Flight Unlimited 3

Flight Unlimited 3

* * * * *


PC Electronic Arts

$99.95


Microsoft's flyer has been the market leader since it came out in 1982, but this third version of Flight Unlimited gives it a run for its money.

Real pilots may disagree, but there seems to be little difference in the actual flight simulation of the two titles.

There are other differences, though. Flight Unlimited does not have the global scale of Flight Simulator, taking place over thousands of square kilometres of America's Pacific Northwest, from San Francisco to Alaska.

Many of the airports are country ones with runways being little more than fields. There are no Heathrows or JFKs here - forests replace skyscrapers and the main runway hazard is cows.

Planes, too, are smaller. The Beechwood corporate jet is the biggest compared to Flight Sim's Concorde and Boeing 737.

This may not matter to armchair flyers.

It is probably a more realistic ambition to pilot a single-engine plane between two small airports a few hundred kilometres apart than to fly a Concorde across the Atlantic, especially with all the "cheats" turned off.

Both sims have good graphics, with Flight Unlimited having the edge at an impressive 4m a pixel.

My 3-D-accelerated Pentium II coped with it at the highest settings, despite being a notch below the recommended configuration.

Required: Pentium 233, 32MB Ram, 4MB video card.

Recommended: Pentium III 350, 64MB, 3-D accelerator.

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