YMMV / Crimson Skies

• Adaptation Displacement: More people are familiar with the video games than the original board game.
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: The outlandish aircraft designs in the game are largely based on real outlandish aircraft designs engineers experimented with in the early days of commercial aviation.
• Contested Sequel: High Road to Revenge is this to a fair number of fans of the original game. The reasons usually cited are the simplified combat systems and a Denser and Wackier tone.
• Cult Classic: Both games were loved by those who played them, but neither one did the numbers sales-wise.
• Demonic Spiders: Downplayed with the Hoplite gyrocopters. Though their appearance doesn't necessarily mean an automatic defeat and loss of hope, they are the most maneuverable aircraft in the game with good weaponry and armor to boot with only their slow speed preventing them from becoming Game-Breaker enemies.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Pirate's Gold and Rogue Flyer were supposed to be the first novels of two trilogies: Wings of Fortune and Wings of Justice. Despite the books being fully written, only these two were published in English. In Germany, however, Crimson Skies proved popular enough to warrant the publication of all six novels.
• Obvious Beta: The PC game isn't the most glaring example of this trope in action, but it's pretty clear there wasn't much time to polish it before release. The original unpatched game suffered a lot of small issues, and on the computers available at the time, it was particularly prone to massive frame rate drops even in completely nonsensical areas (such as some of the menus). Patches released later on did fix some of the minor annoyances including the save corruption bug, but the taxing performance requirements unfortunately would only be resolved by technology advancements.
• Vindicated by History: Part of the reason the original game didn't perform particularly well on release was its Obvious Beta release state (including a particularly nasty Game-Breaking Bug that could corrupt your save file), as well as being extremely taxing on the computers available at the time. The game may not have achieved Cult Classic status had it not been for patches that fixed some of the biggest issues and maturing technology allowing players to fully enjoy the game as it had been originally intended.

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