	Over the years, flight sims have come in all shapes and sizes.  From your classic Falcon 3.0, to the greatest dogfighting simulator of all time, Red Baron.  Each sub genre of flight sims has its very own king of the hill.  Red Baron for WW 1, There are too many WW II game to list off, and definitive but old present day king, Falcon 3.0.  Origin has come storming onto the simulations market within this past year,  with two extremely popular games, Strike Commander and Pacific Strike.  They hope to make it a triple crown with their third sim release, Wings of Glory.  If you've ever played Red Baron, and wished for something with a little more plot, and a lot more graphic intensity, Wings of Glory is going to be the game for you.  

	Origin has taken the basic engine from Strike Commander, tweaked it considerably, and thrown in some classic planes from the great war.  These include the Sopwith Camel, the Spad 13, and the Fokker Dr 1, just to name a few.  The graphic detail that was missing in Dynamix's Red Baron, has now been put in by Origin.  The graphic detail is truly a sight to see, the rolling hills, the full three dimensional clouds, and if your computer is ballsy enough, there will even be scattered trees here and there.  Origin's creative team for Wings of Glory has gone to painstaking lengths to put in the most graphic detail ever seen in a flight sim.  Each plain has been rendered in 3D studio, with intricate decals painted on in various brilliant colors.  To add realism to Wings of Glory, Origin has added hot spots to their three dimensional wire meshes.  When one of these hot spots is hit by flak or gun fire, the character controlling the plane will actually lose control of that section, whether it's the ailerons, the rudders, or even the pilot himself.  Wings of Glory should easily be the most realistic WW I flight sim out there when it comes to flight dynamics.  

	As usual, Origin has included some incredible sound effects.  Some of which include creaking of the planes' wooden frame when you take tight corners, and the wind rustling through the wings when one is gliding with the engine shut off.

	In Red Baron, the player was strictly limited to air to air combat, with the occasional flak burst being shot up from the ground.  In Wings of Glory, the player will be able to fly bombing missions, and some planes in the latter half of the game will even have rockets.  Origin has obviously done their homework on this one. 

	The overall variety of planes in Wings of glory will be excellent, though the player will  actually only be able to fly five different planes, there will be over twenty planes, balloons, and zeppelins to shoot at, not to mention the objects on the ground.

	The whole of the game is a set cinematic storyline, in the style that Origin is famous for.  The player character is an American that has come to England to fight in the ladder half of World War one.  As usual, the difficulty will slowly increase as you complete each mission, and there are changes in the plot according to success.  But for those who finish the campaign, or just plain want to blast things out of the sky, there is a gauntlet mode in which the player starts out in a single dogfight and then continues to rapidly work his way up the difficulty scale.  In the gauntlet, planes come towards you in what are called waves, you finish one wave off, and you have to deal with the next until you die.  The realism settings are cranked down for this mode to give a more arcadish feeling.  The other two parts of the game are the mission recorder, and the mission builder.  As you might have guessed the mission builder gives the player an infinite amount of possibilities when it comes to mission types.  And the recorder lets you look at your last mission with the options to change your views, save it, jump from plane to plane, etc., etc.  With one last helpful option, which is the ability to jump into the game at a certain point in the tape, a la Red Baron.

	One thing that Red Baron was missing was a multi-player option, either in network play or via modem.  Sierra supposedly fixed this with their on-line version, but not everyone wants to call up and pay to play with another human, or join some service.  For some reason, rumors started to circulate a couple of months ago about Wings of Glory being network and modem playable, with a possibility of two people on one computer questionable, but when asked Origin would not comment on whether or not these rumors were true.  This could be a turning point in the making of Wings of Glory.  Either Origin could create an incredible game, with the ability to be one of the best multi-player games ever, or they could sit on their ass and be a little more conservative, and let Wings of Glory just be another cinematic storyline with beautiful graphics. I'd have to say that it's a pretty good assumption that everyone would like to see Wings of Glory come out as a multiplayer game, but we'll just have to wait and see.

	From what I could see, even if Origin skips the multi-player option, Wings of Glory will  easily become the top dog if not at least Red Baron's equal, in the WW I flight sim category.  So for all of you mad dogfighters out there, Origin's got one hell of a game coming down the pipeline.
