Learn to Fly

Fireman Sam 2, Myrrien, 2008

After playing a racing game like Gran Turismo 5 I'm always drawn back to Grand Theft Auto for the freedom of the road. After finishing Le Mans I went back to messing about in GTAIV but became bored of going on rampages and aimlessly driving about (especially since it lacks the expansive countryside of San Andreas). I used to do the taxi missions for some mindless escapism in SA, but IV removed that gameplay mode so having completed the vigilante missions and quite enjoyed playing the police I was reminded of back in the days of Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear there was a total conversion mod (The Temporary Tango) that completely flipped the game on it's head. Rather than playing the titular antiterrorism military unit you became the terrorists whom you combat in the first half of the game. It was very weird to gun down the good guys in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and didn't get any less disconcerting through the other missions. I then wondered if someone had similarly flipped GTAIV around. Although no-one has made a true total conversion mod that presents Niko's story from the perspective of law enforcement (because that's quite an undertaking), there is a mod that uses the Rockstar Advanced Gaming Engine as a foundation for something like a police force simulator - LCPD First Response.

LCPDFR largely revolves around attending various incidents in a squad car (as the GTA series is largely about driving, hence the A in the name) and making arrests where necessary and performing traffic stops and licence checks. The basic mod is fairly limited and repetitive after a while, but the Braveheart Policing Script is highly recommended for offering far more varied and dynamic incidents (assisting other officers, road traffic accidents, arson, medical callouts, etc). Together with the Simple Native Trainer I was hoping to make a video of policing in Liberty City titled 'Nightshift NY' along the stylistic lines of Taxi Driver with a few ripped off shots from Heat, but the video editor for GTAIV is a pain to use. Aside from the sense of importance I get from switching the siren on and running intersections, LCPDFR is exactly the kind of technical roleplay that appeals to me. It may seem strange, especially to a real police officer, that someone would find escapism in their daily occupation, but it's actually a well documented phenomena.

Like nearly every child there's a photo of me on my fifth birthday dressed as Fireman Sam and when I was in Primary 3 a few friends and I put on a short play of us as the Ghostbusters complete with plastic proton packs - though it was a near silent play because I didn't write a script. And who hasn't imitated their parents' routine? We learn through imitation, and through roleplaying other careers we also learn about ourselves. Granted my childhood is well over the horizon (and those autism awareness adverts on the LCPDFR site are unfortunate), but I find engaging in complex gameplay and mastering lots of controls far more rewarding than simply staring into the television. I've played as all sorts of people in all sorts of eras. In B-17 Flying Fortress (both the 1992 original and the 2000 sequel) I was almost everyone: gunner, navigator, bombardier, pilot. Most simulators are selective in what they recreate and only approximate the real life details in order to make the game more accessible which leads to a blurring of the line between game and simulator. Of all the games I've played, there's one I've always hesitated to call a game.

Orbiter is a space flight simulator I came across sometime around a decade ago - certainly before the launch of Shenzhou V. I was searching for a free Space Shuttle sim better looking than the old Shuttle game from Virgin. I can't stress just how much more appropriate it is to call Orbiter a simulator than a game - the learning curve is probably the steepest of all time. As someone who came to hate maths class I found the profusion of numbers daunting. If you've been raised by depictions of space flight in Star Wars and Star Trek then you should immediately jettison those preconceptions and prepare to learn orbital mechanics all over again. I have to admit in the years I played Orbiter I never managed to land the Shuttle. Launch into orbit and rendezvous with the International Space Station was easy, though the result of a lot of hours of practice. Landing the shuttle involved doing S-turns to counteract the lift from the wings which was never a keyboard friendly manoeuvre and I usually ended up falling long or short of Cape Canaveral.

I clearly remember my greatest achievement in June 2005 when I successfully took the Delta-Glider (the fictional in-game spaceplane) from Havana Spaceport all the way to Olympus Base on Mars - though I did overshoot the base a bit and had to circle back in the thin Martian atmosphere. I think that took the best part of two hours at high time acceleration which was nothing compared to my last great trip to Neptune. When everyone was ripping on the Beagle 2 mission, I was the lone voice trying to explain just how hard it is to (safely) hit such a large target. I haven't played Orbiter in a few years because space is a really really big and it takes a long time to get anywhere. I never had one of the conventional flight simulators like the titular Microsoft release, largely due to how expensive they were, so I was never part of a virtual airline. There was, however, a short lived site in 2005 called Air Orbiter that did much the same thing for space flight though it was very basic and allowed you to log your flights and keep track of your flying hours. Whilst I was looking for old Rogue Spear screenshots (sadly lost on the defective hard drive in 2004 it appears) I came across a copy of my Air Orbiter profile:

Pilot No. 75
Callsign Zarya
Joined 2005/04/28
Rank Master Pilot (Three stripes)
Realtime Hours Logged 40.1hrs
Flights 72 (Ranked #8 at last login)

And people wonder how I managed to drop out of college. Somewhat ironically, I don't think Postman Pat had much of an influence on me.

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