Flight School

I’ve owned DCS: Black Shark for a couple of years now. It is one of the few games I ran out to a GameStop (then EB Games) here in Jacksonville and paid full price for. I got into the game pretty good and even had a great friend pick up a copy so we could fly some multiplayer missions. Like any game, it waned and eventually collected hard disk dusk along with my flight controller. Then quite inexplicably it was one of several games I purchased a second time when I had a major Steam boner (don’t ask).

My interest in DCS: BS (no pun intended) stemmed directly from flying LOMAC, which I flew the A-10A to death in that game. Eventually I bought a computer capable of running A-10C and bought that through Steam, finally ending up installing the free component of DCS: World when it came out on Steam (obviously my DCS: BS1 is not compatible with DCS: W). So I have all these flight simulations sitting around needing attention, and guess what? My flight skills deteriorated over time.

It’s one thing to sit out several months of any first person twitch shooter and within one or two keystrokes be back into fragging innocent villagers and spawn knifing, it is quite another animal to sit out a flight simulation a similar length of time and expect anything more than SFFSAMF (that is my lame acronym for Starting From F* Scratch Again M*F*). A couple of years ago I had some posts on this blog (since deleted) where I attempted to do a “Summer Qualification” in the A-10A using LOMAC, and even that was an abysmal “what’s this button for?” exercise as well.

That brings me to today’s post and efforts in BS. Knowing that I have to purchase BS 2 to integrate into DCS: W, I decided to give the original game a shakedown to see if it truly did still hold my interest (not to mention that I would only really consider getting version 2 if it came out on Steam): this trial run consisted of a simple flight pattern around an airfield with no combat involvement. While such a trip (and a post about it) may bore some people to death, I actually had a decent time getting back to at least being able to take off, navigate and land (albeit on game mode, using a Logitech dual-action controller).