It's said that a fear of flying can be alleviated by learning to fly a plane, familiarizing yourself with all the procedures and checks that are done to ensure a successful journey. Naturally this sounds like a completely dreadful idea to me, as putting me at the controls of one is a surefire way to significantly reduce the safety of a flight - but there was a game called F29 Retaliator that I used to play a lot, and I've been meaning to go back to it for a while.

When I say I "played" it, I really mean "fooled around with". This was one of the games that somehow grew on the hard drive - I assume that my dad got it from someone at work - and without the manual, doing anything involved a substantial amount of guesswork and just pressing buttons to see what they did. After some experimentation, I managed to memorize how to take off (press B to take the brakes off, Z for the throttle, then wait until you've built up enough speed before tilting the nose up) but the game had a simple but effective copy protection mechanic - it listed absolutely no mission descriptions in the game, and put them all in the manual instead. All I could really do, then, was fly around the sky, point myself at likely-looking buildings or blocky tanks on the ground and then fire a barrage of missiles, hoping that I wasn't accidentally dropping bombs on our lot instead.

Sometimes that met with success, but having worked out how to take off and fly, landing was a much greater problem - you have the option to eject, but if you do this too much, the nice people back at base tend to get annoyed about you destroying their plane. I got around it by just sort of circling around blowing raspberries at anti-aircraft installations until my wings were sufficiently perforated to justify using the ejector seat - as long as you complete the mission and survive (preferably ejecting right over your base), you'll live to fight another day.

But this time, I decided to bring closure to yet another one of those little things I'd never achieved - I resolved to successfully return the plane to the ground.




What next? Well, with that outcome, the next obvious step is to go on to star in another game where I lead an underground group consisting of a boggle-eyed geriatric, pyromaniac astronaut, someone covered in bees and General Electric, until I'm eventually killed by Big Boss. At least it's better to be remembered for that than for being a really bad pilot.