A dogfight on the living room wall
Forget Top Gun. There’s a dogfight going on over my living room, and I’m ready to take my Gravol now. Since sometime yesterday, the tactical comms channel reminds me that the enemy is ready to lock on and blow me out of the sky. My gaming children are deep in the game/movie called Ace Combat 6, and I’m impressed.
I started flying a simulated Cessna back in the days of a PS/2 Model 30-286, so the idea of following a virtual tunnel is not particularly new; I just never got up to flying jets. The kids have much better hand-eye coordination with those odd-shaped controllers than we ever managed using a mouse and keyboard sequences. I’m still “hooked” on Flight Sim, although my last purchase attempt on eBay didn’t go particularly well. The dealer shipped only one of the two DVDs, so I’m grounded. Quite a data spiral from the original 1.44 diskette.
Right now, the XBox 360 and projector combo make for a very nice wall full of aerial eyecandy. I can see where games like this one grab and hold the interest, even if I’m not willing to master all those odd ABXY multiple trigger combinations. Too much information. I’ll sit back and see who wins the battle that never ends, because these games appear to be rather open-ended. And to think that we don’t even have to own shares in a jet fuel depot any more.
I’m left wondering how many geographically challenged player believe that Estovakia is a real nation. And is that Morse code I hear from time to time? Now I’m really interested!
