Like many gamers, I've tried my hand at flight sims. They're one of the biggest-selling genres of computer games, so I suppose just about everybody with a 286 or better has made at least a passing attempt at virtual flight. Some of the people who try fall instantly in love with computer flight and all its intricacies. I was not, am not, and will probably never be one of those people. I like the idea of flight simulators, even those that aren't combat-oriented, but I've had to face up to the fact that I am a bad pilot. You see, flight simulators require either previous real-world knowledge of airplanes, or the willingness to learn a great deal about the art of flight. I don't possess either of these properties, so I'm out of the clubhouse. Flying majestically over beautiful landscapes blowing the hell out of everything with wings sounds like a good idea to me, but I don't know a barrel roll from shinola and doubt that I ever will.
That's why I'm damn glad we have games like Terminal Velocity in the world. They trick you into thinking you're playing a flight sim, but you'll never need to ask "What's air vector, Victor?" while playing them. No complex procedures. No studying the tactical advantages of various maneuvers. No leafing through manuals drafted by Stephen King. You're flying, so's everything else, now kill them. That's my idea of a flight game. Apparently, 3D Realms has a similar philosophy, because Terminal Velocity drops you right into the middle of a high-intensity air war, with no training necessary. I've been playing Terminal Velocity since its appearance as a shareware game, so the commercial CD version was something I'd been waiting for. Although the game is still great, this package wasn't all I'd hoped it to be.
I knew that the full commercial version would doubtlessly take more space on my hard drive than the shareware version, but I wasn't prepared for just how much more it would end up requiring. The CD version of Terminal Velocity sits on 40 megabytes of hard drive space, which is pretty hefty even in the age of games like Wing Commander III and Dark Forces. The game keeps everything but the cinematic scenes on the hard drive, a whopping 40% of the 100-megabyte program. It's a good thing Terminal Velocity is so much fun!
Fun is what Terminal Velocity is all about. Not manual reading, just good old fast-paced arcade action. You pilot a futuristic fighter as you attempt to decimate the seemingly endless hordes of air and ground forces being used by a diabolical computer system with its sights on the earth. (Damn it, I thought we told them to discontinue that model.) Your craft is speedy, especially with afterburners, and incredibly maneuverable. You'll be able to pull sharp 180-degree turns, skim the ground mere feet above the surface, and pull straight back on the stick and do a complete loop, all without worrying about passing out from G-forces or tearing your ride to shreds. Terminal Velocity contains no hyper-realistic physics model, and for that I am eternally grateful. What it does contain is dozens of hostile craft all itching to take a chunk out of you, lots of weapons, power-ups, and lots of carnage.
The registered version of Terminal Velocity follows the Apogee model and delivers the remaining two thirds of the game's missions. It also gives players four more Comm-bat levels--arenas specifically designed for multi-player games. This is all very good, but I was especially looking forward to playing Terminal Velocity with high-detail texture maps and SVGA graphics, two features you only get to enjoy in the registered version. Unfortunately, they turned out to be the game's one and only Really Big Let-Down. As soon as I'd installed the game I tried to switch to the high-detail texture maps, only to find out that they require a minimum of 12 megabytes of RAM to load. Funny, but this rather stiff hardware requirement wasn't mentioned anywhere in the game's advertising; I guess it was just an oversight. With my puny Pentium 60 with eight megabytes of RAM I was able to load the SVGA graphics with the normal texture maps, and was thoroughly disappointed. It didn't look any different. Well, the trees looked a little crisper (not that there are many trees in TV), and the dots on the radar display were smaller, but that was it. Playing with both the high-detail textures and SVGA graphics requires 16 megs of RAM, and after a little work I was able to track down a P90 with 32 megs to try the game on. Even with all the bells and whistles, Terminal Velocity's "enhanced" graphics mode turned out to be a big fat zero. To be totally honest, if I saw a still shot of TV with the high-detail texture maps and SVGA, and compared it to a still shot of TV running in the plain VGA graphics, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference. Pretty sad, huh? My sole piece of advice to 3D Realms would be to make sure that their high-resolution graphics options are actually an improvement over the low-res mode, and that they be a little more up front with their hardware requirements, especially when they're unusually high.
So the registered version of Terminal Velocity didn't quite live up to all my hopes, but it's still a terrific action game that everyone in the world should be forced to play at least once. If you like to fly really fast and blow things up, you couldn't ask for much more. If this is any indication, we should all expect big things from 3D Realms.
