Flight Control HD

T

Tzzird

Supreme [H]ardness
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May 9, 2006
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Did anyone pick this game up for $1.70 during the Steam sale? I'm having such a blast with this game (11 hours this week) that I want to see if others are playing it too. I would have gladly paid the full $5 for it if someone recommended it to me before the sale. After the time I've spent with this game this week, I'm surprised that there is no thread in the gaming section about this game. This game was also just released on the PSN, so I don't feel bad putting this thread in general gaming.

Apparently, the flight control concept has been popular on touchscreen phones for a while now. But since I didn't get my Android until last month, which is my first touchscreen phone, I didn't even know the concept of this game even existed. Here's a review if anyone is curious: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/flight-control-hd

The gist of the game is using your mouse to draw a trail from a plane that comes from off screen towards an appropriate color-coded runway. Some plane colors have two different types of planes that will move at different velocities. Typically, the bigger planes move faster than the slower ones.

The game moves in real time. So as you're drawing the trail from your plane to the runway, it is actively following the path that you've drawn. If you mess up, simply redraw a line and it will erase the old path. The game starts you off with 3 or 4 planes (and helicopters). But as you land more and more planes, the number of planes on-screen progressively increase. By the time you've landed your 100th plane, you're constantly juggling 10 or more planes.

Each round ends when you allow a plane to collide with another. As soon as I crash a plane, I usually retry and attempt at a higher score than the previous run. Steam keeps track of your scores on the different maps and even gives you a rank (like captain first class, test pilot, etc.) and a percentage at the end of the round (top40%, top 10%, top 1%, etc.). If you check your stats in Steam outside of the game, it will give your global (steam-wide) rank.

I usually don't get excited about games like this. Hell, this is probably the first mini-review I've ever wrote. But I hope this encourages at least a few of you to try it out and possibly begin discussing this gem of a game. It's one of those games that you can learn in 5 minutes but possibly take years to perfect (like those old arcade games that we know and love).
 
Tzzird said:
It's one of those games that you can learn in 5 minutes but possibly take years to perfect (like those old arcade games that we know and love).
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I bought it as I like ATC sims, and the game at least looked fun, but...

Unfortunately it doesn't take years to perfect. Maybe because I like ATC sims already, but I honestly had all of the Steam achievements completed in my first hour, minus the "200 games" achievement, which frankly the more you suck, the quicker you'll "achieve" that mark, so I wouldn't call it an achievement. I'd call it "200 crashes" myself...

When I first loaded it up I thought I'd get hooked on it, but after completing the Steam achievements so quickly, it only took 97 min according to Steam (and that includes going through the tutorial and etc etc and getting the hang of the game mechanics) before I hung it up and went back to Kennedy Approach.

I've played Kennedy Approach every day for the last 2.5 years, and it's just more of a challenge to do perfectly. Once you've played KA a bit, you'll quickly realize how some of the Flight Control HD game mechanics can quickly be re-imagined into (basically) cheats, and you'll achieve the "3-min" achievements in about... oh, 3 min?

My final rub is the "reach 20 "Most Aircraft on Screen" achievement. Once you realize the (again, basically) cheating game mechanics of FC HD, all you have to do is load a large map (I think the last one?), and you can have dozens of planes on the screen at the same time...

and never crash them into one another...

I achieved that one on a run where my objective was to just never attempt to land a plane... Only crashed two when I got bored and stopped playing... And since I had multiple planes with their proximity detectors going off constantly, it was hard to even tell exactly which ones crashed...

It sure looks like fun, but if you're an ATC sim fan, the game mechanics of FC HD cause your fun to die in just over an hour... and then you're just left basically screwing around 'til you get bored and crash a plane...

Unfortunately, like I said, it took 97 min before I was back to KA... I passed when it was on sale for $1.70, but still snagged it later for $2.50 as I watched some vids and it looked like fun... Too bad I didn't realize the flaw in the game mechanics from the Youtube vids before I bought it, otherwise I may have still passed on it...

Don't regret buying it, but don't really plan to play it again...
 
Thanks for the lengthy post Tolyngee. I had no idea that games like this have been around for so long. I had to google Kennedy Approach and it pulled up a page that had 8 bit graphics.

Unlike you, I didn't get 9/10 achievements in the first day of playing. I think it wasn't until my second day of playing (about 5 hours) did I got the 200 landed achievement. Eleven hours in now and I still haven't gotten the 200 games played yet (or as you more accurately stated, 200 planes crashed). But I'm sure that's coming soon enough.

I'm not sure what you're alluding to when you talk about the "cheating mechanic of FC HD", but is this the fact that you can simply have the planes in HD mode fly tight circles in separate areas? Sure, this might get you the achievement easily, but it won't help you get many planes landed on the HD levels. Landing more and more planes is the "achievement" I look for in this game, not the Steam achievement.
 
Tzzird said:
I'm not sure what you're alluding to when you talk about the "cheating mechanic of FC HD", but is this the fact that you can simply have the planes in HD mode fly tight circles in separate areas?
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Since you haven't figured it out, I didn't want to give it away. I will say though that the game Dylan80 linked will not let you do it though.

Tzzird said:
Sure, this might get you the achievement easily, but it won't help you get many planes landed on the HD levels. Landing more and more planes is the "achievement" I look for in this game, not the Steam achievement.
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You don't understand. I believe I could play the same game 'til the day I die and never crash a plane, as long as I paid attention, which I couldn't because I would get bored.

As long as you don't crash a plane, obviously you can land planes 'til the day you die. So obviously it's going to help you land more planes.

I wasn't even trying to achieve the achievements. I just noticed something in the game mechanics that you can exploit and exploited it. In the meantime, I achieved all of the Steam achievements with the exception of "200 crashes".

I am certain I could play this game 'til the day I die and never achieve "200 crashes" though.


Like I said, it's a fun game. And, in your own defense, I haven't found a single Youtube video that the person does what I figured out. Maybe it's not so obvious so those who aren't ATC sim fans?


(I'll give you a hint: it's thinking outside the box. Since I am an ATC sim fan, it didn't cross my mind for probably the first hour. But then I realized you can tell the planes to do things that planes cannot do. "flying tight circles" is something a plane can do, so no, it's not that.)
 
Ok, I thought I was thinking outside the box by spinning tight cycles, but I guess that isn't it.

I'm intrigued now that you've mentioned that there is a way to exploit the mechanics of the game, which allow you the ability to play the game indefinitely without crashing. I really don't see how that is possible since the game will keep introducing more and more planes to the screen and at some point there would be too many to humanly control.

Does it have to do with the fact that you can pause the game and make the real time component of the game not-that-real-time?

If I'm not even close, please email me what you're referring to. I do not plan on exploiting this as I've got a thing against cheating. If it's too easy and obvious to implement, it will probably just keep me from wanting to play the game at all.
 
So your beef with the game is that it isn't fun when you play it by using an exploit? That seems kind of...obvious.
 
I got it and have been enjoying it. My GF also gets a kick out of it. Great entertainment for the price!
 
Tzzird said:
I'm intrigued now that you've mentioned that there is a way to exploit the mechanics of the game, which allow you the ability to play the game indefinitely without crashing. I really don't see how that is possible since the game will keep introducing more and more planes to the screen and at some point there would be too many to humanly control.
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Or at least too many to fit on the screen.

But don't misread what I am saying; you cannot play the game indefinitely and never land a plane. But I am sure you could easily have a hundred if not two or even three hundred. (I didn't sit there and measure planes sizes and map size...)

If you have that kind of control of the sky, you have all the time in the world to come up with landing approach strategies. (I've been playing too much KA...)


Tzzird said:
If it's too easy and obvious to implement, it will probably just keep me from wanting to play the game at all.
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Bingo. It unfortunately was an insta-kill in my entertainment. I don't want that happening to others unless they really ask for it.

Since I can't find vids of people doing it, maybe the devs possibly haven't seen it before.

Cheat? Not really, the game mechanics allow it.
Exploit? Probably not how the game's meant to be played, since it doesn't appear others are doing it.
What the devs intended? Dunno. The game mechanics let you do it!

But yeah, the game Dylan80 linked won't let you do it. I was doing one thing for a little while thinking outside the box, when it led me to realize the other.

But everything you need to know I already said in my previous post. Read this sentence carefully: "you can tell the planes to do things that planes cannot do."

Gawd, I'll shut up. I'm sure ATC sim fans who play it and don't figure it out will /facepalm when they read that sentence above, as they'll instantly get it.

The game's fun. It really is. I honestly don't want to kill it for others.

But yeah, I honestly believe I could set some interesting high scores, if I could not bore myself in the process.

The devs probably can't undo what I figured out. The game naturally lets planes do what planes cannot do, and that's even in some of the demo vids, I get went and took it to another level. But the devs could easily semi-undo it. They certainly could make it trickier to do for long. But to completely undo it, they'd have to change some of the nature of the game. And while that would stop me, it would probably anger the casual fans of the game.
 
Forceman said:
So your beef with the game is that it isn't fun when you play it by using an exploit? That seems kind of...obvious.
Click to expand...

But it's in the nature of the game. You can not mean to do it, and have the game mechanic do it automatically without meaning to. I've seen this in the vids, and I bet most people who've played it over an hour have seen it.

If the game wasn't itself automatically doing it, I'd say it wasn't in the nature of the game. But it does, and I just realized you can take it to another level. But I've never yet seen a vid of someone taking it to another level.
 
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