Arrgghhh... Dammit! Who shot me?

OK, I'm officially tired of crashing into walls, going down in flames, and getting my head blown off by enemies that materialized from nowhere, in some cases, literally. I'm a practiced gamer and consider myself to be pretty good at video games in general. I have good reaction times, good decision-making skills, and pretty good situational awareness in some types of games. I'm best at flight sims, which is what's got my panties in a bunch today. I'm a pretty good pilot, and in the ultra-detailed realistic flight sims, I probably do as good as our boys in uniform. In real life I would probably be almost as good as them, meaning I would probably not come back alive, where they would be safe on deck. I have a lot of experience with flight sims and I can out-fly most people I've played online. The point is, I can handle a pretty tough situation in a fighter plane.

So I recently went out and bought an older flight sim game for XBox: Air Force Delta Storm (aka Deadly Skies in Europe). It's a pretty good flight sim overall, and things are mostly as I would expect them. The controls are standard, allowing a choice between "Beginner" and "Expert" control styles. The Expert mode operates like a normal plane, and the Beginner mode offers a self-leveling flying style. I prefer the Expert mode, since many of my repertoire of moves involve loops, flying sideways and upside down, and so on. These "moves" include standard aerobatic maneuvers and some I've invented over the years which seem to work well in sims. The Half-Cuban-8 and (less often) Reverse Half-Cuban-8 are my favorites actually. This works quite nicely in situations where you need to make multiple quick passes over a ground target. To get from a bombing run into a higher-altitude dogfight, I usually use an Immelman Maneuver or a simple climb, depending on my enemy's relative position. I consider things like altitude and its effect on relative energy and the effect of that on the outcome of dogfights. If I want to win, I prefer to have an altitude advantage, or a serious power advantage.

Now, those are all the things that make battles easy. What's fun is when a battle is hard, so I appreciate a challenge. However, I've noticed a disturbing trend in all games lately, not just flight sims: forty-five-on-one is one thing, but 145-on-one is another thing altogether, and nearly impossible to deal with in most games. Games have gotten too hard. Normally I love a mission where I have to fly down a canyon and kill things on the way, but in Air Force Delta Storm, they take the magnitude of enemy forces way over the line.

In this mission, I have an altitude ceiling, supposedly above which I'm shot down immediately by some kind of super-powerful anti-aircraft system (it works too). I'm also hobbled by a choice between an F-4 and an A-10, both notoriously difficult to maneuver in tight spaces. In case you're not familiar with these, the F-4 is a Strike Fighter from the 1950s, and the A-10 is a CAS-specialized attack craft from the 70s. Both are still in use today and they are very capable aircraft. Very capable that is, as a Strike Fighter and for Close Air Support, but not very capable as a multi-role fighter on a canyon run with a deadly altitude ceiling. I need an F-18 for this, or maybe an F-86 or something with a tight turning radius, hell I could do this thing in a Zero, but there's walls on the sides of this canyon, you know? How dare you send me in there with a slow-turning thing like an A-10? Come on now... give me a chance!

Now, it may sound like I'm just whining about a hard mission in a game, but that's not it. What I'm whining about is the total lack of respect for the laws of physics. Flight is a physical activity, and you are bound by those laws, you can not escape them. If those laws are programmed into the simulator, then they are just as inescapable as in real life. In a canyon with a limited altitude, you are basically flying in a box. That means your energy levels are finite and limited. In dogfighting, energy levels are a very important thing. If you don't have more energy than your target, and can't "catch-up" by using your engine, you are not going to be able to turn to shoot the target. Period. That's a law. There are complex calculations you can do that can give your likelihood of success in a given situation. Now, these calculations never converge to the point of "impossible", but there's a point where it's impossible for practical reasons. In this game and in this mission, you are approaching that limit. This is not fair, particularly for a beginner who doesn't know any of that stuff I just talked about. Also, if I can't do this mission, it's pretty freekin hard. Did I mention there are things shooting at you this whole time?

Now some people may say, Jazzy you're just gettin old and you can't keep up with the whippersnappers anymore. I disagree. Expertise should always win out. If it doesn't, then it's not a realistic simulation. Also, my kids are teenagers and they agree with me - games are getting way too hard these days. So game programmers, can we dial back the difficulty just a bit?

Thanks,
Jasmine