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Navy Strike is designed to give you the best flight engine with the best graphics that can be had. The game delivers on both. However, the game has cheesy sound and requires so much in the way of memory, that I still have not played the main campaign! The game just will not run inside windows 95, which unfortunate for me I HAD to upgrade to. Since I don't have a system with Dos/Windows, I am stuck with a limping sim for the short term.
The big problem I have been having is getting enough memory cleared out so that the game will run. My CDrom drivers are causing me the grief. I can not even make a boot disk that doesn't have some problem with it. The combination of needing a mouse driver as well as the CDRom driver are very, very problematic for the Windows 95 user. You can create the MS Dos prompt to auto just about everything but compatibility. The only way I have been able to get the memory it requires is to boot without an autoexec.bat and config.sys into windows 95, then go to a dos prompt. That gives me the memory, but it doesn't allow me to play the game, it just locks up at that point. However, when I go to MSDos mode, I can't get the memory I need, nor can I get my Memory manager I would prefer to use to work under 95, catch 22!
On a better note, what I have been able to play is superior to any flight sim I have played to date. The graphics and controls are wonderful! The motion is fluid and smooth to the eye. You do have the ability to blackout, so be careful about the G forces you pull. During the blackouts, you have no control, you have no idea what is up or down, but the sim will not let you even guess, like some of the other sims I have played. This is good and bad. Good because its almost like a real blackout situation, bad because I do know that some pilots go into 'auto pilot' when blacked out and just don't know it.
Regardless of your feelings on the blackout effect, this game has much more to offer than I have been able to see. The weapons systems seem to be accurate, they almost always hit, and they almost always knock out of the sky what you aim at. This is good, since a weapon is useless unless it hits its target!
This game really does live up to its hype. Navy Strike has a great graphic and flight engine. I would be happier if I could have gotten the campaign to work on my system, but the training missions gave me a good enough idea on what its like.
--- Andy Hardison
--- stilgar@eden.com
