We’ve released yet another update to Airport Madness 4 which you can grab here, free to existing owners of this product.  New challenges have been added, my favorite being “Fast Forward”, which speeds up the game play to 2X speed.  I actually found it to be more fun than the core game itself, which suggests something.

With the first version of Airport Madness, there were complaints that players were not being given enough time to react. It’s a real-world problem as well, but nevertheless, I changed future versions of the game to be more ‘zoomed out’ with smaller airplanes, offering plenty of time to react.   But I think the game lost something when I did that.  The next version of Airport Madness has a bizarre theme which I’m very excited about, but it will require that I ‘zoom back in’.  Airport Madness was never a simulation, but all game.  I’m striving to keep it there, in risk of disappointing those who want ‘more features’.

I received a great email from someone the other day who feels that Airport Madness has become a big tangled ball of yarn.   In Airport Madness 4 there are different user profiles to choose from.  And you must pick a name.  And there are challenges and different levels.  But the levels must be unlocked.  And what’s the trophy case all about?  With each version, we experiment with new stuff.  The stuff that works gets added to future versions.  Everything else gets cut.

The next version of Airport Madness deserves a better name than ‘number 5’.  I think we can do better than that.  After all, it’s going to have an entirely different feel to it.  It practically deserves a new name altogether.  We will have to see.  I don’t think anyone’s going to by ‘Airport Madness 17’ if they already own the first 16 versions.  Realistically there are at least four variations on the Airport Madness theme that I would like to try.

Needless to say, we will be keeping ourselves very busy for the foreseeable future, not just with Airport Madness, but the Radar Chaos series, which will likely have several future versions of it’s own.  Sky Madness will also be getting an overhaul this summer.   If it makes a decent comeback, there could be future versions of that as well.

I hope to soon find time to try something entirely different.   I think there are untapped ideas in flight simulation, which seems to have kind of disappeared over the last few years.   You can read about it all here first.  I will do what I can to keep everyone posted!