How did you get started in Aces High?

[GScholz]

Originally posted by jetb123
I was bored one day. Me and my sister fighting over the channel turner. and boom ah commercial was on wings. I stoped looked wrote down site. downloading for 6 hours. And played offline for about 1 week. Havign so much fun. So i came back to the site and saw that you can go online. I  met some cool guys and started flying 24/7:) . Then after 2 months my computer got tooken back. Not enough money to pay for it. I thought my life was over. So I stayed in depression for 2 months having lonley nights staying up watching wings. Then one once my mom got money. We ordred my dell for 500$. I was so happy thought I had the best computer in the world. To find it it was a deadbeat:o . But i still thank my mom for buying it. So i played for another 4 months. Then bamm ah2 comes out another 2 months from ah. Now I am back to watching wings late night and on the board. and workign for computer money. cant wait till I finnaly get back to ah in a week.

Hitech, now do you see what you are doing to people?! Do you see what you're doing to people?!

[Redd]

Originally posted by Frodo
I think he means rraf also. He was a Korean MP who worked with guard dogs. He was a squadmate with me in The Red Falcons, in the early days of W/B. Great stick, and rraf stands for Royal Raomi Air Force.

Redd would that be Deft that you are thinking about? Deft got me hooked on W/B in the fall of 1995 when we worked together at Chrysler. Haven't looked back since.  Been here in A/H since beta.

Frodo

No wasn't Deft , This guy worked at one of the Korean car companies I think he was mainly around in beta. I remember Deft well though  , good guy and good stick.

[jetb123]

Originally posted by GScholz
Hitech, now do you see what you are doing to people?! Do you see what you're doing to people?!

 Yeah I hate being  High On Aceshigh.

[Silat]

Well my good buddies father was the principal in a company called Thrustmaster:)

For the holidays I was given a box of controllers including 3 full HOTAS's. F22, thrott and the old aluminium rudders. I was told to get a puter. I was taken to the office and introduced to the staff and they were told to give me all the assistance I needed. And that was alot as most of you know.

I spent many hours at Tmaster playing games on their dime. AW was the game I fell for. It was because of a sheep at a17 named Fifi that caused me to become addicted to the game. Now sadly all that remains of Fifi is a blow up doll from Muttonbone.com:( But as I fill her with helium for lift it does benefit my flying.

I flew AW solo then joined the ACES WILD and then the Nomads of 38 auger fame.
I also dabbled in WB when it came out but never really got into the community there.
When AH went beta I was there. And I am still here. And I will stay as long as HT keeps paying me:)

[jetb123]

Originally posted by Silat
Well my good buddies father was the principal in a company called Thrustmaster:)

For the holidays I was given a box of controllers including 3 full HOTAS's. F22, thrott and the old aluminium rudders. I was told to get a puter. I was taken to the office and introduced to the staff and they were told to give me all the assistance I needed. And that was alot as most of you know.

I spent many hours at Tmaster playing games on their dime. AW was the game I fell for. It was because of a sheep at a17 named Fifi that caused me to become addicted to the game. Now sadly all that remains of Fifi is a blow up doll from Muttonbone.com:( But as I fill her with helium for lift it does benefit my flying.

I flew AW solo then joined the ACES WILD and then the Nomads of 38 auger fame.
I also dabbled in WB when it came out but never really got into the community there.
When AH went beta I was there. And I am still here. And I will stay as long as HT keeps paying me:)

 Silat LOL over theses last 2 months I been so despariate to play ah2. I was about to ask If I could come over.

[Charon]

What are your system specs Jetb? What are you short on? Do you just need a graphics card, if so, do you have an open AGP slot?


[edit: oops, see in your sig you're ordering a good system TODAY!]

Charon

[eagl]

Jetb,

Did you already order that system?  If there's still time, I suggest going to anandtech and hardocp and browsing their latest doom3 and other system comparos.  They're seeing huge gaming performance increases going up to athlon64 cpus, even the "cheaper" ones.  For only about $150 more than your cpu/mobo combo you can get 20-50% better framerates in some games by stepping up to even a lower-end athlon 64.

If it's too late, then enjoy what ya got  Me, I'm waiting until the socket 939 mobos and cpus drop a bit in price.

[FiLtH]

A friend played AW1 back in the mid 90s and I KNEW thats what I wanted to do. Ive always loved pc games and to me this was the best way to play them. I always dreamt of being in a room fighting other humans in the same room. Little did I know how big the room would become. I had no idea at the time people from all over the world would want the same as I did from a game.

  I played AW till the end, which was about the time of 9/11. For me I kinda lost interest at that time. AW died and I tried WW2ol. Stuck with that a while and visited AH last summer. I didnt like the laser cannons it had in here, so I went back to ww2ol.

 My patience with that game died this Spring so I thought Id try AH again. To my suprise AH2 was just being released! I love this game now and plan to be here awhile.

[Reschke]

Like most everyone here I started playing around on flight sims in the early 1980's. Being 33 now; I remember vividly playing the Chuck Yeager game and Falcon 3.0 as well as one from Microprose called F-19 Stealth. That was back in the time frame from around '87-'89 or so after playing Hellcat Ace and many others in the years before then. Once I got to college a buddy of mine from my football team showed me Air Warrior. He was one of those gifted by money kids whose parents didn't care how much he spent and we probably played several thousand dollars worth of flight sim hours at his apartment on the two systems he had.

Then I moved on to Warbirds when we all graduated from school and I couldn't afford to play as much as I did before then. Boy it was hell on the early months of my marriage when the first few bills for Warbirds came in over $300. So I bailed on it and played boxed sims like Falcon 4.0, EAW, etc... for a few years. Then I found this game in 1999 called Fighter Ace 2.0...Well it was only $10 and it was loaded with over 200 players in the Intermediate Territorial Combat server on the Zone. Hell I thought I was a hot hand and after killing all those AI guys in EAW I knew I was better than most of the guys in there so I went to the "Advanced" arenas.

After finding no one but me to fly against for hours upon hours I ended up back in what we started calling ITC over on the Zone. Anyway I flew the F4U-4 almost exclusively for the US in the first several weeks of my time in FA. Mostly those of us flying for the USA were trying to stem the flow of the "Green Horde" as they slammed Spit14 after Spit14 into the US area to get away from the uber La-7's, Tu-2's and Bf-109G series fighters that hunted them down and killed them with a vengenance.

Well after a few weeks of that I get a private text message from a guys who went by KScratchie (eventually known as Kratzer in AH) from the German side asking if I wanted to join his squadron. After pondering it for a while and finally flying something different in the Fw-190A-8 and liking it I joined LuftJagerKorps (LJK for short). We flew exclusively for the German nation in FA and became a group that was pretty damn impressive when we went hunting Brits and Russkies in our purple icon German planes.

After about a year or so of this I started getting bored with the Intermediate physics crap in FA and wanted to return the the ways of old but I couldn't afford the $30 a month of AH plus my ADSL connection which was $55 a month. So I logged into AH every once in a while and went back and told my buddies in LJK about it. All while I was playing FA part time and eventually all my LJK buddies started coming over to AH and we left a few guys over in FA but never forgot about them. The main ones that came over then were me LJKResch (Reschke now), Raubvogel (went and joined the FDB's), Kratzer (went and joined the FDB's but haven't heard from him in a long time), LJKBear, LJKSparv (now Glock22), LJKVonray, LJKKampf (goes by LJK Kampferas on the boards here now I think) and many others now forgotten by name but not in spirit.

Anyway this leads to recent history now. LJK broke up shortly after 9/11 because   some guys gave up on flight sims and real life intervened for many of us. I ended up starting VF-17 in the fall of 2002 when I found I still hadn't forgotten about my original blue plane fever for F4U series planes. So with a slow start JconradH and his brother Ltblogs joined up and then we quickly brought on a few more guys to have us at the point where we are now. This chapter of my life will have to end at some point. I think it will be sooner than I want it to be but real life and time committments are getting harder to escape as the kids get older. Maybe when I grow up I can be like the guys who play all day long in their retirement years.

Thanks for starting this thread JB73. ! and thanks for all the fun times and lost wages HTC!

[Rude]

Played for much of the eighties on an Amiga...500 then the 3000. Played mostly flight sims.....can't remember the names anymore, might be Secret Weapons of the Luftwbobbles and a more serious online effort that I believe Robert Shaw had something to do with....ahhh....Fighter Duel.

Anyways.....was at a pal's house to see his super dooper PC...90hz....he was playing AWDOS. I asked him who he was typing to and when he told me real folks, I fell over. An entire arena full of fresh meat.

Started my first day by staying home from work....played all day long and all night. Got up the next day and worked until 1 or 2 then came home and repeated the same.

Little did I realize that to access Genies servers during their business hours rated at something in the $16/hr range.....my first month's bill?

$800.00!

Now the best is yet to come.

A couple of years ago, my wife had some of her friends over at our house along with their husbands. Well, the men asked, "what's with all of the joysticks and such on your desk"? I began to tell them of my hobby and shared the first billing story as well. When I was done, my wife said, " You had an $800.00 dollar bill for one month?" "Sure honey....don't you remember how shocked we were at that time?" She said, "I didn't know you spent that much on that game." I said, "Sure you did....remember how silly you thought I was?"

Well, the short of the long of it is this.....my wife and I have a deal in our marriage....she gets to spend on herself what I spend on myself and visa versa. That little story that night cost me $800.00!

Anyway, after AWDOS, Dale wrote CK and I followed.... WB and I followed....then AH and I followed again. It's been a fun ride....made alot of friends and enemies I suppose....still, all in all, I'de do it the same way all over again.

[Jasta]

Flew AW AOL for about a year, and never really got any good at it. But anywho, I was part of the Night Raiders squadron for a little while. When AOL upped AWII to premium service, I dropped because I was in no mood to have anyone else pay that much money for an addiction of mine. I bought AWIII and played offline for a long time, completely satisfied. It brought me back to the days of AWI.

I finally got tired of AWIII offline after I beat the VF-17 campaign at least 4 times I played Red Baron II and 3D with great success and headed 2 successful squadrons, then joined the misfits for the remainder of my time there.

I rediscovered AWIII, and after playing a couple of H2H games with my cousin across the neighborhood, I decided I needed to play this game online. By that time, EA was just starting to flaunt its newfound toy of AW.

I signed up, downloaded AWMV, and anxiously awaited the release. However, EA announced it would be premium, and the monthly fee was still too high for a kid with no job, so I gave up hopes on Air Warrior forever.

Real life aviation consumed me in the last year and a half, and I basically had no interest in flight sims, because none of them offered an experience near to what I could get for the modest fee of 90 dollars an hour Around April of this year the engine went out on my Cessna, and my instructor and I crash landed in a neighborhood. With a much needed break and no plane to fly, I rediscovered sims. I took a trial with Warbirds, and really enjoyed what I saw. However, nobody was flying. My two week trial was the end of my Warbirds experience.

Still addicted to the old Air Warrior experience, I upped a trial in Aces High and fell in love with it. As many people as I remember, and the plane I loved (F6F) was just as sweet as I remembered it. 2 Week trial ended, and my job had terminated the previous month, so I had to wait until I could pay for this newfound addiction.

I scored a job fixing computers with the school system, and am now making just enough to cover the costs of my two habits, Sushi and Aces High. I plan on indulging both tonight

Thank you HTC and Aces High.

[Elfie]

I started my flight sim career with AirWarrior 3. I purchased the game and installed it on my brand new used Cyrix P-120+ comp that I bought from my brother in law. My first comp! wooohooo! It had a 2m vid card and was so slow I had to play with the graphics on the lowest settings just so I could hit 25 fps. I couldnt even tell where the ground was. I lawndarted so many times  My first campaign (I just happened to sign up on a reset friday) I got 9 kills and died over 1000 times I had even *practised* offline for 3 weeks until I thought I was ready for online play, little did I know!

Despite my gross ineptitude I stuck with it and by the time I quit playing AW (in disgust with EA) I had played 3 of 4 weeks of my last campaign, I had 1200 kills in 3 weeks and was on top of my game.

I left AW and played other games for awhile including AH, but at $30 a month I just didnt stick with it. I played WW2Online for a bit but didnt like the flight model at all. I played games via modem connection with a friend across town. When AH dropped their subscription fee to 14.95 I resubscribed. I have been in AH ever since even though at times I would get distracted (mostly by Everquest, although I just sold that account) by other games for a time.

Flight sims have always been my online passion, probably always will be too

[RTR]

JB73 very nice and refreshing read Sir.

I started with computer flight sims back in the old Amiga days.

I came "online" at the urging of my brother (ASW) with AW3 , which he had been flying for a long time.

Whe AW died I came to Aces High, and I gotta tell ya. My expectations were high, and they were exceeded.

I have learned that it is much more than an addiction. It is the abilty to forge new friendships, feed an interest in our histories, and enjoy a camraderie that is really only second to those who are serving in an active military (S to those who are, for what ever country you serve).

We are a cliquey bunch, but I think all in all, a pretty well grounded bunch.

I am glad you brought this up JB73, and <> to you Sir.

RTR

[Herr Milde]

Started by operating the shoot and bomb button for a friend playing Air Warrior in 1998.

Since he liked Spit and I have German blood, I decided to fly Axis planes.

A co-worker was jokingly calling me Herr Milde at the time and the callsign was created.

Was busy studying at the library a lot. Since anything is more exiting than studying, I would spend 50% of my time reading about WWII aircraft performance and pilot accounts. This worked by keeping me in the library a lot!

I discovered how scarce historical tactical information really is and how sensitive people are to data about Axis aircraft performance. I remember trying to pull pages apart from a book that someone had glued together and written Nazi all over it. I remember using my book knowledge to teach my buddy the perfect Immelman. We both soon found out that it was not a good combat manouver if done perfectly.

I still enjoy the challenge and the tingle of adrenaline from the immersive realism of flying in AH and am lately more and more beginning to look forward to familiar personalities.

You guys and gal(s) are all a great bunch.

Cheers,

RitteR

[Guppy35]

Might as well play through

I've had a longtime passion for WW2 aviation so finding first the offline stuff, Aces over Europe, SWOTL etc really got me going as I was 'flying' the planes I'd spent so much time studying.

Found Airwarrior in 1996, upped in a Spit knowing nothing of how the game worked, shot at the first guy I saw and killed an ally.  Got a bit better, started talking to folks and joined my first Squad.  Found the P38 and got talking with the 38 guys from all the countries.  With another guy, came up with the idea for the Nomads, which was a shades squad of the best 38 drivers we could find.

Kept the Nomads going through the ups and downs.  Found the scenarios and really got into that.  Burned out as AW was dying.  Came and went in AH a couple times before settling back in with the Nomads again.

Got busy for a bit with real world and now back at it again in AH2 and really enjoying myself.

Always nice to see lots of old names from the past as well.

Dan
+Tiff in AW
Slack in AH1
Rust in AH2