Flight Stunts 1.0 iPhone iPod Touch | 19,6 MB
Though the iPhone and iPod touch have been graced with a spectacular flight simulator in the form of X-Plane 9, “fun” flying games have been comparatively few and far between on this platform. This week saw the release of two separate titles that aim not for realism but rather to let players enjoy flying under different conditions: the first, in commercial and military airplanes, and the second, in military helicopters.Makayama Media is the airplane version, giving you the ability to fly a Boeing 747, an Airbus A319, a Hercules C130 and a Lockheed-Martin F-16. Makayama’s formula is to drop you into a vehicle in the middle of an urban environment, give you an altimeter and speedometer, and tell you to achieve certain objectives: for instance, level one has you fly a plane under the Golden Gate Bridge, past Alcatraz such that your wing tip touches a lighthouse, and then to a landing at the San Francisco Airport.
Level two has you fly a different plane through a hanger at JFK Airport, around a control tower, and then onto a landing field. Though the art isn’t stunning, thanks to so-so textures and a lot of obviously flat background art in each level, the developer has represented major objects with 3-D polygons and does a decent job of creating interesting environments. There are five levels with 20 total missions.We’d like to be able to tell you about more of the levels, but unfortunately, Flight Stunts has some serious issues that prevented us from doing so. First, there were the instability problems: we experienced graphics glitches and crashes that stopped us at the beginning, and later at the end of level two, such that the “ground” level wasn’t being properly shown when we tried to make a landing. We merged into the ground rather than landing properly, then fell through it, at which point the game declared that we’d crashed. We were brought back to the preceding level to do it over again, without the ability to resume from where we’d left off.
A similar sloppiness pervades the entire title, some of which the developer tries to explain away as for the sake of fun—and we understand that—but some is obviously just incomplete development. For instance, landing your plane is as simple as getting it to a certain point on the map, coming close to the ground, and bringing your speed down below 100MPH, which is fine. But if you miss the landing, you may still be on the ground; just hit the speed up button and your plane is right back in the air, flying normally again. It never really lands, and never really takes off; similarly, a sluggish frame rate and too little in the way of special effects make you feel less like you’re really flying, and more like you’re just moving around a map. Nintendo did a more compelling job with fun plane action 19 years ago with Pilotwings, and iPhone developers would be well-served to revisit that game to see what made it so great.
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