Out of Control
The sound effects (apart, perhaps from the agonised screams and the sledgehammer noise on landing) are very, very good indeed – I’m especially impressed with the Sea King sound effects, it actually sounds like a damn great helicopter with five huge rotor blades. This is an area where some other sims have fallen down a bit.
As I’m something of a rotor-head I have invested in some quite Gucci
kit, I have a Cyborg 3D joystick with CH Pro pedals and a reasonably quick computer
(AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz, 64Mb GeForce 4 graphics card and 256Mb RAM). I would recommend
something broadly similar for this game. The settings can be adjusted to take
account of slower computers’ capabilities but in my opinion you really
do need the full kit where controllers are concerned. I guess that I’m
a bit of an anorak where flight sims are concerned but I think that having a
set of pedals is practically essential for helo games, it’s a shame that
they are so expensive and difficult to get hold of but I think that they worth
investing in if you really want to tackle the challenges of flying a helicopter
in a realistic way. I initially bought the Saitek as it had a twisting handle
for the rudder control (and because the stick looks very funky indeed). I have
to say that while it’s a cheap(ish) solution, trying to co-ordinate everything
through the joystick is a real chore although, to be honest, it’s not
too bad with SAR as the rudder pedals aren’t required that much –
especially as the helicopters don’t yaw to the left on take-off and at
low speeds – but it’s still massively improved by having foot control.
One point to note regarding hardware is that IAV have still failed to make any
use at all of the buttons on a standard joystick even to the point that though
the hat switch is used for glancing left or right there is still no option to
use it to pan the view. I finally managed to get my Cyborg to work on a Search
& Rescue game although I don’t know if this is due to the issue having
been fixed in the game or due to the fact that between SAR 3 and 4 I updated
to Windows XP which discards the joystick’s manufacturer drivers and replaces
them with generic, bollocks, joystick driver types (i.e. 2 axis 3 button with
throttle).