Flight Control HD (PC) (2010)

Overview and Recommendation:
Flight Control is a simple game that's well suited for play on a tablet. With just a small number of levels, the game is great for a casual gaming experience, but has a high likelihood of growing stale.

In other words, while trying to get a high score on all the levels is fun, a simple game like Flight Control would have either benefited from having more levels or from a level creator so that users can make and share custom levels.

In any case, the goal of Flight Control is to direct incoming planes and helicopters towards the appropriate landing strips and landing zones. While the concept is simple, the player needs to avoid collisions and keep in mind that the different types of aircraft travel at different speeds.

While a mouse works pretty well, this game was originally designed for iOS and truly built with touch controls in mind. As such, I would recommend getting Flight Control HD for any platform which has touchscreen input (e.g., smartphones and tablets).

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20111207:
This is my first time playing Flight Control. Achievements were earned from 5:31pm (Safety Card - Read the game tutorial) to 6:51pm (Nice Shades - Open all umbrellas simultaneously on the Stunt airfield).

[20140420]

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20111230:
While I may have played the games here and there, the only other date attached to an achievement is today at 3:57pm (Snowball - Land 5 helicopters in a row on the Windy airfield).

[20140420]

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20140420:
I played today and tried to complete the last of my achievements.

2:33pm Crowded Sky - Reach 20 "Most Aircraft on Screen"
: I accomplished this one while trying to accomplish Restrainer.

3:07pm Restrainer - Land no aircraft for 3 minutes
3:21pm Summer Drought - Land 50 aircraft without flying through any gates on the Stunt airfield
: I felt as if the game handed me this achievement before I landed 50 aircraft. Maybe the achievement is cumulative.
4:11pm Wings - Land 200 aircraft in a game
: I used the Stunt airfield and focused on getting the stunt airplanes through as many gates as possible, because the bonus score grows non-linearly. In short, getting a stunt airplane through all the gates earns sixteen extra points.

Interested in accomplishing the Veteran achievement (Play 200 games in total), I searched for a way to determine the total number of games I've played thus far. Searching the internet, I found the following tip:

To see how many games you've played, go to output_log file in the Flight Control folder in your steamapps. CTRL+F (find) the word "games", it will show you number of games played.

Sadly, I have only played 53 games total thus far and decided to set this last achievement aside for a rainy day.

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20240322 Snapshot:
output_log:
(Level: High Score | Total Planes Landed | Most Planes On Screen)
Original: 121 | 579 | 24
Beach: 41 | 65 | 10
Carrier: 39 | 53 | 9
HD Original and Beach: 38 | 38 | 15
HD Beach and Carrier: 49 | 75 | 28
HD Outback and Original: 34 | 177 | 23
Outback: 56 | 56 | 9
Windy: 92 | 280 | 13
Stunt: 291 | 1351 | 22
Total Planes Landed - Overall: 2674
Number of Games Played: 80

Steam Game Time: 4.7 hours (cumulative game time)
Last Played: 20150206

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20240322:
Today I played some Flight Control HD. I spent some time playing the game while watching The Seven Deadly Sins, and so a good chunk of the time (maybe about 20%) was spent idle.

Setup: Mouse. Too lazy to load the game onto a tablet, I just played on my computer. But I think this game is best with a tablet.

Note that one element I tried to take advantage of is that transportations can actually approach the landing spot from multiple directions. An element that I did not take advantage of is pausing the game to think about how to deal with potential collisions. Note that one can manually pause the game by pressing pause, but that will bring up a menu screen. Instead, one can click on a different window and the game will automatically pause without a menu screen coming up.

It's not an amazing game, but it is a great casual game. I'll give it a solid 4.0 out of 5.

Steam Game Time: 9.8 hours (cumulative game time) / 5.1 hours (session game time)

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Flight Control HD (PC) (2010)*
*Flight Control (iOS) (2009)

Relevant Links:
Flight Control (video game) (Wikipedia.org)
Flight Control HD (Steam Store Page)