Aerowings 2: Airstrike

Pros • Flying, flying’s good • Blowing yourself up • Blowing things up	Cons • Stupid soundtrack • Ridiculous gameplay • Funky controls
Bottom Line Well, you fly around and try to hit things, but being at the helm of an F-16 in this game is more like trying to fly an 18-wheeler. Okay, we’re starting this game review off with a top 10 list. The top ten games I’d rather be playing instead of Aerowings 2: Airstrike. 10. Fooz ball 9. Magic 8 ball 8. Bedrock Bowling 7. Catfight (Arguably one of the worst game ever created) 6. Duck, duck, goose … with actual fowl 5. Russian roulette 4. Parcheesi with step-mother 3. Hide the cigar with Clinton 2. Pool with Chris Hudak 1. Catch with cats

Aerowings. Oh, Aerowings. I had such high hopes. I know, I know, most console games are brain dead, so where did my high hopes come from? From the Dreamcast system of course. Anyway, Aerowings 2 really bites. Let me tell you. I’m thinking that this game took about three and a half weeks to put together and it has about three and a half minutes of gameplay.

Here goes: First you sit through an amazingly obnoxious movie with a soundtrack right out of Top Gun, only not as compelling. There’s no story. But there usually isn’t a story in a flight sim, so no points lost here. Then you sit through an amazingly obnoxious trainer. Anyone who knows anything about flight sims knows that a knot is roughly 1.15 miles an hour, bla, bla, bla. Oh, the best part of the training mission is it is narrated by someone who sounds remarkably like Barbie (or at least the Barbie voice in all the new Mattel releases).

So after Fighter Pilot Barbie tells you how to handle your plane and shoot down the enemy you are thrown into fighter pilot mode. Only here you can not get creative. You last about 2 seconds if you don’t pull up when you’re told to pull up. It’s real annoying.

So, then you try free fly mode. Nothing to kill. Boring. Then you go on a few campaigns. One cool thing is that if you are flying in the rain and have no bearing on your horizons, you can kill yourself real quick and it makes for a nice explosion.

The weapons – in regular mode you don’t get to choose between machine gun (which sounds like a fart) and missile (which sounds like a cap gun). You just aim, fire and hope for the best. Oh, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. You absolutely must turn off the soundtrack. It will make you want to kill things, anything, even if you’re not in the air.

You can switch camera positions – cockpit, pilot eye view, behind the tail. You can choose your jet F-14, F-16, T-4 jet trainer, etc. You can choose a local, time and weather. (If only it was that way when you booked a flight on United).

Okay, say you have just taken off from the base, at noon, and it’s clear skies. Now you are zeroing in on a target (bogey at 4 o’clock) you pull around to get a closer look, then you realize you are getting a little too close to a building. You don’t worry about it you just stay on target. Stay on target. Stay on target. And then BOOM!!! You realize it wasn’t your missile hitting the target that made the explosion; it was you hitting the side of the building because, like I said before, you have the turning radius and maneuverability of an 18-wheeler.

Uggghhh!!!

Okay, I know I’ve crabbed about this game for the last 600 words. But there is just one more annoyance I have to mention. The replay. Now my friend John has been going nuts lately playing with his Tivo. It allows him to watch just about anything on television, when he wants to watch it – even back things up and watch them again. Aerowing 2 has its own brand of Tivo – only not quite as effective. You see, after I had wiped out a half dozen times for reasons other than my lack of piloting skills, the last thing I wanted to see is me plowing into the side of a hill over and over again.

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