F 22 lightning crack

Gamers deserve a few nuclear secrets. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has now spread to desktops everywhere. Smart bombs are for geeks. Try the dumbest bomb ever, the B61 Tactical Thermonuclear Bomb. Forget the term "surgical strike. The pilot thinks: "Well, I see that the developers have inserted a few textured blocks that are supposed to be the buildings I am bombing. F Lightning 3 is an exception.

The ground, buildings, and sky all fit together into a seamless world. Be it simulation or game, there are not many titles with better-looking graphics than this.

Predictably, the most extravagant visual in F Lightning 3 is the sight of a B61 Tactical Thermonuclear Bomb exploding with a flash and slowly sweeping its gray fallout across the earth under an orange mushroom cloud. This is truly a sight and surely future sims will attempt to emulate this. In the head-scratching department, the missile view cuts back to the cockpit just before the missile impacts the target.

Pilots miss the theatrics of their missile pounding into the evil enemy. NovaLogic generally does a great job in the sound department or studio, rather.

The erratic radio signals heard from the aircraft and the air traffic controllers generate a sense of urgency in the battle. Missing in action was Bitching Betty, the deliberately annoying threat warning voice! No great loss. Pilots hear a threat warning tone that beeps like a heart monitor, increasing in tempo as the missile approaches. F Lightning 3 should have a strong appeal to entertainment-oriented virtual pilots. The nuclear feature has a way of drawing the curious into the game.

The quick missions are just as good as any mission found in the campaign mode; they are simply there for users who do not want to play through a full campaign. Campaigns are divided up with each one taking place in an individual country. When you begin a campaign you get to name yourself and eventually earn points and awards. Statistics are tracked for each pilot, such as craft lost and number of enemy kills. In total there are 46 missions in Campaign mode. If you want to jump into the Internet play right away the first thing you should do is register.

Novalogic requires players to register and you will not be able to play until an activation code is sent to you via e-mail. They also state that it can take up to three days to receive the activation code -- it took about 20 hours for mine to arrive.

An amazing players can take part in dogfights at the same time. Online you can also take part in bombing an opposing team's base or team up with 16 people to play special cooperative missions. Voice communication is supported and the game includes a headset. F Lightning 3's Internet play is quite stable and adds a large amount of replay value to an already impressive game.

Just as the game excels in gameplay, it does the same in the graphics and sound departments. Graphically the jets feature a large amount of detail. From a third-person view players can see everything from the small flashing lights on the wing tips to the slightest movements of the flaps. Spin upside down and check out your arsenal too. Backgrounds look just as good but they do not contain a lot of objects.

Usually they consist of plain landscapes with your runway, sometimes a few buildings, and when the mission calls for them, ground targets. Now, earlier on I said that this wasn't about hi-fi flight models, and that is true, but it would be nice for physics to have a little more effect in places. Make no mistake, though. When it comes to looks, this knocks pretty well every other fixed wing simulator currently available into a cocked hat. You'll believe that youire really there -coastlines are beautiful, mountain forests are spectacular, deserts are, well, sandy.

Other aircraft are superbly presented, and even ground targets manage to look good without suffering from that Cstuck on' look that afflicts many sims with high quality terrain graphics. F is going to take some beating - and it doesn't go all pear-shaped when you get up close either. While we're on the subject of the overall effect, the sound is really quite excellent as well.

You get full Dolby Surround sound and it really is worth it, although the music can get really irritating you can turn it right down, but then you don't get any in the menu screens either. The background noise is good - just engine noise and the mechanical whirring you might expect forget that you wouldn't really be able to hear them and accept that they're useful here , while the explosions from enemy flak are really quite unnerving.

So, what have you got? Well, overall you've got a very good-looking simulator which has a nice career progression, a neat mission builder and full network support - either co-operative or head-to-head. No multi-player campaigns, though.

The flight model isn't exactly military spec, but it's better than many which claim to be ultra-realistic. I have to admit that I was honestly expecting to slag this off - I truly and passionately detested Comanche because I'm a helicopter pilot and I wanted better. This is really quite good, and will probably stay on my hard drive for quite a while. The resupply flight of C s on the way in is being threatened by an unknown flight which is closing fast.

You and your wingman are scrambled and vectored to intercept. You get off the deck in double quick time and pull a hard right turn onto the first waypoint.

The AWAC's datafeed is already giving you information on the location of the bandits as they close on the transports. It's going to be tight At 25 miles you flick on the radar and instruct your wingman to engage the first bandit. Thirty seconds later, it's all over. The stealthy approach and the LPI radar meant that the MiGs didn't have time to react and are now all riding the silk elevator. A brief thanks from the transports and it's back to refuel, rearm and get breakfast.

The Lockheed F22 is destined be the Falcon of the late 90s. In other words, every man and his dog will be doing a simulator of it soon.

However, it is a stoater of an aeroplane, and will probably be one of the few planes this century which will actually be as good as claimed. It's a middleweight attack fighter which costs more than its weight in gold, but is probably worth it. Hardly surprisingly, even the US will only have a few of these babies, but their speed, range and stealthiness will make up for that.

The F has been designed with the ability to CSupercruise', which allows supersonic flight without using burners, making it both stealthy and fuel efficient. Couple this with vectored thrust to give a new level of agility and a powerful LPI radar and you've got a serious piece of kit.

Just wish they'd let me fly one Welcome to the Flight Sim of the Week Club. It seems at least that often that a new state-of-the-art flight simulator hits the PC gaming market. Who is buying all these flight sims? Who needs more than one? Flight sim addicts, that's who. If you're stricken with this affliction, I hear there's a recovery center in Minnesota where they search everyone's luggage for laptops equipped with Thrustmaster rudder pedals.

But before you pack your bags, you might want to hear about F Lightning II. Air Force's newest "air superiority weapon" -- what in simpler times was called a "fighter. Comanche debuted in , leaving gamers agape at NovaLogic's proprietary, patented VoxelSpace terrain generation technology.

NovaLogic largely disappeared from the market after that, with the exception of some Comanche mission disks, and Armored Fist , the tank simulator that proved that, while VoxelSpace terrain looked terrific from the air, from a tank on the ground it looked like pixels the size of ceiling tiles. Well, NovaLogic is back with a vengeance, having doubled their staff and more than tripled the size of their U.

After four relatively dry years, they're set to release no less than three titles for Christmas NovaLogic is justifiably proud of its flight model, and it's definitely better than average. It does have a few minor problems, such as the lack of energy loss in tight banked turns unfortunately common in modern flight sims , but nothing serious. The cockpit graphics are nothing to write home about -- the main eye candy here is on the ground or in the external plane view.

The latter features realistic retracting landing gear, movable flaps and ailerons, weapon bay doors and air brakes. You can also call up additional screens that focus on Defense, Attack and Stores weapon inventory , none of which I found particularly useful, since you can get all the information you need from the standard HUD and pop-up radar display. Night missions are something of a waste, considering F's focus on graphics. The areas you're flying over are unpopulated, so you don't even get lights on the ground, just blackness with your HUD superimposed.

Enemy artificial intelligence is good, and cannon-only dogfights can be gripping events, after which you have to pry your sweaty palm from the joystick. It avoids the cardinal sin of flight sims: when you and the computer opponent end up endlessly chasing each other's tails in a circle. You're outnumbered many times in the game, but come out alive because the bad guys have missiles with a 5-mile range, and you have missiles with a mile range.

That's not exactly up close and personal. But the game's Dolby Surround Sound is extraordinarily effective when you get into a rare head-on close flyby.