Who remembers...

[Volron]

...Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain, Battlehawks: 1942, Red Baron, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Aces of the Pacific and Aces over Europe?

The first game I was introduced to in this line up was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.  Oh the joy that was had in that game.  I found it funny, that to evade enemy fighters was to go vertical just enough that it would just shoot below you.  Then when he stalled, you would dive and be right on his 6.  Took out many a fighter using this tactic.   Oh how I enjoyed bombing the ball bearing plants and V1/V2 sites.  A real pain to aim with that bombsite though.


Next on the line up was, Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain and Battlehawks: 1942.  Sadly, I don't remember much about Battlehawks anymore.   But what I DO remember was, it was a lot of fun!  In Their Finest Hour, I was usually flying He-111's or Do-17z's but found it quite fun to take the Ju-87 and Ju-88's against convoys.  I really liked going for Do-17z's in the Spitfire Mk I...oh the fun.

Red Baron came next...  And man, I goofed the first time I took a Fokker Eindecker out for a spin.  Diving that thing turned out to be a very squishy proposition.   I really did like the fact that you could color your own plane a little.  By todays standards, it's ew, but by the standards of the time, !  The moment the Fokker D.VII came out,   I would give it a green color and have my way with the Allies.  Each time I'd come across a recon plane, I would always try to pump JUST enough rounds into it so that it's controls would be shot out or the pilot was wounded and just follow it all the way to the ground.  Sometimes, the plane would just hit the ground and you wouldn't see that satisfying explosion sprite.  At that point, I would strafe the wreckage just to make it go boom.


Aces of the Pacific....*drools*  I loved flying the Devastator in the Navy and had a lot of fun with the P-39 in the Army.  Had fun with the campaign mission involving VT-8 during Midway (man it was a pain. Took a bit of luck to get through it w/o ending your career there).  As a Japanese pilot, I would usually be in the Army flying the Nick.  The fun with that plane...*drools*  But I had my fair share of fun with the Tony as well.  In the Navy, I would fly in Kate squadrons (which allows you to do Pearl Harbor if you chose a very early career).  The down side I saw with that game was, your rear gunner couldn't shoot worth a crap, nor would you see more than just one plane taking a shot in the formation.  Bombers are included in this little tidbit and the gunners in all planes only fired in 4 shot bursts.  You could make a dead 6 approach on the B-29's and Betty's, and not have to really worry about being hit.  Still, there was always that one possibility, as I got a wing blown off by a B-29 once.  Started to roll up on it's 6, thinking, "Oh yeah.  Your arse is grass and I'm the lawnmower."  *BOOM*   "What the ell!?" *Plane start an uncontrollable spin* "Crap!  Crap, crap, crap!  You you son of a bisket!  Why is it, when I'm escorting your sorry arses, you couldn't hit the ground with your hat in 3 tries, but I saddle up on you as a Jap, and you actually manage to blast my wing off!? "  I managed to recover from the spin just long enough to bail out.  I had saved the recording on it, and saw that the B-29 got me with the 3rd tracer.  1st 2 just seem to pass through my Zero, but the 3rd one connected.


Aces over Europe:  The first thing I did was a single mission, bomber intercept.  I did the same thing I would do in Aces of the Pacific...and quickly realized that, that was a very quick way to get your plane full of ventilation holes.   Yep, found out the hard way they fixed the gunner problem that was in AotP.  You actually had to use tactics against the bombers.   I was sad that there weren't any He-111's or Me-110's in it but when I first saw the B-26, I flipped.  They were definitely a furry target in that game.  A mini B-17...   It was funny, that some of the scramble missions in the campaign would put your airfield right NEXT to an enemy gun battery emplacement.  You'd get flak and ground fire the moment you started to take off.  It ended a couple of careers right then and there.


Oh the joy and fun that was had with those games.  I was a tard then, getting the 3.5 copies instead of the CD variants.  If I could roll back to those times, I would still have working copies of each of those games.  Well, I have the CD for Aces of the Pacific and Red Baron, but not the others. 

[Flipperk]

I would like to add

B-17: The Mighty 8th to that list...still the best B-17 simulator out on the market today...and still relatively good graphics

[Volron]

I prefer the 1st B-17 Flying Fortress that MicroProse released.  The 2nd one, although quite nice with graphics, dropped the ball on the fighter attacks.  You only get attacked 4 times before you will not see anymore fighters.  The flak in it was deadlier than the fighters (provided the fighters didn't end up ramming you which a lot of times, ended my career).  The one released in 92, you would get attacked all the way to and from your target.  Sure, you were the ONLY bomber to shoot back, but at least it was a bit more realistic in the fighter attacks.  The last mission I flew on the 2nd B-17 game, took me to Berlin.  I was attacked by fighters the moment I flew past the French coast.  3 more attacks took place while over France then the rest of the mission was just dodging flak, hitting my target, and falling asleep returning home.  They did very good with the graphics though and the damage I've returned with in that game, would've just killed me in this one.   I still think it's awesome to get a camera view of the target and watch your bombs hit it.  If you zoom in far enough, in both games, you can hear an air raid siren.

[Saurdaukar]

SWOTL got me started.

AOE/AOP got me hooked.

AW got me fired.


(not really)

[Tupac]

Red Baron was my first flight sim, and i spent many afternoons on BoB

[Maverick]

I had all of them. As a matter of fact it was the BOB game that got me to drop the Apple 2C I had for an IBM 8088 machine so I could play it. I was at it so long I had to down to a science. I could down a ME109 with 8 rounds from the guns. I set up my own missions with waves of max numbers of fighters vs just lil ol me, until I ran out of shells. Later on I was very very disappointed that Air Warrior wasn't the same in regards to kill / death ratio. 

[APDrone]

BattleHawks 1942 was my first..  Amiga version

Remember flying Dauntlesses on the Midway mission and suddenly .. BOOM!.....BOOM!..... BOOM!  'bout fell out of my chair.. took me 15 or 20 seconds to figure out that was AAA going off.   

Been hooked ever since. 

I loved doing bomber missions in SWOTL.. pop the primary target, then diving down to deck and strafing bridges down..   I forgot what sort of rediculous score numbers I racked up doing that.

[Saxman]

Aces of the Pacific is still the greatest WWII air-combat simulator of all times. Nothing before or since really had the variety of missions in single-player or campaign mode.

1942: The Pacific Air War was also a VERY good sim from the era.

[dev1ant]

My first flight sim was Pacific Strike..really a great game for it's time.

[Lusche]

...Their Finest Hour: Battle of Britain

My first one.

Clearing a sector full of Spitfires in my Ju-87 without dropping my payload, then landing on a British fighter base to wait for my bombers. After they dropped their load, I took off again to bomb the hangars they missed.

I wish I was THAT good in AH 



And the best one was Red Baron I+II with it's dynamic campaign missions... not that scripted garbage of later sims.

[Volron]

The one thing I noticed about Their Finest Hour over Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe was that the bullets would change according to how you were banked.  IE, if you were banking right, the bullets would be "banked" right.  In SWOTL, they just took a level path regardless of your planes bank.  In SWOTL, it wasn't uncommon for me to have the 5 fireball on my B-17.  I even managed to get it with a P-51 AND survived.  I would let the engine burn just for the recorder as it was easy to balance between the fire going out and blowing up.  A few times I would had the outer fireballs, which wasn't easy, quite rare infact, going without the inner 3, but this usually resulted in me blowing up very shortly after the inner 3 showed.  On the fun I had with the Me-163.  When I first started using it, I would run out of fuel a lot and end up crashing and I could not figure out how to use it's rockets.  I stumbled upon it's use when I flew under a B-17 and it blew up.  I had just downed a different B-17 but was flying too fast to get a solution on another one in front of it.  I had the rockets active, but forgot I had them in the first place (still didn't know how to use them).  When I flew under the lead bomber, it blew up.  After watching the recording, I figured out HOW to use the blasted things.  From then on out, the fun to be had with the 163 was great.

I never had a chance to play Red Baron II.   I so wanted to, but my computer couldn't run it.

I remember one single bomber intercept mission I ran in Aces of the Pacific.  Once in a while, you would run into 8 bombers or 8 escorting fighters when you encountered them, and this was one of those.  4 Betty's and 8 A6M5's against my 4 F4U's.  I ordered the wing to attack the bombers and went nuts on the fighters.  I quickly found myself being chased by all 8 Zero's, that quickly dispatched my allies.  To this day, I don't know HOW I did it, but I pulled off what was to be the funnest moment in AotP for me.  I was hit initially in the fight, and took just enough engine damage that I couldn't outrun them but wasn't to the point where I couldn't get home.  When they all started chasing me, I just rolled my aircraft as they all started to fire at me.  They shot each other down! All but one.  All I did was roll and roll and roll and they never landed a hit on me.  When it was down to just the one Zero, I stopped rolling and tried to run away (at that moment I thought I may have left the invulnerability option on).  The last Zero quickly finished me off.   Since then, I've tried to recreate that incident but to no avail.

[Saxman]

I love those once-in-a-lifetime moments that happen in games.

Two of my favorites came in the original X-wing. The first one I was playing X-wing Historical Mission 1 (Dev's Sidestep). Near the beginning of the mission you encounter two TIE Interceptors flying in close formation They were passing at almost 90 degrees across my flight path. Now, the thing about the X-wing games is that there was NO convergence until X-wing: Alliance. Your guns fired straight ahead, so the X-wing had a VERY wide field of fire, but it also meant you had to offset to hit a target right in front of your nose. I fired off a quad-linked snapshot as the two Interceptors went past, and watched them both explode instantly. Surprised the heck out of me because Interceptors normally took three supercharged shots to knock down, whereas I only hit each ship with two laser bolts.

The second was the "Escort Tantive IV" mission near the end of Tour of Duty III, shortly before the Battle of Yavin sequence. This could be a VERY challenging mission because a Corvette could only take 6 torpedoes before going down, and you had to deal with wave after wave of TIE bombers VERY quickly before they could launch. By the end of the mission I was down to the very LAST torpedo the Corvette could take and was unable to finish off the last set of bombers before they launched. I watched in frustration (the missions in the original X-wing could be INCREDIBLY difficult, and you HAD to finish them to proceed to the next one) as they streaked towards Tantive IV, thinking I was about to have to redo the mission again. At the EXACT moment the torpedo was about to hit and kill her, Tantive IV suddenly accelerated and jumped to hyperspace to complete the mission. If you've seen Star Trek V, when I watched my film playback it looked EXACTLY like the scene where the Bird of Prey fires a torpedo and Enterprise goes to warp RIGHT as the torpedo reaches her. Coolest thing I've ever seen.

[Ripsnort]

F-19 Stealth Fighter was my first flight sim, then Air Warrior, SWOTL, AOP, AOP, PAW...damn those were the cutting edge days. Remember loading the floppys...LOL!

[Saxman]

F-19 Stealth Fighter was my first flight sim, then Air Warrior, SWOTL, AOP, AOP, PAW...damn those were the cutting edge days. Remember loading the floppys...LOL!

I still have nightmares of trying to squeeze out enough EMS memory on those boot disks to run them....

[Volron]

Saxman
That's one game I have on CD. Both the Collector's Edition of X-Wing and TIE Fighter.  The mission I found most annoying in X-Wing was the 9th mission in the first tour (If I recall correctly).  You had to kill a Frigate with an A-Wing all by your lonesome while protecting some Supply Containers.  More than a few times, the blasted Frigate would come out of hyperspace right in the middle of the supply containers and quickly caused me to fail the mission.  Other times, it would hyper out well away from them, but would quickly dispatch me somehow.  Of course, you couldn't make your self invulnerable, or you couldn't progress to the next mission so I spent a few hours trying to complete that mission.  Made me mad as ell.  I went to sleep, woke up the next day and finished it in one go.  Go figure...

Ah yes...the good ol 5.25's.  I still have some of those disks but the 5.25 drive in my DOS machine is kaput, so don't know if they would still work.  I too, remember having to make a boot disk with them just to get AotP and AoE to work.  I played with autoexe.bat file and the config.sys and got AotP to run w/o the blasted boot disk, but not AoE.  Made the computer think it had more EMS than it really did.

We can't forget about Aces of the Deep.  I had a lot of fun with that game, once I found a convoy or a lone merchant that is.  Otherwise you just spent most of your time in x10 just getting to your patrol point.  It was fun to sink the escorting destroyers and the tactic I used against them were to fire a torpedo at them when they charged me.  You had to time it right, too far and they just avoided it, too close and it wouldn't detonate and you were either rammed (if you didn't dive fast enough) or took a bit of damage or were sunk from the depth charges.  One mission I recall was, I found a convoy on my way to my patrol zone and I decided to attack.  I managed to sink a merchant and oiler, and the escorting destroyers were none to happy about this.  I managed to sink two of them before I was forced to go deep (there were 4 destroyers escorting the convoy).  It took me 2 hours to finally escape from them.  Then tragedy.  I was ALMOST to a friendly port when the power went out.   I did love how the coded the sinking of the ships.  The merchant took the hit to the starboard bow and sank accordingly.  The oiler took the hit dead center and split in two.  It's bow portion sank rather quickly and the aft portion went down about 30 seconds later.  I would flip each time I torpedoed a ship as each would always sink in a different fashion.