Classic Air Combat Sim Recommendations

Even the experience of browsing the store shelves was all the more enticing with those big boxes, especially when some of them played with the shapes.

Hey, Longbow Gold puts its hands up. I like LB1s crunchy pixels more than the weird GLide stuff of LB2.

Isn’t Longbow Gold still primarily a DOS game that you can still run via DOSBox?

So yesterday I played F-19 on veteran difficulty for the first time, and my prophets it’s like an entirely new game. Whereas on lower difficulties you could fly under an enemy fighter in the middle of the day with no problem. Now they’ll actually see you with their eyeballs and engage. Made the game far, far more tense. Totally loved it.

So this was a neat read. It’s tips and such for Gunship 2000 from the game’s lead designer.

So today I did my first missions against veteran opponents in F-19 and wow, it’s like a whole new game.

I went to look for your video on YouTube and found the last one was 6 months ago. Have you switched over to Twitch completely?

Shit, I should make that more visible:

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Here’s the latest one:

As soon as I learned I could emulate this on my PC, and therefore stream it, I had to snag a copy.

OMG YOU GUYS

That game sounds so much better than it is. I remember getting the press about it, getting an early review copy, and… Yeah, it’s one step above an aviation text adventure.

shhh don’t harsh the buzz of “every classic sim is fire” Brian’s got going on

I wouldn’t go that far, but you do spend more time in other stations than flying the thing. I think it works, though.

Not true. I tried a couple recently that were garbage. Evasive Action and Navy Strike. Just crap. Plus, you have other middling sims like ATAC and Birds of Prey. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Sir.

So the other day I played and streamed the Playstation version of Gunship 2000 (just called Gunship) for the first time and was really surprised how they were able to cram the controls solidly on a PS1 controller. Flying with the D-pad was fucking weird, though.

Really looking forward to starting a series with the DOS game this Friday.

I’m enough of a dork that that actually sounds like fun.

Some of the screenshots remind me of SAM Simulator.

I’m a little sad that we can make games about power washing peoples swimming pools, but not ones about operating far cooler and more complex machines.

Wow yeah I can totally see that.

If you’d told me in 1997, when I was covering three or four new sims a month in my CGW column, that by 2023 we’d have just two AAA combat flight sims as well as MSFS and X-Plane, but there would be a wealth of power-washing, farming, and goat simulations, I’d have assumed I was reading some kind of parody article on Old Man Murray.

It’s my hope that games like Tiny Combat Arena and Helicopter Gunship DEX will be the spark of a new era of, as you call them, pilot sims. If it happened for space games, it can happen for anything.

Yeah, non-sims are valid too. The fact that we don’t have another Crimson Skies after all these years just boggles my mind.

Gosh me too. How is it there are only TWO Crimson Skies games? It’s a crime, that is.