Making a pit stop in Chicago for some of that famous deep dish pizza. Game Info Publisher Microsoft Developer Microsoft Genre Simulation Origin U.S. Number of Players 16 Net Support YES Accelerated YES Minimum Requirements Win95/98 P166 32MB RAM 4x CD-ROM 420MB hard drive space "And this button over here activates the lime syrup dispenser for those perfect mid-flight gimlets." MSFS 2000 even lets you relive the early days of flying. Hey, I can see my house from up here. It looks huge! Oh, wait ... that's the stadium.

This isn't necessarily bad, since the Microsoft Flight Simulator line has some good things going for it. It's the biggest selling flight sim of all time (it lives regularly on PC Data's top ten sales charts), so it enjoys considerable third-party support. You can always find additional scenery and aircraft on the Internet. Microsoft usually has an eye to being backwards compatible, so lots of enhancements for the last few versions of Flight Simulator will work with this one.

Since Microsoft knows marketing, you can bet they're going to do everything they can to make Flight Simulator 2000 palatable to non-simmers. They've started with an excellent manual with a comprehensive glossary and index. The manual serves not only as a handy reference, but also as a companion piece to the sim's thorough tutorial missions, cleverly arranged like a flight school that unlocks new levels as you progress. There's extensive accompanying text in the manual written by someone named Rod Machado, who is described as a "renowned flight instructor, aviation educator, and humorist". His first two titles seem redundant: flight instructor and aviation educator? His third title, humorist, is questionable. Consider his big opening: "One day, when I was in grade school, I didn't bring my homework to class. The teacher asked me why and I said, 'Ahh, the dog ate it.' The savvy teacher responded by saying, 'Rod, do you expect me to believe the dog ate your homework?' I replied, 'Well, I had to force him, but he ate it.'" Is there a rim shot in the house? Machado's tutorials are littered with painful cracks like this. I would advise him to keep his day job.

Fortunately, Mr. Machado does a great job with the tutorials. If you were ever curious to learn the nuts and bolts of civil aviation, this is the sim to teach it. From simple maneuvers like banking to the finer points of instrumental flying rules, these tutorials are the best I've ever seen. The art of navigating by VOR radials was always something I barely had a grasp on, but Mr. Machado's tutorials made it easy to understand.

It's too bad these valuable lessons are lodged in such an awful game. With the exception of a few betas I've previewed, I have never seen a graphics engine run so poorly. It's impossible to capture that elusive bird known as the "the feel of flight" when your framerate is limping along like Tiny Tim and Captain Ahab lashed together for a three-legged race. Since I put a priority on framerate over eye candy, I'm accustomed to having to turn down detail for smooth performance. But even with a fairly hefty rig (PIII 550, 128MB RAM, TNT2 card with 32MB RAM), I have to scale Flight Simulator 2000 down so far that it looks worse than Terminal Reality's godawful Fly! Even then, the game is far from smooth. When you turn your aircraft or change the view to look out a side window, the game pauses and stutters to load the new scenery. If polygons could blush, they would flush deep crimson in Flight Simulator 2000 for being so often caught naked without their textures, which pop in at a leisurely rate. Sometimes in the external views, the aircraft never picks up its texture and you'll find yourself flying a gray unpainted airplane. And then there are the lockups, which afflicted all three systems I used to test the game, almost always requiring a hard boot. It's beyond me how this was regarded as acceptable performance. I've seen bad code before. This may very well be the worst.

Flight Simulator 2000 retains the same feel as the previous versions of the game. Anyone who's played the previous titles can boot up Flight Simulator 2000 and they'll find themselves right at home, staring out the cockpit of a Cessna 182 along runway 36 of Chicago's Meigs Field, an old and immediately recognizable standby for people familiar with the franchise. The interface hasn't changed much, offering excellent online help, including tool tips for each dashboard and easily accessible right click help. The spread of aircraft finally includes some commercial jet liners, including two Boeings and a British Airways Concorde. While the Concorde is a flashy addition, it's actual somewhat tedious, requiring constant nursing to balance its fuel load and reach full speed. The Bell helicopter is still so twitchy that it's nearly useless, especially considering the lack of situational awareness. If the graphics didn't thrash around so much when you changed views, you might be able to maneuver the helicopter in close quarters (such as trying to land on a building). But the framerate makes the finesse of helicopter flight almost impossible. Although the flight model varies noticeably for all aircraft, it's still suspect. There's a pig-headed reluctance to allow spins so even the most ham-handed pilot can crank up the realism level and yank around a delicate airplane like the Sopwith Camel with no fear of losing control.

Microsoft seems to have eschewed their practice of releasing add-on scenery, since they've included plenty of regions with high detail scenery in this box. They are, however, offering two versions of Flight Simulator 2000, a regular edition and a Professional edition. This latter version contains two additional aircraft and six additional scenery areas. It also costs $25 more. This cynical effort to wrest more money from serious simmers is reprehensible. It's bad enough that this game is so lousy, but it's worse that they expect people who love the genre to pay extra.

There's a good flight planner here, which is a helpful way to explore the world that Microsoft has laid out, but it's not as good as the planner in Terminal Reality's Fly! The air traffic control and interaction that brought Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited series to life like no other civil aviation sim is sorely missed here, since there is absolutely no air traffic control and no interaction with other aircraft. Some of the scenarios have recorded voices, but they're merely canned narration. The new control panels look good, but they obscure too much of the outside view with no option to use only a few gauges or scroll the view to see more scenery. I am happy to report, however, that the uninstall routine works just fine: it's fast, easy to find, and thorough.

-- Tom Chick