Flight Unlimited 2 • Looking Glass Studios (PC Windows 1997)
70BE SURE TO ENABLE CLOSED CAPTIONS FOR RUNNING COMMENTARY ON THIS VID!
Flight Unlimited was developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Eidos in 1997 for Windows.
After first Flight Unlimited which focused mostly on flight model and aerobatics, this time we've got a big chunk of land (FU1 only had few small repeating areas) - San Francisco Bay. What differnetiated it from Microsoft Flight Simulator though was that the terrain was modelled with unparelleled quality for the time. With high resolution terrain mesh and aerial photos for textures, the flight sims never looked more real. Atmospheric effects were on similar level - raindrops seen on your windshield refracted the light quite realistically and were influenced by upcoming wind. Even today this effect still holds up pretty well.
But the pretty graphics and sounds was not all - this sim was probably the first one that let you experience actual VFR flying. On top of that IFR was also implemented with several VORs you could tune into, ATC you could talk to and restricted airspaces you had to request to fly into.
But free flight was not the only way to enjoy this sim. There were also plenty of "adventures" (akin to FSX missions) for you to fly. In this video I present one of them - note that playing them repeatedly can provide different experience as some events may or may not occur.
Most important part - aircraft. We've got 5 aircraft to play with, with additional one patched in later (Fokker Dr I). The base aircraft were Trainer (basically Cessna - perhaps they didn't get the rights to use the name?), Beechcraft Baron (2 engine), Piper Arrow, de Havilland Beaver (floats) and P-51D Mustang.
This game will actually run on modern Windows with the help of dgVoodoo2 or DDrawCompat, but due to high CPU frequency the ground handling will be broken. That's why I'm running this on PCem emulating Pentium II clocked at 233MHz with Voodoo3. If you want to know more on how to set it up check out this vid:
https://youtu.be/7pPpoqtD9Og
More retro flight sims:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIku_oD9y-RD5mg8f9ganyHBOBO8l7lQk
#RetroFlightSims