What are your favorite old flight sims that check those boxes, out of curiosity? I’ve been contemplating getting European Air War because I’ve always heard good things about that.
OH god so many. EF2000, Pacific Air War, the Jane’s games like USAF or Fighter’s Anthology, European Air War definitely, Hind and so many more.
Well said, that first mission where you’re just checking out the shipping yard is one of the best, immersion-wise. Just noodling around and then things happen, that felt GREAT! Otherwise I do like the capital ship engagements, it’s nice to have that big strategic target to deal with.
Wings Over Flanders Field gave this sort of feeling too.
You’d take off and fly your patrol route and some days there’d be some distant dots that would get closer and closer and then turn out to be friendlies, some days you’d stumble over a lone enemy reconnaissance plane who’d dive for the clouds and run away and some days you’d be in some massive 60 airplane furball and land with an oil-soaked windscreen and hundred of holes in your plane.
It was great at giving the feeling that there was a war on and you were in it, rather than it being all about you.
Oh yeah, WoFF is the best sim at this currently, absolutely, but I was asked about old sims. ;)
Then again I guess Combat Flight Sim 3, upon which it’s based, is pretty old.
the IL-2 games give a lot of that “pilot” feeling too, with patrol flights etc.
Yeah even as button-pushy as they are, they were pretty much the last great pilot sims really.
It really turned me off that all capital ships are half size
How do you know the fighters aren’t actually twice the size?
Well you’d need to double the size of the fighters AND double their speeds to achieve the same effect
But good point XD
But the bigger the ship the faster it goes! That’s why an aircraft goes 700mph and an aircraft carrier goes 70,000mph. Lern to sciense, n00b.
Heh, at least Star Wars has the excuse of being Fantasy. So they can make up whatever physics they want for their universe. What really bothered me was when something like X: Beyond the Frontier had weird physics. Instead of conservation of momentum, they have conservation of speed only, not direction. So if you were going 100 m/s in a particular direction, you had to slow down slowly back down to 0 m/s. But if you wanted to change direction to be going 100 m/s in the opposite direction than the one you were just going in? No problem, just change directions.
Oh, right. This has a thread!
We got a group of eight friends together to play this on a couple of nights in January, and both the team deathmatch and the MOBA were a blast. It’s a really fun game when coordinating with friend. Too bad that you can’t get XP for the unlocks in friendly fights, and pub games are basically dead so you’d have to grind it playing against bots.
I did not care for the little I played of the campaign.
Long enough that I don’t have a HOTAS or even a joystick in my “tech junk” box. I think they were all serial ports or something that isn’t on even the oldest computers I have in the house, so I chucked them.
I do keep my first-release Hyperkin Duke controller by the desk as a passable substitute (anything that flies in GTAV, for example).
Internet high five, dude. I love that thing.
Ohhh now I want one.
Just wanted to say I finally just ordered one of these things. Can’t wait to try it.
Why do people like it? Looks uncomfortable.
It’s really comfortable. At least for people with smaller hands, like me. It really fills the hands nicely, instead of there being empty space like most controllers.
For me, it is the only controller that is comfortable with my giant hands. On a good day I can palm a basketball, so stock controllers are really awkward & give me hand cramps after a short amount of play. Even the Duke ends at my ring finger so my pinkies are curled up or flailing about, and the triggers hit the center of the second pad of my index fingers (the middle phalange bone).
So I’ve always bought larger third-party controllers. My favorite was a PS2 controller that had fans built into it, so it was absolutely huge. Perfect fit for me, though.