game, game. repeat.

Crimson Skies Notes

Tue 28 October 2003 #IWantToWorkAtEA.com

MS just released their sequel to Crimson Skies on the Xbox. Heh heh, they know its a good game and they want it to help drive purchases of the Xbox and subscriptions to Xbox Live. I’ve been meaning to take some notes down about the original for some time because it was a game I enjoyed and I thought it worth reflecting on why I enjoyed it as much as I did.

At its core Crimson Skies is a crappy flight simulator. By “crappy” I mean fun. :) They traded away the realism one can find in the Flight Simulator series for something much more arcade-like. Instead of worrying about aerodynamics, you can worry about pointing your guns at the enemy while the plane takes care of itself. For most people, myself included, easy-of-use trumps realism in the making of a fun flight game.

Ok, so its another flight game, right? Well yah, it’s a flight game, like many, many others before it. Its basically an arcade style flight game. The graphics are nice, but nothing truly spectacular even for the time it was released. But the game is hella fun.

Why Is It Fun?

Breaking down the graphics, the gameplay, the sound quality, and all the technical attributes is very misleading with this game. Everything is pretty good, but nothing it terribly revolutionary…so its taken me a while to figure out how this game pulls of being so fun:

Its really nice to come across a game as fun as Crimson Skies and its even cooler to realize that its fun not because of some flashy, cutting edge technology, but because the designers emphasized good gameplay and a good story world in order to set the stage for the fun.

Updated on October 5th, 2013

Some of the links were broken. I replaced them with working links to pages with the same or similar content as before.