"But captain, she's held together with toothpaste and bogies, she can'ne take no more."
Come on now all you programmers out there, isn't it about time you concentrated on playability rather than detail? In about a year's time there are going to be flight sims where you'll have to get your pilot dressed in the morning and send his kids off to school.

After getting the kids off to school you'll have to drive your car to the airfield only to find that your plane hasn't been built yet, thus you'll have to build your plane out of Hope and Glory matches and Evostick. Detail is getting a little out of hand on these games.

If you are a generally impatient person like me, then you must probably find games with too much detail infuriating instead of engaging.
Megafortress is one such game. It's so involved that you have to plough through a manual of proportions similar to that of the Domesday Book just to install it onto your hard disk.

In general, the aims of the game are quite similar to Falcon - you choose various missions which include bombing innocent coach loads of vicars and so on.

There are three different "theatres" as they are called that you are part in.
There is the compulsory Persian Gulf without which all the flight sims in the last year or so wouldn't have existed. The Old Dog (your guess is as good as mine) and Red Flag.
Basically a theatre is a number of missions geared toward the political climate of the era. So the Persian Gulf theatre entails bombing the buggery out of everything that moevs and a lot of things that don't and the Old Dog involves an ageing Digby.

Each theatre has eight missions which you can take part in. Once you have chosen a mission you get a quick briefing and off you go.

After choosing the mission you must choose your weapons - a bomber's not much sodding good without bombs, is it? Wow man, the armoury is awesome - every possible type of bomb you could think of - but let's not get silly. There's no point dropping a Cruise missile on one measly control tower, so you must choose the missiles vaguely suited to your use.

Once you have chosen your mission you have to fly the plane - a bit of a pain, I know. You can choose from a number of views, such as the main cockpit, the co-pilot panel, comms and external view.

So first off, you'd better start the plane, really. Now I know that I'm not exactly the Red Baron, but I still thought that starting a plane wouldn't entail much more than a simple twist of a key and pushing a few buttons.

But no, procedures for starting the plane on Megafortress just about stop short of chanting, drawing pentagrams on the floor in chalk and making sacrifices to the God of Aeronautics.

It's all turning on batteries, flicking switches, levering levers - h, the thrill of the chase. But eventually you will get the thing in the air and off into the great blue yonder.

The detail is a little over the top but flight sim fantatics will lap it up. The different scans and radar are very convincing. It even has the view from the cameras on the bombs, which is a nice touch.

One of the features that I most liked about Megafortress was the mouse control. On all the old flight sims, when you lifted the flaps or something, the lever or whatever moved on the screen, but on MF you actually move the thing with your mouse instead of using the keypad.

From the pilot's view, you control most of the plane's movement. You can use joystick if you want to, but cursor keys are generally a lot better. From here you can do things like identify yourself before your own guys blow you out of the sky, and turn the lights on, it's even got sodding air conditioning. I thought this was a plane, not Marks and Spencer.

To make full use of the game you would really have to scrutinise the manual quite hard - there were loads of little buttons and bells that I'm sure did something, it's just that I'm not quite sure what.

If you like flight sims you will enoy this game, but then again if you like them to be graphically smooth and speedy this is definitely not the game for you, and if you don't have a hard drive and you hate swapping disks then you're really knackered.

I tried to play this without a hard drive on an unexpanded 500 and it was diabolical - every single icon you click on brings the old "please insert disk blah blah" ten minutes of that and I was fit to nuke a nun. Like a lot of simulation games around at the moment, Megafortress suffers from painfully slow screen updates.

The only way I got it running at anything like a decent speed was by having it installed on a hard disk in an Amiga 3000 with an accelerator, so you can see how serious the problem is.

A lot of time has been taken over Megafortress, but it doesn't do anything new for flight sims. If you like 'em though, you'll like this one.

Everybody must have heard of the B-52 bomber. I mean, they were used in Vietnam, they were used in the Gulf, they've even had a hand named after them. Not bad going for a big, ugly, out-of-date strategic bomber.

The B-52 Stratofortress (as it's properly known) has had a hard time of late. What with all these new-fangled supersonic stealth aircraft, nobody seems to want a lumbering eight-engined bomber with the radar signature double that of an Italian opera-singer. Scrapheap here we come.

But perhaps not. A chap called Dale Brown, who apparently used to navigate with the USAF on these babies, wrote a book in 1987 about a B-52 which was modified at Dreamland, the secret aeronautical works deep within Nellis Airforce Base. The plane was given all the stealth characteristics so in vogue at the moment. He called it the Megafortress.

And here's the game of the book. What you've got is a completely black plane that flies almost exclusively at night, with no lights on, and tries to avoid everything it picks up on radar. So you can forget your G-LOC fighting skills - it's time to get defensive.

Rock Lobster
First you must learn to fly the beast. This means sussing out not one but five vital onboard situations, one for each crew-member. If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. For example, if you want to get the thing off the ground (and it is desirable for most of the missions), you must flick loads of switches in the commander's position, then swap to the co-pilot's seat to flip some more, then swap back.

To operate the switches and levers, you must use the mouse. Click on each button and the computer switches to whatever it wasn't switched to before. Once you get used to this, you can actually fly round most of the panels, clicking away and getting the flight systems running with surprising rapidity. But it does take a while to get used to it.

As well as the two actual pilots, there's a navigation station, an offensive-weapons console, and an electronic warfare operator (see panel). You'll need to be familiar with each if you're going to get anything done. There are three theatres you can operate the Megafortress in. Red Flag in Nevada is a training area, which gives you some mock-up baddies for you to avoid, as well as bombing ranges, air-to-air refueling points and missiles bases to hide from.

Then there's the Gulf. Yes, it's time to go up against Iraq once more, as you fly much the same sort of missions. This time, though, the enemy is real. They're angry, they're numerous and they don't like huge black planes flying over their territory.

If that doesn't pucker you enough, then there's always 'The Flight of the Old Dog'. Taken directly from Dale Brown's book, this sees you belting across Kamchatka in an effort to knock out a special laser developed by the USSR for use against good, honest Americans everywhere.

You have to beat the best Soviet equipment both on the ground and in the air during this mission, and, seeing as you're the only idiot that is stupid enough to actually try this sort of caper, you've got no support from any of the other US forces. It's a big mission, and it's packed with nerve-shredding tension almost from start to finish.

How this game differs from many flight sims is its time-scale is more realistic. This means each mission takes a while (about half-an-hour or more) and for much of the time you're sitting waiting for the action to start as you drone across the night-time landscape on autopilot at about 200 feet. But if you're having a go at the Old Dog mission, the tension really gets to you as the minutes tick past.

Megafortress is reminiscent of Birds Of Prey in that it's not a climb-in-and-fly sim. You do have to know the manual, and there are those five stations to master (see The Dream Team box). But the control panel, switch-clicking business works better than you'd think, and it's fairly forgiving when you're in a hurry.

The game is let down by the long disk-accessing pauses as you switch from station to station. The actual update rate isn't quite fast enough, either. Also, you only get to fly the Megafortress at night. This makes sense plotwise, but it limits the gorgeousness of the outside views somewhat. It's a pity because there would otherwise be some great external views. What you actually end up with is a black angular shape whizzing over a load of dark grey shapes on the ground.

Love shack
Because it's a bulking great bomber, the combat action in Megafortress is far removed from the usual manic panic. Instead of climbing, diving, weaving and generally chucking the plane around, you have to concentrate more on electronic warfare at the Offensive Weapons Officer's station. This gives it a nice tactical edge, and when you finally manage to fend off an attack on your ship, it's very satisfying.

But on the whole, Megafortress lacks the edge which would place it up there with the F19s and AH73s. There's just too much techie clicking and disk accessing and just not enough fast, furious action. The novelty of flying a one-off B-52 soon pales and you'll need to be dedicated if you're going to stick with the game through all of the available missions.

The supplied documentation is good, though, especially when you bear in mind the 'special price', and the level of detail is impressive if you're impressed by that sort of thing. Like Space Shuttle, Megafortress borders on the educational, and again like Shuttle, this is to the detriment of the seat-of-the-pants playability.

What was the name of that Kenny Everatt character? You know. The American general with the huge shoulder pads and a chest full of medals. The one who used to say 'We're gonna round 'em up, put 'em in a field and bomb the...'. Yeah, that's the one. Anyway, what ever his name was, he'd love this game.

The only trouble is that the anti-American pinko subversives haven't been conveniently rounded up and put in a nearby field. They're scattered from the Persian Gulf to the USSR and it's going to take some pretty high-tech equipment to track them down. To a certain extent, the high command has got the situation under control, but what they need is a bunch of guys who are prepared to climb inside a B52 and deliver 50,000 pounds of explosive mega-death missiles to the collective communist doorstep. Any takers?

ONE HEAD IS BETTER THAN FIVE
The game is unashamedly (and rightly so) based on Dale Brown's apocalyptic novel 'Flight Of The Old Dog', which chronicles the adventures of a group of die-hard pilots and their kill-hard B-52s. They are the West's only chance of salvation from an increasingly powerful Soviet bloc, and as it happens, Flight Of The Old Dog is one of the three scenarios in Megafortress, the other two being training at Red Flag in the US desert and the now ubiquitous missions against Iraqis in the Persian Gulf.

But this isn't one of your Knights of the Sky-style take-off have-a-dogfight-and-land flight sims. Oh no. That would be far too simple. You see, for a start the B-52s a long-distance stealth bomber, so it's not going to mix it up with any MiGs because it's trying to get to the target unnoticed.

And what's more, the B-52 has a five-man crew, which means on every flight you're the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, weapons officer and electronic counter-measures guy.

Apart form making it the perfect game for shizophrenics, this is where Megafortress really comes into its own.
It's quite unlike any other flight sim because the realism isn't just a purist's delight, it actually becomes an integral part of the game. Each position has a baffling screen of fully operational instruments, replete with dialable dials, switchable switches and buttonable buttons.

With all this attention to minute detail, you'd be forgiven for thinking Megafortress is a game for aeronautical train spotters. Sure, it's easy to imagine five hooded anoraks huddled around an Amiga, taking turns to operate each station, and getting kicks out of turning the landing lights off at exactly the right moment. But they'd be missing the point. Yes, it's amazing that you can twiddle the knobs and flick the switches, but it's their effect on the gameplay that's important, rather than the fact that they exist at all.

Controlling each of the positions becomes a sort of role-playing-cum-strategy sub-game that provides a telling test of nerve and intelligence. In fact, Megafortress is as much about strategy as it is about flying. For once the manual's not packed with explanations of next-to-useless manoeuvres such as the inverted 'S' and the Immelmann loop.

Alongside the essential instructions on how to operate the equipment, there are detailed explanations of electronics and avionics. Some of it reads just a bit like an A-level physics lesson (so I'm told), but it all adds to the game's highly realistic atmosphere.

I FORT IN THE WAR FOR YOU
As far as the flying is concerned, the frame rate is slow and doesn't compare with F-15 or Knights of the Sky. But it doesn't take long to realise that it doesn't really matter. The B-52 isn't going to get involved in any dogfighting, so the game's playability isn't impaired by the plane's sluggish movement. And anyway, as I said before, Megafortress isn't about fast and furious dogfights. It's about tension.

It's about sitting on the edge of your seat, waiting for the target to come into view. Hoping the enemy radar won't spot you. Checking the radar to look for incoming missiles. Telling everyone else in the room to shut the hell up while you're coming in to land. Worrying that you've missed the in-flight refuelling rendezvous.

Switching to the nav station and biting your nails as the plane sneaks around a mountain, a couple of hundred feet above the ground. If you want a nerve-racking computer game, you just found it.

But not everything is hunky-dory in this high-tech game world. Megafortress has several annoying aspects, but they are flaws in the game rather than the gameplay. The Red Flag training missions are a bit too basic to start with, and it can take quite a while to master the complexities and subtleties of each station on the plane.

There's no point trying to get more excitement by moving on to a combat mission because the B-52 will be wasted before you can 'Don't shoot at me. I'm still learning how to fly this crate'. Patience is most definitely a virtue in your first few hours with Megafortress.

The game is also let down by the 3D system. Apart from the slow frame rate, there's a distinct lack of ground detail until you reach the target area. The mountains have a horrible habit of leaping up out of thin air, which can be particularly unnerving when the plane's trying to avoid detection by following the contours of the land.

The external view is also a bit of a disappointment. With 50,000 pounds of bombs dropping every mission, it would have been great to sit back and watch the high explosives rain down on unsuspecting enemies. Unfortunately, from the external view, the explosions are accompanied by flickering graphical glitches that obscure the short-lived fireballs.

But if you can live without the most sophisticated graphics in the world, Megafortress has got a lot going for it. On the face of it, the idea of rendering five flight stations in such detail could have created an exercise in interminably dull, mind-numbing button-pushing. But the disparate elements gel together to create an enthralling challenge that provides a totally different experience to any other game I've played.

Megafortress has got atmosphere, excitement and tension in abundance. Forget what the trendies might say about the buttons and the switches, as far as I'm concerned, the attention to cockpit detail makes it all possible. Listen to Captain Morrissey of the Smithsonian School of Flying. Plane spotters of the world, unite, and take over.