Pilotwings avoided this by keeping the player's sprite at a fixed distance from the player’s view, and by placing almost all of the game world on the faux-3D ground plane. In my recent play-through, the only sprites I saw were the green rings that players fly through during challenges and the little rising clouds that represent thermal updrafts. When combined with the beautiful design work on those few extant sprites, we have a gorgeous game with few graphical anomalies to pull us out of it.

I was likewise impressed by the physics system used for the game, which seemed to contain relatively accurate simulations for velocity, acceleration, and mass. I first noticed this in the Rocket Belt (jetpack) levels, where our horizontal motion can be likened to moving on a flat, frictionless plane. Where similar games with less of a focus on realism tend to allow players to stop and start and turn on a time, there’s a significant amount of inertia here. It becomes clear that if we want to finish the challenge with a good time, we have to learn how to drift, turning and firing the Rocket Belt at an angle perpendicular to our motion to create a new vector without requiring a complete stop.