My favorite PC flight simulators

I started out on my first flight sim before I even had a computer. This was an old version for the Apple II that one of my teachers had (back in WA), and would let me try. I think that it may have been one of the first versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I will never be sure. The graphics were crude non-shaded colored polygons, and the flight model took gravity into consideration, but I think that was it.

After that, I went years without stick time. This next sim was Chuck Yeagers Air Combat. For sheer quick fun, you will be hard pressed to beat this title. The graphics are poor by today's standards, but for the time, they were great. I remember telling my brother Tom something about how good sim's would be in just a few years.

In college, my roommate had a 286 with a EGA monitor. I spent hours on the internet looking for games to play on that thing. Eventually I came across a combat sim called LHX. This met my cramped requirements for that PC. Again, I would spend hours playing that game, and it meant some sleepy days at school.

1995 - Eventually I pieced together a PC, and began looking for a flight sim. One day I came across a game called EF2000. This is a DOS based simulator (we only had Windows 3.1 back then, and windows 3.1 took too much overhead to run any serious games). I am eternally grateful to the makers of EF2000 (DID and Infogrames). This sim was the first that I know of with a dynamic campaign. This was a change from previous sims, in that the missions were never the same twice. Older games had scripted missions, and once you finished all of the missions, there was nothing more to do. If you played the game again, you ended up playing the same missions that you just finished. With EF2000, your subsequent missions would be dependent on how well you did in previous missions. For example, if you were sent on an Airfield Denial mission, but you flight was shot down on the way in, then that enemy airfield is still in commission, and sending out sorties. But if you do knock it out, then your ground troops may be able to overpower their ground defenses, and the base is ours. Now that we have the base, we can strike deeper into the enemies territory. My favorite strategy was to 'airfield hop' until we had effectively stopped all enemy airpower.

1997 - DID updated EF2000 to EF2000 v2.0, which enabled Windows 95 to play this treat.

1997 - The next big flight sim (for me) was F22, also by DID. This was basically the same sim, but based on the impressive US F22. Unfortunately, DID had problems completing the dynamic campaign design, and released this with scripted missions.

1998 - But DID eventually made good on it's promises for a dynamic campaign, and release Total Air War (TAW). Although this game is 3 years old, I still play it more than any other jet sim.

2000 - Enemy Engaged RAH-66 Comanche vs KA-52 Hokum (EECH) is released. Holy crap this is a good sim. I play this more than any other sim right now. This is the first helicopter sim that I was willing to play with just a joystick and keyboard, but this sim convinced me to but the Siatek X36F USB HOTAS system. I love it. I use the throttle as the helicopter collective, and rotary knob 1 for rudder. I stopped using the built in rudder control, because it always returns to center, and with all of the realism turned up, the torque from that main rotor is never constant at different collective inputs, so when that rudder returns to zero, you are yawing. With a rotary knob, I can dial in the amount of rudder, and leave it X% off of center, which lets me fly without that annoying sideslip. This isn't an issue when you fly the Hokum, because it's dual counter-rotating concentric main rotors produce no torque, except when it intentionally produces torque for turning. This way you will never need rudder input unless you are turning. But who wants to fly that Russian piece of crap. The Comanche cannot be seen by this flying tank when flying in LO (Low Observability) mode (radar off, weapons stored internally).

2001 - The successor to EF2000 and TAW will soon be out! Eurofighter Typhoon is coming from Rage software. It will have a dynamic campaign supposedly. We will get to fight over iceland. The expected release date is Q1 2001. Let's hope that this date is solid.
2001-09-20 - I finally picked up Eurofighter Typhoon a few months ago. It's not all that I hoped it would be. They dumbed it down for the masses. But the dumbing down doesn't bug me as much as the fact the it crashes out to windows randomly, and without any error screen to help me diagnose it. I have it patched up current, but that doesn't help. A plus is that the campain is very good, and managing 6 pilots isn't the pain that I was expecting. It's fun to fly, and the graphics are beautiful, though I have to turn off hardware T&L for models to render properly.

I grabbed these screen shots from Troffmeister.

Tank commanders have the worst job in the world...

See....

Take care of the AA before going after the big ticket items...

FYI, the AGM-114L Hellfire is a stand off weapon

Here are some of my own captures:

Say hello to my little friend

It's such a GREAT feeling to be sent out on a simple SEAD mission, and come home with a full bill of AA kills, and a carrier kill! I spent about $240,000 of US taxpayers hard earned money on this distraction, but I cost the enemy billions and weakened their defenses.
The down side was that one of this dorks Destroyers was able to get off a SAM while I was taking these 2 pictures (see the picture above this one, destroyer on the right). My copilot was unable to effectively use our countermeasures against this missile, and our Apache succumbed to it.

My pimping wingman attacking a different carrier in a later mission.

You want resources, I've got your resources right here:
General military info .
Missiles .
Missiles .
Hellfire info .