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"Squadron leader here, form up!"

Oh, er, Wilco, tango, foxtrot, over. Blimey, here's a tough challenge for a flight sim. This time I've got to fly in formation with the famous US Navy Blue Angels air display team. I use the term 'famous' loosely of course, 'cos I've never heard of them.

"Four seconds to first move. It's a diamond low-break cross followed by a fleur-de-lys and a left echelon break."

Yeah, yeah, over. Of course, one of the beauties of flight sims has always been that you can buzz the control tower, break through the clouds and simply be as free as a bird, so imagine the alarm bells that started ringing in my head when I found that I've got to co-ordinate my flight path with five other planes. Fortunately, there's a simulator within the simulator that's a wire frame representation of the world and your fellow planes, with each manoeuvre mapped out in the air by red boxes. You simply follow these boxes, and at the end of each pass, your flight path is drawn out and you can compare your wobbly attempts to the perfect, graceful arcs they wanted.

"Break, break, break!"

Oh dear. Unfortunately, whereas the sim is quite fun and rewarding, the actual airshows are a bit sad. The game jerks and glitches along, with the sky frequently turning green, and the display always being fraction behind your controls. Also, without the guiding red boxes, your only clue as to what the planes are going to do next is a little display in the bottom right corner, which means you spend all your time looking at this. The final problem is that you've got such a small viewing area, that once your team mates are out of sight, it's odd-on that you're never going to recover your position. It's a nice idea, but it just doesn't work and - Oops.

"Cancel airshow. Somebody scrape Cam off the runway. Over."

The simulation mode's more fun than the airshows, which seem an entirely unworkable idea. The fact is that there are many faster, smoother, better-looking flight sims out there that you can practise complicated manoeuvres on, and then go and shoot down planes afterwards. Strictly of novelty value for flight sim enthusiasts only.