Flight Control HD

Flight Control HD is a game available for the iPad and on the iPhone (as Flight Control). It is a puzzle game developed by ndWare Pty Ltd. The aim of the game is simple – you have to act as an air traffic controller and land all the aircraft on your screen at the various landing points. After loading up the game, you are presented with a colourful map which has four runways and three helipads. From all around the screen aircraft of different colours appear leaving it down to you to get them down to the ground safely. Just to make things interesting, each aircraft and runway/helipad is colour-coded so you have to ensure you get the right aircraft to the right destination. On top of that, the aircraft all travel at different speeds so you have to keep your wits about you! Aircraft will crash into each other but the game thankfully provides a visible and audible warning if this is going to happen so you can take evasive action. To get the aircraft to go where you want you simply press on the aircraft and trace a line to the landing zone. The aircraft will follow the route you have selected, which stays visible on the screen. Of course, things become more difficult as more and more aircraft fill the screen and you have paths that crisscross and overlap each other.

This is the first game I downloaded for the iPad and it is one which I will come back to time and again. I mostly play in single player mode, but the fact you have your previous high-score to beat means there is always a ready challenge. You also have the option of playing multi-player through split screen (co-op and vs modes) and wireless. The app is well made, looks gorgeous and suffers from no apparent bugs. The animations are smooth and the sound effects don’t annoy and you can play the game in both landscape and portrait orientations. The only criticism I have is that it would be nice to be able to choose from more than one map in single player mode, but having said that the one map provides more than enough challenges.

Rating:

Review is based on version 1.03 on the iPad, purchased from iTunes.

What Happened to Tycoon Games?

I have an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 which provide many hours of entertainment but I rarely find myself playing the same game for more than 20 hours. Back in the day when PC gaming was only starting to emerge there were quite a few games which took many hours of my time. These were not ultra-realistic shoot-em-ups or massive online open world games but humble “Tycoon” games.

I am a huge fan of these games – you know the ones where you get to build stuff, manage stuff, and then watch your little “peeps” to see how they react to your in-game choices. They are also sometimes classed as “God simulations” or “contruction / management games”. Whatever you want to call them they were very common in the late 90’s but don’t seem to be so popular these days. I blame the popularity of consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 whose controllers don’t lend themselves easily to the precision of city, theme park or hospital building. This is a great shame as I spent literally hundreds of hours with these games, carefully crafting and creating massive metropolises (or metropolei), watching them grow, and then seeing how other areas I neglected become derelict and fall apart.

It’s such a shame that these games don’t seem to be as popular any more, but I want to pay homage to some of these games which ate up a lot of my time in my teenage (and to some extent, post-teenage) years! Read more »