Introduction
In the mid to late 1920s, the sport/business of Air Racing began in earnest and no where was it as prevalent as it was here in the United States. During the 1930s, which was the real heyday of Air Racing, the air race pilots themselves were a matter of household names and in most cases most air race pilots were more famous than the Hollywood stars of that era. The most famous of these daredevil pilots had to be Jimmy Doolittle after his successfully winning the coveted "Thompson Trophy" on several occasions flying the infamous (and deadly) GeeBee Racer!
With the coming of World War II, organized air racing came to a end, but many of the aircraft design features, discovered by the aeronautical engineers for air racing aircraft, found their way into the World War II fighter designs. With the end of World War II in 1945, jets had come of age and air racing, as it was known in the '20s and '30s, was no longer to be—that was until a small group of enthusiast living in Reno, Nevada thought it would be interesting to organize a revival of sorts, of the long gone air racing events before the war. The first ever Reno National Championship Air Races occurred in 1964 at the then just-closed Stead AFB, just a few miles from downtown Reno, Nevada. Over the years, additional classes have been added, but it's the "Unlimited" class that is the main or central focus of Air Racing in Reno. For the Unlimited class the rules are fairly simple: the aircraft must be equipped with a recip (piston) engine driving a propeller! The speed, the sounds, the competition, and the extraordinary and ever present danger is something like no other form of motorsports you will ever witness.
Over the years, several aircraft have made their mark in the Unlimited class including such names as: Dago Red, Strega, Critical Mass, Red Baron, Smirnoff Bearcat, Miss Ashley II, The Pond Racer, Miss America, USA 1, and of course RareBear. It was only natural that with the influx of the PC computer, someone at sometime would eventually get around to developing a simulation or game based on the Reno Air Races and after a couple of misstarts, Victory Simulations is finally ready to release Xtreme Air Racing (previously called Reno Air Racing when Mattel was to be the publisher).
I personally have had a great deal of interest in this type of simulation for a couple of reasons, the first being that I do live in Reno, NV and I have been an attendee at the majority of the Reno Air Races held over the years, including the first one back in 1964; plus I do have a keen interest in aviation and flight simulation. So it was a natural for me to take a look at what Victory Simulations has come up with.
The dilemma:
This product is being offered as a "..near real world simulation.." of what it's like to pilot a 500 mph air racer around the pylons at Reno or at 4 other courses: the Arctic, England, Asia, and a European Alpine course, but this in itself has created a bit of a dilemma for myself. I say dilemma, because I may have come to expect too much from any aviation related simulation product and that maybe my personal standards have arisen to the point that it's near impossible for anything to impress me anymore.
To better explain myself, let me say that I have had nearly 20 years of experience at flying with flight simulators, both civilian and combat types and the natural evolution that has occurred with all the different simulations available have at times been extraordinary. How this relates to Xtreme Air Racing is that to me the look, the feel, and the sound was far more on par with a coin operated arcade racing game rather than a true simulation of air racing, which in some ways has been greatly disappointing for me, but on the other hand there are a few points about the game that I did like.
So what to do? Do I review this software as a simulation or do I review it as a arcade game? My wish to develop a positive review and my wish to not offend the developers prompted me to purchase several other games (racing) over the last couple of weeks, including several from EA Sports, Valuesoft, and Sierra (to give myself some racing game experience), but to be completely honest, that only made my work more difficult. I finally decided that I will simply present and evaluate the program in our usual review format here at AVSIM and then draw up some conclusions, suggestions, and observations in my summary.
Installation and setup
Installation is simple and straight forward with no surprises, but I would have liked to have had the option of a desktop icon being installed, especially considering that once the game is installed, you no longer need the CD disc to play.
From there it's a simple process of setting up the game as it's best optimized for your system. Xtreme Air Racing supports both an Open GL mode or the 3Dfx Glide mode (voodoo for example) and once you've chosen your mode, you then have a choice of 640 x 480 up to 1280 x 1024. Unfortunately there is no memory of your chosen settings, so whichever mode and screen resolution you choose, you must re-choose your settings every time you call up the game from your program menu.
Once you go through the startup screens you are presented with the screen where you can choose Setup to set your Audio, Graphics, Controls, and Gameplay settings. These are held in memory, so you don't have to re-set them every time you play the game. The settings here are mostly related to setting up the Audio or volume level of your co-pilot (that gives you hints), the race announcer, the sound level of other aircraft around you, and other such items. The Graphics section allows you to increase the scenery detail (depending on the power of your home computer), plus it allows you to add course edge marking cones, pylon lasers (so you can see the position of the pylons from a distance), and even air hoops so that you can fly on the groove! Controls allows you set up your roll, pitch, and yaw sensitivity, plus your keyboard commands. Finally there's Gameplay, where you can turn on/off engine and aircraft damage levels, etc.
Once you've got your settings optimized to your system, then it's time to start playing the game. Here you have several choices. There's Single Race, Race Season, Freeflight, Multi-player, or Combat (more about that a bit later here). To start off I picked Single Race and from there you have a wide variety of aircraft to pick from, including Dago Red (a real P-51 that races at Reno), Miss America, and my particular real-world favorite (for obvious reasons) RareBear, plus a whole host of others.
This is where I ran across my first point of curiosity. In the ALPHA version of Xtreme Air Racing, I had the choice of racing in either the Unlimited Class or the Formula Class of air racing, but with the VIP/Press Release version of the game (and I would assume the version for public release), you only have the choice of the Unlimited Class. The Formula Class of racing aircraft apparently is not included with the final release for reasons I'm not aware of.
Graphics
I started out at flying a single race on the Reno Unlimited course (there are 4 different courses available at each of the 5 locations, including a figure-8 race course, as if air racing isn't already dangerous enough... hehehe) and I would say that the general scenery graphics is fairly good and fairly accurate as to the real-world scenery around Stead—though I would liked to have seen something a bit more detailed, like having spectators in the grandstands for example! To give you some comparative, the quality of the scenery is somewhere between FS98 and FS2000 (default). It's fairly easy to judge the surface of the ground in the event you have a habit of flying as low as I do as the scenery in XAR does depict the sagebrush of the Nevada desert and the runway/airport of Stead sufficiently for flying in this game.
The Aircraft
Exterior graphics
The exterior graphics of the aircraft are generally pretty good and most certainly accurate – they are for the most part – up to the levels of other similar games (NASCAR4, EA Sports Superbike, or FS2000/FS2002) that I have to compare XAR to. So, even though the general exterior graphics are not extraordinary, they are quite acceptable for a game of this nature. There was one little detail that I did like very much and that was that in high stress turns, faint vapor trails would appear on both of the wing tips, not unlike the vortices one would see trailing off the rear wings of a Formula One or Indycar at high speed! I have seen these vapor trails appear at the real Reno Air Races during those years the humidity was above 40% or so. Nice little touch.
Panels
I really did have a problem with the panels, as the panels in all the aircraft are not up to even the level of the default panels in FS95, let alone the panels in FS2000/FS2002, FLY/2, or Combat Flight Simulator 1/2. The panels in XAR are very flat, very generic, and very uninteresting. They are on the other hand similar in their function as like the virtual cockpits in FS2002, but only in that you can use your hat switch to swing your view left or right. Beyond that though they are pure arcade in their appearance.
Flight dynamics
This is one area that I can give XAR acceptable scores, with some reservations. I found the FDEs for each of the aircraft to be more than acceptable on several levels, but mostly because this game is not a sim for flying from point A to point B, but is a game for simulating air racing. For me, due to my experience with flight sims, I found that the best settings for the pitch, roll, and yaw sensitivity was with the sliders fully maxed out. For the non-pilot or beginner I would probably suggest they start with the sliders at mid-way or less, at least until you became more comfortable with handling the aircraft. The fellows over at Victory Simulations have added one thing that I do like and that is the effect of wake turbulence when you are in close proximity of other racing planes, as you can get bumped and banged around pretty hard if you attempt to pass too close and low to your competitor. This part of XAR was quite realistic feeling and there was a danger of you losing control of your aircraft sufficiently long enough to crash. If you attempted to pass, following the real rules of air racing, you shouldn't ever have a problem with wake turbulence, but if you attempt to pass from directly behind or just underneath your competition, you'd better hang on for your life!
Sounds
With any flight sim or any racing game, there are only two senses the program developer has to address if he or she wishes to bring the level of immersion up to an almost real-world like sensation, that being sight and sound. At any point, if one of these two items becomes less effective (for sim or game immersion) you can, to a degree, make up the difference with the other. Unfortunately, if one is weak and the other is nonexistent, then we have a problem and if this sim/game has a blaring weakness, it's with the sounds. The sound of the radial engines, like in RareBear, are only slightly different from the sounds in Dago Red, which has a Merlin Rolls-Royce V12? They both sound quite similar to a juiced up version of the default sounds of the Cessna 182 in FS2002? Not very authentic, to say the least. If there was one single thing that keeps me going out to the Reno National Championship Air Races every year, it's the sounds of the Unlimiteds rounding the pylons at 500+ mph—it's something I can't describe and you cannot imagine until you've experienced it, so you can understand my disappointment when the sounds in XAR seemed hardly more than remixed sounds of the default Cessna in FS2002.
Engine/Cockpit management
This the boys at Victory have got fairly well covered, as you have the options of opening your spraybar (water injectors for engine cooling), Nitrus injector modes, monitoring of your engine temperatures, etc., and if you allow your engine to run full throttle with nitrus, believe me you'll lose your engine and you will have to declare an emergency. Now, the landing gear and flaps work on these aircraft (just don't attempt to lower your gear/flaps at 400 knots, because they will be ripped away by the air blast faster than you can say belly landing); I found that deadstick landing one of these aircraft to be one tough job, as the stiff landing gear on the XAR aircraft require a gentle touch to your flying skills, particularly during landing in the desert vs the hard-surface runway. I have some video (home video) that I shot at the 1999 Reno Air Races, where Strega (a highly modified P-51) had to declare an emergency due to a blown engine and on the video you can see that the pilot had a real tough time getting his aircraft safely back to terra firma. That same year Gary Levitz (a very popular air racer with the fans here in Reno) was not so fortunate with his air racer Miss Ashley II; when he suffered a catastrophic structural failure at over 500 mph and at less than 100 feet AGL, Gary did not survive.
Other Flight Modes
Besides the single race mode, you do have the choice of flying a full season, freeflight, and an interesting mode called Combat. The Combat is more like an air show demonstration of a two-plane dogfight, except you have real guns and you can shoot down your opponent. I only tried the combat mode once and I found it to be very difficult or next to impossible, because even though I was flying RareBear (the world's record holder for speed for a propeller driven aircraft), my opponent (Miss America, a P-51) was capable of at least 100 knots more speed then I could attain. No matter what I did, Miss America could pretty much sweep down on me at will and I was really nothing more than a target! Ugh!
Summary
The Reno National Championship Air Races are one of the most exciting motorsport events you could ever wish to witness, as the past and the present come together in a way that is quite unique in this world. The sight and sounds of a highly modified World War II era fighter flying 50 feet above the ground, rounding the pylons, at speeds of 500 mph or more is something that will get the blood in any aviation enthusiast pumping wildly. I cannot describe the sound a Merlin Rolls-Royce engine produces when it has had its superchargers staged up, with a full-load of nitrus being injected, screaming at over 3,000 rpm, and with the massive prop it's driving grabbing at the air with the force of over 4,000 horsepower, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck just thinking about it!
I'm afraid that Xtreme Air Racing just simply is too little too late for my personal tastes. If this program had been introduced 4 or 5 years ago, well, my review would be quite different, but today we've got some truly excellent flight sims and some truly outstanding racing games available to us. I'm talking sims and games that are on the forefront of advanced 3D technology, whereas Xtreme Air Racing is on par with the arcade games we would more likely see at the local 7-11, arcade games we would have seen 2 or 3 years ago. As a bit of comparison, for myself, I took a 3rd party aircraft (a P-51 called Miss Detroit, designed by Alain L'Homme, J. Scott Nix, Chris Arrington, and Steve Gandy) that I have installed into FS2002 and I took it around the pylons (as best I remember their placement) at the Reno/Stead airport (all in FS2002). The difference (between this P-51 in FS2002 and with a similar aircraft in Xtreme Air Racing) was extraordinary, as the sights, the sounds, and the feeling of flight with Miss Detroit in FS2002 seemed years ahead of Xtreme Air Racing.
I know that a lot of you that are reading this – that know me – may be a bit surprised by my review of Xtreme Air Racing—but I've got to be honest about it and frankly the fellows at Victory Simulations need to rethink their work a bit and consider what they've got to offer in comparison to other similar sim/games out there. Xtreme Air Racing, as it stands, is a great start—but there is a lot of work to be done before I would recommend they release it. If you were to compare the cost of this game ($29.95 retail) to say a game for Playstation2 or X-box (of which average $45 or more), then I would say it's a deal, but on the other hand I found that I just couldn't get into a situation where I wanted to play this game on a regular basis due to it's lack of realistic sounds and/or reasonably accurate panels. Overall it simply was too arcade like for my tastes.
To order Xtreme Air Racing visit the Xtreme website.
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