Surely the most eagerly anticipated combat simulator in years, Lock On: Modern Air Combat finally hit the shelves in the US in mid November and the rest of the world some three weeks later. I bought my copy the day of it's release and it did not even get as far as the shelf. A spin off of the Flanker series, which culminated in Flanker 2.51 a couple of years back, Lock On was developed by the same team comprising mainly Russian programmers who really know their stuff. The Eagle Dynamics team, led by Americans Carl Norman and Matt Wagner, is about as knowledgeable as any sim development group could be and have created a modern jet combat sim which has few peers.
Anyone who played Microsoft's previous title, CFS2 will know that it wasn't a bad title. So, for most people, CFS3 comes as a disappointment. There have been many complaints ranging from poor framerates and stuttering to lock ups and in my case, uncommanded reboots. Microsoft released an upgrade patch which was supposed to correct these faults but actually, in some cases, it created even more problems than it resolved.
A bit of research, especially reading the Microsoft CFS3 site, will give a very good idea of how to set up the game and get it to run well. I was initially very disappointed but after uninstalling and reinstalling the game the way Microsoft recommended, most of my problems… Read more
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Disappointing..., July 30 2003
Given the rave reviews this book received I expected rather more of Anna Funder's first work, "Stasiland". The subject matter is certainly loaded with potential, especially given the human trauma associated with the greatest sociological experiment in European history. Funder, an Australian based mostly in Berlin, is clearly fluent enough in German to be able to extract prodigious amounts of detail from the people she interviewed but, in this reviewer's opinion, fails to deliver the knockout punch hoped for.
It all started in 1996, at the height of the rebuilding program, when Funder was working for an overseas television network in Berlin. Having been there at that time myself, I recall… Read more
