Review by: Bob Mandel
Published: September 20, 1998

If there is one type of game that I simply cannot stand to play, it is the flight simulator. While I love tooling around in cars, motorcycles, tanks, boats, and submarines on the computer screen, I have never much enjoyed flying airplanes. My rationale here has to do both with the complexity of the controls, which always seem to be significantly more menacing than those of land or sea vehicles; and I’ve never really been able to enjoy the lack of direct interaction with anything else, moving quickly through vast emptiness while passing over interesting stuff too far below to see clearly.

So when I first heard about Segasoft’s Plane Crazy, I was a bit apprehensive (despite the clever title): as the only arcade flying racing game on the market, it combined my addiction to racing with my distaste for flying. Before I played the game, I thought to myself, can this combination really be fun? Would I have a Jekyll-Hyde reaction to it, loving one half and hating the other? Surely being in the air would eliminate all the tantalizing scenery and obstacles that I had become so used to on the ground.

But as has become quite common of late, I found my initial thoughts about the game to be completely wrong. After playing Plane Crazy nonstop for over a week, I now am beginning to wonder how I can manage to continue to enjoy the rather mundane and dull land racing games that are missing some of the special components that can only come from the amazing kind of plane racing presented here. Plane Crazy is produced by the little-known Scottish company InnerWorkings for SegaSoft, and all I can say is that the designers must possess incredible talent to make a game like this one.

Plane Crazy has 9 total race courses: 5 huge point-to-point courses, a bonus multi-lap course, and 3 practice courses for beginners. The 5 main courses are Boulder Dash, Dockland Dive, Monument Rush, Volcano Rapids, and Sin City Run. These courses are extremely different from one another not just in topography and physical appearance, but also in the types of obstacles you face and the type of flying you need to do to succeed. Your eight flying competitors are named Nemesis, Big Red, Tsunami, Bustin’ Bear, Slippy, Swifty, Duke, and Chub. All are quite cute and make no pretense of looking or handling like any real plane.