It seems every time we visit the RAF airshows, I feel the need to dust down my trusty PC flight yoke and take to the skies once again. Be it hunting down Messersmits in MS Combat Flight Sim or simple cruising around with Microsoft Flight Simulator I’ve always been enthralled by digital flight.
Thinking back now, my earliest recollection of playing on a ”Flight Sim’ was Flight Path 737 on our Commodore Plus/4. In theory it was a very simple affair, take off, fly over the mountains and land but boy was this a tough one to crack. Timing was critical, too much speed whilst lowering the under carriage and you were toast (graphically depicted by a cracked windscreen!).
Moving on to the Commodore 64, Micropose’s Gunship was by far my favorite and later on became became a huge fan of Microprose military titles. Despite being difficult at first to fly the Apache I was soon unleashing hell on enemy tanks.
It wasn’t until the early nineties, when owning both a Commodore Amiga and having access to a variety of early PC’s whilst working for IBM did my love of the combat flight sims quite literally ‘take 0ff’. On the Amiga, Electronic Arts F/A-18 Interceptor just blew me away with it’s ultra smooth vector graphics. I spent most of the time simply flying around, gunning the afterburner and whipping underneath the golden gate bridge in San Francisco or setting to rear view and barrel rolling after take off from an aircraft carrier ala ‘Top Gun’ style:-)
Back to Micropose, both F-19 Stealth Fighter and F-15 Strike Eagle II on the PC remain two of of my favorite games even today. I used to play them every lunch time at work and more often way in to the afternoon when no one was looking! The graphics and AI may look very dated now but back in the day they were state of the art. The sheer amount of detail not only in the actual game but in the supporting material like the keyboard overlay and the novel sized instruction book just pulled me in. I’ve been revisiting F-19 for this afternoon and it still hasn’t lost it’s appeal. Flying at break neck speeds as low as possible to avoid radar contact from snooping SAM sites whilst counting down the miles to primary and secondary targets….brilliant.
On the Amiga, F-29 Retaliator by Ocean wasn’t too bad although it didn’t seem to capture the suspense of the Microprose games. A huge favorite for my older brother but I much preferred the updated Gunship 2000, again by Microprose. I used to love sneaking low between the hills, rising just enough for rocket site to spot me and then duck down again before it could fire. Still keeping out of site I’d fly around him and when I popped my head above the hill he’d be looking in the wrong direction and easy pickings.
Over the years, as PC’s have advanced so too have Flight Simulators but it’s these early titles that bring back fond memories for me and I highly recommend trying out a computer emulator or Dosbox and enjoy a flight down memory lane.
Other notable favorites are –
Wings – Amiga
Red Baron – PC
Falcon 4.0 – PC
Warbirds – PC
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator – PC
Crimsons Skies – PC *I’ve had to set up a separate PC with older GFX card to get this running recently as modern Nvidia forceware drivers aren’t compatible.
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