Mini-Review
Fly!
PC	From: Take 2

This is Terminal Reality's first attempt at recreating the joys of flight, and it's not half bad. It promises ultra-realistic cockpits for each of the five aircraft (Piper Malibu Mirage, Beechcraft King Air B200, Cessna 172R Skyhawk, Piper Navajo Chieftain and the Raytheon Hawker 800XP) and photorealistic satellite imagery for five US cities. Not bad for starters, but this is also offered by the competition (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 boasts over 20,000 airports worldwide, 12 flyable aircraft and a dozen high-res cities). Fly! does attempt to do something a little different to the rest - the cockpits are much bigger than your monitor, meaning you have to move the mouse around to look at all the instruments. Why? This doesn't add anything to the game and becomes a complete pain during a tricky landing. The other main gripe with Fly! is that the framerate can render the aircraft unflyable, even on a high spec system. You certainly don't expect that when you've just bought a 500MHz Pentium III with a Voodoo3 graphics card! Armchair pilots should wait for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, or buy Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 to tide you over.

FG verdict

70%

Mini-Review
Mayday - Conflict Earth
PC	From: PBH Systems

This is what you get when you tell your senile grandma that you'd like C&C: Tiberian Sun for Christmas. Either that, or, if you're very lucky, she'll pick up the latest pack of Princess Diana first day covers from the Post Office. Mayday - Conflict Earth is a shockingly flaccid attempt at cloning the kind of real-time strategy games we were playing five years ago. Or maybe we're missing the point - retro gaming is very hip at the moment. Seriously, they want 30 quid for this! You can pick up Dune II, the granddaddy of them all, for a fiver if you shop around, and it still plays better than this tat. Heck, it even looks better than this! Forget adopting the moral high ground - clones are fine, so long as they bring something new to the genre. Total Annihilation was fantastic, as was Warzone 2100, both managing to bring something new to the table. Mayday - Conflict Earth takes a five-year-old game, strips out the computer AI and replaces it with broken biscuits, slows the whole thing down to near unplayable and wraps it all up in a clumsy and outdated interface. Inexcusable.

FG verdict

14%

NBA Pro 99 / Asteroids