ZX Spectrum - Lightning Simulator (Silverbird 1988) Preview

I have a huge soft spot for the [English Electric] Lightning [Flight] Simulator, a £1.99 budget title for the ZX Spectrum. The magazines pretty much panned it, but there's a lot of depth on offer. It just suffers from no manual and some impenetrable options. Anyway, ahead of a review here's a preview of the game, including a Krypton Factor style landing attempt.

[oporim]

This is the flight sim I played the most when I had Spectrum (I still have it btw).
It was THE MOST realistic flight sim back then, with tons of controls, runways, TACAN, dogfights, the hardest one to land or fight in. No other sim came even close to it.
I played this sim literally hundreds and hundreds of hours. Back then it was even fun to fly from one airfield to another and check and make a low pass near a radar station. Radar antenna was actually rotating. You could even air refule (I managed to do so one time).
So, best flight sim on Spectrum, it was even better than PC flight sims up to mid 90s.

[geezerdiamond]

I played this A LOT as a kid - and like you, I really liked it.
But then again, I liked Hewson's "Heathrow, ATC" 😁

[RoseTintedSpectrum]

This looks like the kind of game I would have loaded up about once a month, under the assumption that I'd now be able to grasp it, and spend 20 minutes trying to take off before giving up until the next month.

[WelcomeFM]

The joystick has to be backwards for it to be the right for the controls. Not bad though.

[paulskingley]

I'm impressed they managed to squeeze a flight sim into 48k. Bit bland on the graphics front but for learning ILS and following VORs it looks pretty good unless all them dials are for show.

[dwj]

I've not played this, thanks for sharing and making this.. I have a question, you say you liked the realism of it, did you ever play Sky Ranger? I was drawn into the feel of freedom