Tim Smith

Well spotted, I'm flattered you read all the way through. Corrected now. Kind regards Tim

Managed to break the undercarriage in my first attempt at landing the Su-25; very disorientated by the kph and m instead of mph and feet! The second attempt was much smoother though the plane did catch fire. I was able to shut down both engines and open the canopy though. I counted that as a landing I walked away from

I've never tried firing a salvo; the LA icon appears again after the first missle. I can't remember whether or not you have to wait for the first to hit. I have managed to fire off a couple in one pass like this. Tim

You get in the car and lean forward to turn on the batteries.... I've really done this and, what is more, tell people with a kind of pride in my voice

>Welcome to the forums and I hope you will love BS as much as anyone here :) Thanks, I am so far! Tim

One thing I did forget to mention, well ask if anyone else has ever done this. Having worked quite hard to memorise the start up procedure, I found myself leaning forward in the car to turn on the Ground DC power! Wishful thinking! Tim

Sorry, the curse of not being able to get tone across properly in forums! I'm not offended, but wanted to set the record straight, and show that I'm reading the forum too! Kind regards Tim

I had a similar problem because I was forgetting to put the throttles to auto - PgUp twice - before take off

My review Hi all I'm flattered to see the link to my review here, I thought I'd dive in and respond to some of your comments. Firstly, I do wish I could have written more about Black Shark and was conscious that there was so much that I had to leave out of the review. I was somewhat envious of the PC Pilot review having so much space. Having said that, we don't normally do full page game reviews like that so please take that as a (well deserved) compliment. I did post some screenshots over at our blog and made a few twitters too - mostly about my more amusing crashes* http://www.windowswatch.co.uk/2009/03/ka50-black-shar-1.html Sadly it's been a busy few weeks and I haven't had as much time to do this as I'd like. And I suppose I can't really ignore the bad review of my good review... >A very shallow review. See above. >Looks like the reviewer read DCS advertisement, Well there was a reviewers guide that was sent with it, though to be honest I spent more time with the Flight Guide (all 350 pages of it) and the very good introduction that Simhq.com wrote. >then unpacked the game, Close - downloaded >flew around for 20 minutes and wrote it. Now here I will mount my most vigorous defence! I played the game every lunch time for about a month :) , with a couple of afternoon sessions when I felt that I could get away with it - it was a proper review after all! So that's probably somewhere between 10 and 20 hours of solid gameplay. I'm confident at starting the helicopter from scratch, though I'm still getting the hang of shooting under fire! For the record I'm still playing it. >"Tanks can shoot", great job, Computeractive! Small misquote if I may, I was refering to the ability of tanks to engage more than one target. Anyway, enough of the negative stuff. I've really enjoyed Black Shark and think it's the best helicopter simulator I've played, certainly more engaging than Search and Rescue 4 and Med-evac. Flight Sim X comes close but I have to admit that without plenty of missions I can get bored! And if I'm permitted a small rig boast, Black Shark is very good fun with 2 joysticks and rudder pedals. Now if I can just afford that Saitek X52 pro..... Enjoying the discussions on the forum Happy landings Tim www.computeractive.co.uk *Things I have learnt - Engage autothrottle - had to learn that keyboard shortcut! - Don't fly around with the collective all the way up as the rotors come off - Those switches on the back panel are important when it comes to the autopilot - Close the door at some point during startup - Turning off the weapons system disables the radar altimeter (I know I know that's what the Master arm switch is for) - Blinding turning every switch on also engages the weapons system training mode. That was a very frustrating mission!