cause the game to
crash or make the mission unsolvable or anything, the comments
your copilots and enemies toss in become confused. For example,
in the very first mission an enemy blimp appears, and just for the
hell of it I let a couple of rockets fly at what I believed to be the
control room (the little room that hangs under a blimp - I'm pretty
sure it has some technical name, but I can't think of it at the
moment). The blimp explodes, and my wingman (wingwoman)
says "Look at it burn!" or something like that, but then makes a
suggestion about aiming for the fuel tanks underneath it. This sort
of thing happened in lots of missions, owing the large number of
scripted events that take place. As an interesting aside, and
harking back to games even older than Wing Commander, you
have no control over your wingmen at all. Their AI is OK, nothing
dramatically special, as is the AI of the enemy, but if you come to
some scripted event, like a dogfight between you and some ace,
even if your wingmen aren't doing anything, they won't help.
They're just off circling somewhere waiting for the next plot event
that they are supposed to participate in. I'm out of ammo, half in
flames, the whole mission is in jeopardy - but they just don't care,
and you can't tell them to. I'm uncertain if the game designers
made them that way to build in some of the more dramatic script
events, or if they were simply too lazy to put a wingman
communication and control system in.
But before you get to play the game at all, you've got to get to the
first mission, and that's where I ran into the first problem. The
level load times on this game are the longest I've seen since the
first, unpatched version of Sin. And once you're in the game,
hitting escape to return to the configuration menu to change the
control configuration or graphics takes a load time that is almost
as long. The menu response is sluggish while you're there, and
then leaving the menu to return to the game is a lengthy wait.
This problem will probably ultimately be solved with a patch. How
often have we heard that in the past? But as it stands, the game is
only marginally playable on my machine depending on my
patience level, and from the buzz on various newsgroups, I'm one
of the "lucky" ones. Apparently all these long load times are
indicative of some memory leak, and for many the game locks up
entirely. It didn't happen to me, but lots of people have reported
it. I have had the game drop me into the windows blue screen of
death several times without apparent cause forcing me to reboot
the machine. There was also apparently a problem with single
player campaign saves being overwritten by single player instant
action and multiplayer games, but a patch now addresses that
issue. Clearly a game that snuck out of the beta lab just a wee tad
early.
As far as eye candy goes, Crimson Skies scores very well. The
airplane models are well drawn. Smoke, fire, explosions, tracers,
glare, sun, water, trees, buildings - they all look great! The cost of
this is more horsepower than I've apparently got (P3-500 with a
Diamond Viper 770 Ultra). With all detail levels set to high, frame
rates would drop to the visual equivalent of a flip card movie when
there were lots of things going on. Voice acting is much better
than usual, with dialog often spoken with the correct amount of
emotion and emphasis. The dialog during the mission layout,
which is performed while looking at a map and photographs of
your objectives, are especially well done, making you feel like
you're listening to a group of buccaneers planning their next
escapade. Jaunty music accompanies all. Both your wingmen
and the enemies make inane comments throughout the dogfights
that become repetitive very quickly, but I can't think of a single
game of this type for which that wasn't the case. It goes almost
without saying that when the graphics went to hell, the sound
stuttered badly. Sometimes the sounds stuttered all on their own;
given that it was accompanied by tons of hard drive activity, I
suspect it's related to the memory leak.
The huge number of fatal and annoying bugs is unfortunate,
because Crimson Skies would be a very good game without them,
and maybe a few patches down the road will be. With a little
more patience in beta testing, it could have come out a winner.
As it stands, I think word of mouth will hold it on store shelves
while patching issues are worked out, and the next hot game to
come along will keep it there.
By: 
