Aviation & Space
Wings: Midway to Hiroshima
Discovery Channel Multimedia has a series of aviation CD-ROMs based on their popular Wings television series, including Wings: Midway to Hiroshima, Wings: Korea to Vietnam, and the upcoming Wings: Saigon to the Persian Gulf. The angle, as you might have gathered, is war. Once you’ve accepted that, these big-budget productions yield a lot of quality content: tactics and weapons, timelines that literally walk you day-by-day through wars, plentiful details, excellent 3-D models, good search mechanisms and smooth-running video, large databases, and, of course, bonus flight simulators. It’s too bad that there’s a flavor of military propaganda throughout the proceedings. Aces who lost their lives are portrayed as heroes who achieved honor – there’s not even a hint of tragedy. Another section happily rates U.S. pilots by “score,” meaning enemy fatalities. These discs are more involved than Air Power and more specific than Warplanes and, if you’re a military aviation buff, they will make fine additions to your collection.
– January 1996
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