This post originally started out as a reply in a different thread. It grew long enough that I felt warrented in starting a new thread.
----------
Those who are calling the MA "air quake" have evidentally never actually played Quake. The MA would bore most Quake players to tears due to the excruciatingly slow pace of the MA. This slow pace is the primary reason why flightsims remain a niche market. In AH even a good pilot is hard-pressed to get more than 15-20 kills per hour with the average pilots getting far fewer. In Quake it isn't tough to get that many within 10 minutes, less if you're a good enough player.
And don't tell me how "easy" quake is compared to AH....FPS gameplay is challenging enough to foster professional tournaments, and top players and clans even have sponsoring companies. A friend of mine was in a UT clan sponsored by Nvidia--how cool is that? Most of the clan got free graphics cards. I don't think anybody makes a living off of playing AH (HTC, being the developers, are of course excluded).
As far of FPS games were concerned, I played Doom, Quake1 and 2, and Unreal; but Counterstrike was my favorite. I can't comment on the newer ones as I haven't played FPS games since '99.
It is possible to see the speed of gameplay (kills per hour) directly affect the online flightsims. The game which had the fastest gameplay--Airwarrior--also had the most subsribers until mismanagement killed it. Even AH has yet to match AW's subscription and nightly attendence numbers. WarBirds, which is decidedly slower-paced than AH, lags far behind AH in nightly players.
I deliberately left out Fighter Ace from the above comparison. I have virtually no experience with it and will not comment on something which I know nothing about.
J_A_B