Air Races

Overview

Attention Flight Simulator Pilots! Are you tired of flying the "everyday" aircraft in Flight Simulator? Do you love flying, but the simulation of it doesn’t really provide that "thrill?" Let’s face it, flying out of Meigs gets a bit boring on the computer fairly quick. The answer to your problems may be here in Air Races.

Air Races is an add-on for Flight Simulator 98 that adds eight new airplanes including the Gee Bee R-1 "No. 11," Bob Hoover’s P-51D, Laird LC-DW-500, Travel Air Mystery Ship, Sundancer, Air Rescue Cessna 414-A, DH Dash 8-300 SimAir, and the DHC-6 Series 300 Twin Otter.

Okay, so now that you have eight new planes, what’re you going to do with them? Well, there are seven new adventures for you to attempt. The first four are the air races and take place over Las Vegas, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. The other three are rescue missions over San Francisco, Hong Kong, and the jungle where you must rescue five DEA agents who have escaped from the clutches of the evil drug lord, Quong. All adventures attempt to incorporate a "storyline" with voiceovers and numerous effects.

While these storylines are cheesy at best and the spoken lines and music even worse, the gameplay itself is quite riveting and will keep you occupied for quite some time. The air races consist of flying around towers, finding NDB’s, touch-and-go landings, precision fly-bys and various other tidbits depending on which race you’re flying in. The DEA rescue missions are quite a bit more involved as they include avoiding anti-air flak cannons while tuning the to the correct NDB’s to find each agent. Once all agents are rescued, you then have to bomb Quong’s headquarters and warehouses, then land the agents at the airport so they can escape on the Concorde. As if this isn’t challenging enough, you have only 40 minutes to accomplish it all!

These adventures require that you DO know how to fly your plane and how to tune in and recognize NDB’s and VOR’s and the instructions are written as such. But hey, that’s what the Flight Simulator docs are for, right? Speaking of documentation, be sure to read the docs that come with Air Races too as some of the commands in the adventures are different from what you might normally be used to in Flight Simulator itself.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Air Races was designed and intended for Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 ONLY. Attempting to play the adventures on Flight Simulator 2000 will give odd results; the planes themselves, however, appear to still function fine.

Recommendation

Overall, this is a neat concept for an add-on that is fun. Unfortunately, since it pretty much only works on Flight Simulator 98, Air Races may have dug it’s own grave since most die-hard Flight Simulator fans will have likely upgraded to Flight Simulator 2000 by now. If you still have Flight Simulator 98 still installed and want to add some flair, or simply add some new planes to Flight Simulator 2000, Air Races is a great way to do it.