You're probably saying 'It's hardly fair, Neil, to compare a serious flight simulation on the Mega Drive to what's basically a glorified shoot-'em-up on the far superior technology of the Mega CD, as Thunderhawk is.'

Well, tough. Life isn't fair. But that's not the point, anyway. F15 Strike Eagle 2 and Thunderhawk both came out previously on the Amiga, at more or less the same time (a couple of years ago). Thunderhawk, regardless of which format it's come out on, has moved with the times. F15 hasn't. The Mega Drive market and the Amiga one are two very different propositions - nobody, or at least nobody with an ounce of sense, gets a Mega Drive because they want to play simulations. It's like buying a Ferrari Testarossa then using it for stock car racing. It doesn't have enough keys, for a start (the Mega Drive, that is, not the Testarossa), and the very essence of a flight simulation is the scary multitude of controls and options and things to fiddle with at the touch of a button.

The Mega Drive does its best to cope here, but pausing the game and working your way through three sets of nested menus just for a quick external view as you send a missile winging into an enemy base isn't the stuff of which flowing entertainment is made, and it's missing a large degree of the point of why people play flight sims - you're not supposed to have all day to stop and fart about and think about stuff, it's supposed to be at least vaguely reminiscent of the fast-moving, quick-thinking, nerve-shredding action of the real thing. Another thing about flight sims is that they're MEANT to be hard to get into - you couldn't just climb into the cockpit and go off downing bogeys at the drop of a helmet, and however nice it might be for us pressed-for-time reviewers, I'm really not at all convinced that you should be able to load this up, start a mission without even opening the manual, and have downed your primary and secondary targets and be on the way home without ever having to press anything other than buttons 'B' and 'C'. This isn't supposed to be G-LOC, y'know.

I don't know, maybe I'm just in a bad mood or something. The scenario described above WAS, after all, the easiest mission on the easiest of the four difficulty settings, where you start in the air and an autopilot guides you directly to your targets if you leave the controls alone. Things do get an awful lot more demanding if you move up the levels, it's just that they don't do it in a very interesting or rewarding way. 90 percent of the baddies you'll blast in this game never make it further onto the screen than a red targeting hexagon on your Head Up Display, shortly followed by a billowing red-and-grey explosion - you never get to see the shape of their tailfins, far less the whites of their eyes.

Dogfighting is a confusing affair, with the computer handling most of the work with chaff and decoys it becomes just a series of random dives and rolls against empty backgrounds, waiting for your missiles to lock onto the usually-invisible enemy and then wasting him without any further intervention from you beyond a quick press of the fire button. You can dice with danger if you like by flying right at ground targets and delaying firing until the last possible second (indeed. it's the only way to get a look at any interesting scenery), but the knowledge that if things get hairy you can blow the baddies up and run for it at any moment tends to defuse the dramatic tension somewhat. The mission structure's a bit odd, too - the manual promises 'hundreds' of missions, so after completing the aforementioned first one with flying colours (quite literally - I couldn't be bothered landing, so I just ejected and ditched several million quid's worth of aeroplane in the briny. Still got a medal.) and deciding to have a go at the next job Libya could throw at me, I was a bit surprised to get the exact same mission to do again. Sorry, General, but I just blew them up, can I not bother with this one?

No such luck - after you choose your war theatre, there's no escape clause, you just have to get on with it until you finish the mission (again) or get shot down, which is annoying and stupid. As is the password option which, once entered, won't let you out until you've typed a valid password - forget the code or choose the option by mistake, and all you can do is reset your Mega Drive. The biggest disappointment of F15 Strike Eagle 2,though, comes in the area where flight sims are usually strongest - depth of gameplay. Even on the toughest difficulty level, this is a pretty simple game - long stretches of lonely flying in straight lines towards far-off targets (there's a 'time warp' option which is supposed to drastically speed up these bits, but it didn't seem to make any difference as far as I could see), followed by bursts of hectic but unsatisfying 'action' that feel more like playing chess by mail than a simulation of the most glamorous and exciting thing a young boy dreams about. Well, okay, one of the top five, anyway.

There's no visual hook to make you want to stick with it (you very rarely, in all honesty, get to see anything at all), no real ending, not even a high score table (which makes the awarding of mission and overall game points seem a bit, well, pointless). Like I say, maybe I'm just in a bad mood today. Normally I've got a bit of a soft spot for flight sims (makes a nice change from yet another platformer or the 600th baseball game of the year), but all through the hours I spent playing this, I couldn't stop thinking how attracted I was by the idea of a quick go on NHLPA 94, or Thunderhawk, or Ultimate Soccer, or Chester Cheetah, or anything at all, really. I've tried to make all the excuses I could think of for it, tried looking at it from every angle imaginable, but in the end there's no avoiding it. It's boring. It's dull. It's two years out of date and it looks it. It should never have been brought to the Mega Drive, it doesn't belong here. It's no fun.

SOUND    7

GAMEPLAY    6

GAME SIZE    8

ADDICTION    5

Still a fair flight sim, but it's just too old to cut it in (more or less) the same field as Thunderhawk). Two years too late, basically.

66 PERCENT

THE PAGE 3 REPORT - MiG-29 vs F15 STRIKE EAGLE The current Top Gun of Mega Drive flight sims is Domark's MiG-29, which scored a not-bad-at-all 80% in issue nine. By a complicated mathematical process involving an entirely arbitrary system of awarding 'points' according to 'vital statistics', MEGA will now attempt to define exactly why F15 fails to knock it off its perch.

ACTION-PACKED SEXINESS

Oh dear. Well, there's no shortage of enemies in either game, but unless your definiton of 'action' is an extremely loose one, encompassing dull aerobatic manouevres and remote-control baddie-blasting, you're not really going to have your heather set on fire by either of these games. Still, of the two, MiG-29 seeems to have a bit of a more even balance of shooting things down/flying along doing nothing very much compared to F15's huge expanses of emptiness followed by frenzied bursts of activity.

MiG-29    5        F15         4

DROP-DEAD GORGEOUSNESS

Neither of these games are great lookers, it has to be said. Huge expanses of blue, green and yellow are mostly the order of the day, with the biggest visual thrills coming from mountains (read: pyramids dropped arbitrarily in the middle of the desert) and roads (read: long strips of grey with white bits up the middle). F15 actually comes out very slightly on top thanks to a bit more variety and some slightly more impressive ground targets to blow away with long-range missiles (ie you never actually get to see much of them, but it's nice to know they're there), but there really isn't very much in it at all.

MiG-29    3        F15         3.5

EASY-PEASY SEXY PLAYABILITY

Like the computer versions, F15 actually comes out slightly on top in this one. You can actually more or less get into it straight away (although you'll come crashing back out of the sky with humiliating swiftness), whereas until you've had a pretty good plough through the instruction manual the MiG-29 will be stuck to the tarmac like a tall man with vertigo. To be honest, though, neither of these games are for the player who finds John Madden Football a bit too complex to get their head round properly.

MiG-29    1        F15         3

NUMBER OF SEXY EXTERNAL VIEWPOINTS (if you know what I mean, eh lads?)

Well, MiG-29's got eight external viewpoints, whereas F15's got seven. And that's that.

MiG-29    8        F15         7

DEEP DOWN SEX APPEAL

In terms of depth, F15's a definite winner. Most of the time the MiG's missions mainly involve large amounts of dogfight frolics on your way to a target, but F15 does have a bit more to do in terms of different things to shoot down. Neither game is as complex as interesting as you might be hoping for.

MiG-29    4        F15         5

LASTING SAUCINESS

MiG-29's problem was always that it got a bit floppy a bit quickly Ð with only five missions and a forbidding difficulty curve, lack of variety and frequent frustrating failure tend to put you off your, er, stroke a bit fairly early on. F15's definitely got a bit more stamina, but a repetitive streak means your interest will still sag pretty swiftly. Still, the very nature of both games means that you WILL be playing them for a bit longer than your average platformer, so a couple of extra marks there.

MiG-29    5        F15         6

THE VERDICT

MiG-29    26        F15         28.5

Statistics, eh? Who'd have 'em? Oh well, that's that sketch knackered.