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The Crimson Skies are dark at last...
Oct. 6th, 2007 03:12 pmThere was an announcement, back in May (then June, then July…) that Microsoft were finally going to shut down their support site for the Crimson Skies computer game. They must have finally pulled the plug sometime last week.
Too bad. End of an era, that kind of thing.
Ah well, seven years is a pretty good run in the computer-game world. It looks as though a good deal of the basic information has been preserved by WayBackMachine, but there are an unhappy lot of broken graphics boxes on the couple of archived pages I checked, and the additional data on javascript popups won't pop any more. So I'm glad I spent a useful evening some time back, carefully leeching the site of all the goodies that I'd hate to see vanish forever.
I don't know how many of you know about this game; it originated as a board-and-miniatures affair, then branched out into PC and X-Box. My friend Jim sent me a PC copy as a birthday present about three years back, and it was (still is) a cracking lot of fun!
As previous entries on this blog have shown, I've a fondness for retro stuff, whether cameras, typewriters, cars, planes – and now fountain pens (yes, really!) I even sometimes wear a fedora... So it's not hard to imagine how I enjoyed an alternate-history air-combat game set in the crowded pulp-fiction period of the 1930s. In case you wondered, it's crowded because Indiana Jones, The Shadow, Sky Captain, The Rocketeer, the Air Pirates and Air Militias of Crimson Skies and a whole bunch of other worthies are loose about the place. Bad Guys have to sign a roster to find out who'll nab them this week, and there's a queue for the loo at every lost city and hidden treasure site.
There's a Wikipedia entry about it of course, but none of the stuff I've read either there or elsewhere has managed to pin down the playability and just plain (plane?) entertainment value of the thing. There's a place for totally authentic flight sims like IL2 Sturmovik, but so much accuracy doesn't belong here and the programmers didn't try squeezing it in. Instead they went for atmosphere, and there's enough of that to get into your head like a good tune (plenty of those, too, if you like swing!) Even the voice-acting in the cut-scenes is a joy, just gung-ho enough for pastiche, not enough for parody.
It should have been a movie or at least a TV series, and if put on the screen with the same gusto as the game was put on the monitor, it would have been a lot more entertaining than Sky Captain, which this viewer found promising-but-dull. More plot, please, and less reliance on gosh-wow CGI effects. After so long, CGI effects aren't gosh-wow any more. They're just another set of tools that help to construct the story – honestly, if you still find the high-tech equivalent of hammer, screwdriver and drill gosh-wow, you need to get out more.
So Crimson Skies is gone...
Sometime this evening I'm going to take a break from aquatic buccaneers and turn my attention to air pirates (Fast planes, hot dames, big guns and adventure as high as the clouds!) I'll put on some Benny Goodman, brew a pot of hot joe, pour myself a slug of rye-on-the-rocks, then settle in to read Spicy Air Tales #4 – Charlie Steele and the Menace from the Mountains.
See you when I land...
Too bad. End of an era, that kind of thing.
Ah well, seven years is a pretty good run in the computer-game world. It looks as though a good deal of the basic information has been preserved by WayBackMachine, but there are an unhappy lot of broken graphics boxes on the couple of archived pages I checked, and the additional data on javascript popups won't pop any more. So I'm glad I spent a useful evening some time back, carefully leeching the site of all the goodies that I'd hate to see vanish forever.
I don't know how many of you know about this game; it originated as a board-and-miniatures affair, then branched out into PC and X-Box. My friend Jim sent me a PC copy as a birthday present about three years back, and it was (still is) a cracking lot of fun!
As previous entries on this blog have shown, I've a fondness for retro stuff, whether cameras, typewriters, cars, planes – and now fountain pens (yes, really!) I even sometimes wear a fedora... So it's not hard to imagine how I enjoyed an alternate-history air-combat game set in the crowded pulp-fiction period of the 1930s. In case you wondered, it's crowded because Indiana Jones, The Shadow, Sky Captain, The Rocketeer, the Air Pirates and Air Militias of Crimson Skies and a whole bunch of other worthies are loose about the place. Bad Guys have to sign a roster to find out who'll nab them this week, and there's a queue for the loo at every lost city and hidden treasure site.
There's a Wikipedia entry about it of course, but none of the stuff I've read either there or elsewhere has managed to pin down the playability and just plain (plane?) entertainment value of the thing. There's a place for totally authentic flight sims like IL2 Sturmovik, but so much accuracy doesn't belong here and the programmers didn't try squeezing it in. Instead they went for atmosphere, and there's enough of that to get into your head like a good tune (plenty of those, too, if you like swing!) Even the voice-acting in the cut-scenes is a joy, just gung-ho enough for pastiche, not enough for parody.
It should have been a movie or at least a TV series, and if put on the screen with the same gusto as the game was put on the monitor, it would have been a lot more entertaining than Sky Captain, which this viewer found promising-but-dull. More plot, please, and less reliance on gosh-wow CGI effects. After so long, CGI effects aren't gosh-wow any more. They're just another set of tools that help to construct the story – honestly, if you still find the high-tech equivalent of hammer, screwdriver and drill gosh-wow, you need to get out more.
So Crimson Skies is gone...
Sometime this evening I'm going to take a break from aquatic buccaneers and turn my attention to air pirates (Fast planes, hot dames, big guns and adventure as high as the clouds!) I'll put on some Benny Goodman, brew a pot of hot joe, pour myself a slug of rye-on-the-rocks, then settle in to read Spicy Air Tales #4 – Charlie Steele and the Menace from the Mountains.
See you when I land...
