Reviews (do you care what I think?).

Review of Babylon Scenery

by jt-3d

Well, at last somebody's here to tell you whether to get the Babylon scenery by Raad Hermes. In a word, outstanding! If you don't want to take my word for it read on and take my word later. I've included alot of screenshots because a picture is worth a thousand words or so. (You can quote me on that). Well, this scenery caught my attention one day whilst browsing the new scenery at flightsim.com. Hmm, the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon' I thought. I've seen a picture of it on A&E or some history channel, why not see the (virtual) real thing since it doesn't exist anymore. It was, after all, one of the 7 seven wonders of the world. So I grabbed it(bable.zip for FS2000) and put it in. A short little hop to make sure it worked. It looked interesting so I decided to check it out later when I had more time. I got more time and I came back to Babylon. (Now that's a Charleton Heston movie title). You can start at the Royal Airport which the artist put there for you to start from. It's right across the river from Babylon. Ok, I'm off. I used a Cessna 152 for the flight, figuring that I would need a slow plane. The 152 is still too fast to see it all. It's incredible!! The textures are very detailed. Lots of paint on the walls. Brick walls, not just tan colored. This is great stuff. If you can fly a helicopter in FS bring one. You'll be glad you did. I can't so the 152 was my ride. Maybe I'll bring one of the trucks over from FS98 and have a really good look. Well, let's get the pics up. There's 8 screeshots so that's 8000 words. I guess that's big enough. I'll be back.

We blast off at dawn. (Really, I just thought a dawn shot would look cool so I reset the clock.)

The first thing I ran into was one of the gates into the city. (There are alot of gates.) This is no hole in the wall. They are true 3d with side walls and floors. The Greek Theater is in the background.

Flying over the Temple of Ishtar. I have no idea what the orange thing is. Some pagan artifact I guess.

This is a good example of the detail that awaits you in the town of Babylon. Note paintings on the wall and patterns on the parapits.

Here's the Temple of Marduk. The tower of Babel in the back and the Hanging Gardens past that. Note, the main street into the city with shops along the side. Very nice, you can imagine the people walking along the street past shops.

Here's a shot of the main gate into the city. More paintings on the wall.

At one point I found myself back over the Royal Airport. I noticed that the detail started here not across the river. Now that's a terminal! Note the folks between the terminal and the lion hangar.

We end this tour where we started, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Once again past the Gardens and back to Royal. This has been a long flight.(Actually, I just could'nt decide between a dusk and dawn screenshot.)

Ok, so why should you get babel.zip? Because I say so! Also I put this review on the internet and everything on the internet is true so it must be great. Really, it is good and deserves a look. If you find that you really don't like it, you can always dump it since there's no flatten switches and whatnot. I don't think you will though.

Complaints? Few and very minor. First, the palms look kinda broken no matter how close you get to them and the same with the people at the airport. The Greek Theater should have seats and even actors, maybe take the people texture and put it on the stage. That's it. Everything else is fine. Trust me, it's great. Be sure to read the 'Readme'. It has some history of the place and gives credit where credit is due.

Ok, so scoot on over to Simviation and grab babel.zip. Also available at Flightsim. 539k download. You must have it. Get it, install it, fly it, get away from Meigs and be free.

Tech section says: This scenery did'nt seem to slow my frames at all until I crashed so don't crash. (It was a cool crash though.) My machine has a K6-2 400mhz, 96 RAM and a real crappy 3d card so there.

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