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| Source // Moby Games |
There's quite a lot of history out there, isn't there? I mean, if we only focus on humans there are a good few thousand years to explore, and we've gotten up to an awful lot of stuff as a species in that time. But it's not enough for some people. History isn't cool enough until it's alternate history, a giant 'what if' that opens up untold avenues for stories and settings.
Picture the scene, then: it is the 1930s, and air travel has overtaken the road and rail networks of what was the United States of America, now a collection of independent nation-states fighting each other under whatever banner they're flying, for whatever beliefs they believe in.
Up in the Crimson Skies, piracy has made a return and Nathan Zachary is on the hunt for treasure. His pirate gang will follow him against all opposition, launching from their giant air-ship in customised, other-worldly aeroplane designs.
Will we glide through the skies or get shot down in seconds?
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| Source // Moby Games |
Frustrations
Installation woes have halted me in my tracks and I'm not able to play Crimson Skies, despite its fan patches and fixes for modern systems. Maybe there'll be more successful in the future, but for now, I've only got YouTube to give me some kind of idea as to how this alternate history dogfighting game plays out.
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| Source // Moby Games |
Fun Times
Crimson Skies is thick and heavy with its period-specific presentation. Newsreel footage and radio broadcasts introduce the world to us, and characters are voiced in a glorious old-timey fashion. Photos and newspaper clippings and blueprints and old maps all get brought together to tell us the story of Nathan Zachary and his quest to recover Sir Francis Drakes' lost treasure.
It is the kind of presentation that emulates classic films, where everyone is a dashing hero and trumpets proudly blast out tunes to accompany the characters' bravado. The 1001 entry sees Nathan as the Han Solo of the 1930s, which I don't think is terribly accurate, but they're at least capable pilots on the wrong side of the law.
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| Source // Moby Games |
The game is all about the dogfighting, and you've got plenty of options for outfitting your aircraft, as well as that of your wingmen. From ammunition and rocket types to swapping out one kind of plane for another, you can approach missions with whatever loadouts take your fancy or fit the mission objectives, which are what you'd imagine them to be - look at this, destroy that, capture this and so on.
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| Source // Moby Games |
In the game itself, the physics are more arcadey than realistic, in an attempt to make Crimson Skies fun to play and great to look at, rather than a fiddly simulation. It's about being a cool pilot, not about being a perfect one, though I don't know how that translates to the controls.
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| Source // Moby Games |
After a mission, fluff depending on your performance is stuck in a debriefing scrapbook, complete with stamps of your kills, cut-outs of newspaper articles telling you what your actions have done, and blueprints for you to build new planes, which you can paint up and pack with whatever weapons you can find.
Final Word
The more I watch Crimson Skies, the more I want to get it working and try it for myself. Enough attention to detail has been crammed into the aesthetics that you're drawn into this alternate timeline with no trouble at all.
I don't want to spoil too much of the plot in the hopes I'll be able to find it out first hand, but if that comes to nothing, it sounds so much like a movie that watching it would be more than alright - especially if I found the controls to be all kinds of complicated, but I just don't know what they're like at all.
I like what I see, I like what I hear, I don't like that I can't find out what it feels like, but that's life. I'll keep trying and hopefully come back to update this at a later date.
Fun Facts
Crimson Skies was imagined as a video game, put on the shelf, first released as a board game in 1998, and finally made for the PC in 2000.
Crimson Skies, developed by Zipper Interactive, first released in 2000.
Version watched: PC, 2000 (Research Indicates)