Games often need the player to demonstrate some kind of skill to be applied before showing them more. It’s arguably true of lots of art in different ways, but usually the art itself isn’t providing such a tangible interface for the process. Your mind might slide off a conceptual novel, but whether you get it or not, on your first or second or third reading, you will have seen its contents and what you made of them is a matter for you. The novel won’t tell you that you haven’t got it and stick its pages together until you have.
Yes, this is inevitable point in the project where I have to point out that I am really very bad at something, and it’s not surprising that it turns out to be a flight sim. Something about them just doesn’t sit well with me. I could do Elite, but that’s in space and even so I was relying on the patience of my seven-year-old self to back me up. Before even getting that far, ACE presents another barrier which was also previously in Elite, a copy protection mechanism called Lenslok. You had to look at the screen through a special lens to decipher codes on screen, and it was enough of a faff that it didn’t carry on being used for long. Between that and the free calculator watch you could get with the game, that’s a lot of supplementary equipment to take flight with. There’s even an emulator for the Lenslok, too.
I can’t tell you much about the massive range of content that the menus and demo mode suggest Air Combat Emulator has, because I didn’t get to them. Lenses locked, launch speed reached, undercarriage retracted, I did eventually manage to take off, but not much more. Unlike some other games, I can’t really blame insane difficulty for that either. It’s just me.
So I didn’t really play ACE. Except, of course I did. I got an experience within the range of those offered by the game. The range of controls, displays and warnings in the cockpit shown on screen certainly made an impression in their complexity. I got to play Failing At Being A Pilot Simulator. And in doing so, experiencing it with the Spectrum’s extremely limited 3D and all, I got a bit of a feel of the freedom of flight out of the game. It might have been the freedom to lurch wildly towards the ground, but is that not freedom too?
