Gamasutra – EA, DTI Bring Sims 2 , Pogo To In-Flight Entertainment

I hope it’s not registration-only, but at least it’s free. The gist is that while previous versions of airline in-flight entertainment have been limited to what I’d call "light-weight" games like Tetris and Who Wants to be a Millionaire (light-weight = in terms of CPU), the Sims 2 requires some hardware. If they’re going to make that level of power available to even a small fraction of the 200-300 customers on any flight at once, we’re talking about some serious hardware upgrades for airlines, in consoles or rack-mounted PCs.

Which makes me wonder why we’re not seeing Google Earth on the list? If there’s any application that ever made sense to use in-flight, that’s the one (I also mentioned a while back about the idea of stitching a 360 of video panorama from around the plane in real-time).

But the biggest thing airplanes are lacking right now is multi-player games. My wife and I tried playing Othello, two people using one controller in series. Not so hot. I suppose there’s always the risk that terrorists could use an airplane-hosted version of Counter Strike to plan their next move. But really, in-flight entertainment is all about passing the time.