X52 to the rescue?
Ok, so I’m only playing a game, but IL2, in all its incarnations, is one of those games that draws you in and starts to feel so real that dying can actually be a shock to the system. Try playing it in full real mode and you’ll soon see that the time that you invest in each mission can lead to an overwhelming sense of satisfaction or a desperate sense of waste of life if you crash and burn. Being a sim which is superbly scalable in difficulty, IL2, as with many other true sims, has a totally bewildering array keys which you’ll need to learn to be able to play the game as intended and get the most from it.
As you can see, fumbling for the key card not only ruins the realism, but can cost you the game and your pilot’s life too. This isn’t so much of a problem in the single player mode, but is a real bitch in the virtual online wars where pilot careers count. So what’s to be done? Well, you could spend hours and hours learning every keypress by heart, but in the heat of battle, having one hand on the stick and the other trying to push ‘ctrl-alt-p-6’ to turn your nav lights off can lead to pilot overload. I mean, the bombsight in most planes has 6 controls alone… throw in flying the plane and you’ve got nearly 250 separate keys to use! This is just for a WW2 flight sim, where the planes were simpler machines than we have today, so imagine how many keys LOMAC or MS Flight Sim 2005 has… What us PC pilots need is a controller that can get us as ‘hands off’ the keyboard as possible so we can get on with the serious business of not crashing. And that’s where Saitek step in with their latest offering, the X52 Flight Control System.