85 is not average

When I think back to how much money I sunk into my current PC, one of my internal organs (I can’t be sure which) clenches up and rolls upside down in an ostrich head-in-sand kind of way. I’m okay with this; over a period of years of buying the latest hardware I’ve grown fully accustomed to the sensation. More recently this race to stay up to date has become futile as cutting edge graphics hardware price tags push £500, and depreciate proportionately faster than supercars, but even keeping up to within a generation or two of the latest technology will still cost you dearly.

We do it regardless though, and though that organ (let’s call it Mr Squirmy) may complete full rotations as you click “Confirm Order” for nVidia/ATI’s latest baby, we tell ourselves that it’s worth it when we can push those detail sliders further right than is really necessary to get the default, or basic level of enjoyment out of the game. With every notch those pointers move towards Detail:High, Shadows:Lots, and Reflections:Everywhere, you feel like you’re getting one step closer to the best possible experience.

Which makes it a shame really, when a publisher goes to no effort at all to ensure that a PC version of what was originally a console game takes absolutely no advantage of all that processing potential you’ve invested in. And when such a port also shows horrendously obvious signs of only having been playtested as far as the god damned intro sequence on the new platform, Mr Squirmy gets very, very unhappy.

So it was when I installed Blazing Angels by Ubisoft, which was developed for the 360 and XBox, with a PC port released simultaneously. The first alarm bell rattled and fell to the floor when the training mission (which you are forced to complete) started referring to controls more typically found on console pads than a mouse and keyboard. ‘Pull the left trigger’, the tutorial urged. A quick glance down at my PC keyboard confirmed my worst fears. There was no left trigger, and this aircraft was going to crash unless I could push every button until one of them did something relevant. By the way Ubisoft, a standard PC 104 key keyboard doesn’t have sticks either. As my plane spiralled towards the upward rushing fields below and my fingers mashed various keys, I bemused myself picturing a Spitfire pilot in the 1940s entering a deliberate spin at the behest of his training manual, only to read the next step and discover that the manual did in fact belong to a submarine. “I say Algy, I can’t seem to find the blasted periscope in this crate, do you have one in yours, old thing?”

Perhaps the most irritating thing about playing this on the PC was that the graphics options made barely any difference from one end of the settings scale to the other. In fact I’m quite sure that small difference was purely pyschological, the work of Mr Squirmy trying to make me feel better. And it doesn’t look all that great either, certainly not a patch on the screenshots plastered on the box, and we all know Ubisoft never tart their screenshots up, right? I’m thinking Blazing Angels was developed for the 360, then stripped of all the fancyness until the lowest compatible denominators remained which were then ported to the PC, and iced with some non-functioning graphics options.

Now let’s talk about realism. I know that this title lands heavily on the arcade side of the simulation realism see-saw, but you would think that the developers could at least attempt to approximate a WW2 fighter aircraft’s handling, and not model it directly on a next generation fighter with vectored thrust, as appears to be the case. Oh, and surely we can all agree that when an engine is sufficiently on fire to totally envelope the fuselage in smoke and flames, accelerating in level flight is no longer an option? Can we at least reason that the pilot would make some sort of attempt to place himself on the outside of an aircraft in that condition, and not sit merrily in his seat, comfortably able to perform tight looping turns until he gets bored of being burned alive? Crimson Skies managed that, and the more I played this the more I longed to be playing that game again. I might dig it out a bit later once I’ve got this uninstalled.

This entry was posted 2 years, 8 months ago at 12:54 pm by Chet and is filed under Bad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.