Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: JB73 on August 23, 2004, 04:19:14 PM
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How did you get started in Aces High?
I’ve been thinking about this today, remembering back to my first few days. Maybe it’s from seeing all these new faces around, who knows.
Here’s how it went:
I worked for Xerox, and had a coworker named Steve. We got along great from the start in my rather unusual position of not having a “normal” place to work each day. In my first few months with Xerox, I worked at Steve’s account quite often. He had done the job I was doing in the past, and was a great trainer. In those long boring days of running a high volume printer, we had tons of time to talk. He would try to tell the grand tales of war in the skies in his B17 gunship in this game called Air Warrior.
Steve (JB42) is a nice guy, but sorry bro; he did a poor job really explaining the game to me. I had never played any online games before, and had only recently even gotten a PC of my own. I had all these questions like: you fly after work, it is night; so is it night in the game? How do you “talk” to each other? What if there isn’t a guy in the other gun on the plane, or he has to go? Does the “war” get lost by the Germans? What happens when the war is over? Total n00b questions.
After a few years of knowing Steve, and golfing with him; I would always “tease” him about being a Nazi (he had explained he flew mostly German planes), and how was his little “flight” career. He’d try and explain how the “war” was going and just keep trying to get me into the game. My biggest reason for not joining was money, since I was still living at home because of an illness. I had huge debt, and no reserves. So I ask Steve one day, how much was it to play online? He said it was a per hour thing, and dodged the subject.
You get billed every month, how; to a credit card? How much were you billed last month?
He told me. $200 or something nuts like that.
I almost fell over laughing, knowing he didn’t have much more money than me. I laughed some more at him, and said someday when I win the lottery I’ll think about it.
Some time went by with us not even bringing it up. Then 9/11 happened. The very weekend after 9/11 I went on a trip to visit some friends in Minnesota. While there, we spent pretty much the whole 3 day weekend talking about what happened, how it happened, and watching the news reports about it. The people I was visiting had some flight simulator (supposedly the best at the time and it was NOT MS).
This part is odd, but given the unusual situation at the time, I don’t think totally psycho. While having some beers in the afternoon we fired up his game, and flew into NYC. The only “flight” game I had ever flown was some microprose game for my apple IIC. I knew if you pull back you go up, and rolling or whatever. Well we had heard the reports about the terrorists learning on flight sims, and wanted to get an idea how hard it possibly could be. On my very first pass I hit the tower dead on with a 727.
I was immediately intrigued with flight simulators, and how hard it was to learn to fly a plane. I went out looking for a flight sim the next few months, but all I found was Microsoft for $30 or more. I knew that I’d need a joystick too, and that would push the whole cost up to over $70, something I did not have.
After Christmas I had some extra money, and asked my work buddy Steve about joysticks. Since I hadn’t talked about flight sims to him in probably a year, he was curious what my interest was. I told him the whole story, and he told me about this new game he was playing that was only $14.95/month; with a real flight model, and combat. I figured what the heck, it’s cheaper than buying a sim, and I’d give it a try. I went over to his house to see the game in action, and learn how to play. He showed me how to set up the stick, what they basic keys were, and how to read the help files.
The next night I kept the PC online downloading the game (dialup @ 34.4k). The next night I set up my new joystick, installed the game, and went offline. I flew for about an hour, then spent the rest of the night reading the help files. This was in February in Wisconsin, so there wasn’t much else to do.
The next night was a Friday and I spent all night practicing doing loops, split-s, immelman’s (the few things Steve described with the “hand puppet” model LOL), and whatever else I could figure out. I must have called him 10 times that weekend asking about what this and what that was. By Tuesday the next week I was totally hooked, and asked Steve to help me set up an account. Online I was frightened into the ground so many times I couldn’t count. I lawn darted while dive bombing a jug or a hog probably 100 times (first few months I could NEVER get those 2 right, always calling them the wrong name LOL).
This all was back before native VOX, and kills were broadcast as they happened. WOW was it dizzying trying to keep up with all that information. I slowly got a handle with what was going on, and got totally wrapped up with the era. One day JB66 told me that before he logged in every night he read the bulletin board to see what new “bugs” or whatever was found. That’s when I started reading this board April 2002. The help forum I read daily, along with the planes and vehicles forum.
Here we are 2 and a half years later, and I still call a hog a jug every now and then LOL. I still love the plane I learned to fly in, the C.205. I still love the game, and still fly hours at a time.
I guess the reason I’m here is the terrorists, in some round about obscure way. I will say this, if it wasn’t for the dedication of the HTC team, and the incredible product they put out I wouldn’t be here. <<>> and WTG HTC!
On a last note, I think what REALLY drew me into the game were the relationships made, and the camaraderie. If it wasn’t for the online aspect, meeting all these people (many of whom I have spoken to on the phone, and meet in person), I’d be just flying a dull boxed sim or whatever.
With the tension lately in the game and here on the board, I think some people are missing that. We are all here I believe because of the personal relationships, and the fun. If not, why are we playing an online game? Maybe we can all think about why we are here, and what has kept us here so long before we go out and “flame” someone, or something.
So how did you get started in Aces High?
<> and TY for reading.
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Wow good story all i have to say for is that Paul brought me in and i had to beg my parents for a joy stick LOL. ACES HIGH 2 RULES lol
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That was a nice read JB73.
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Lets see, 2 old EFW-SOG guys by the names of Frstrm (Firestorm) and DKL (Dark Lord) both work for http://www.virtualworld.com and started blaying Ah1 beta. They got me into this addiction! bastards... :D
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Got separated in late 1987. Had a desk, a fouton and a brand new evaluation Mac II unit in an otherwise empty apartment.
Was a regular BBS user and someone told me about the "big" sevices (Dephi, Cris, GEnie). Signed up on GEnie and found a game menu. Air Warrior. Had some air time in 172's in RL. Was fascinated, hooked, never looked back. Except my credit cards took a severe beating ($6 bux an hour I think).
Spent thousands on computers, HOTAS and memberships of various sorts over the years. Was independent until hooking up w/ the Damned in '94 or '95. Went from AW to MacAW to AW3 to WB's to AH.
Your story is better tho ;)
h
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My brother told me about it a couple years ago. I didn't find the board until a year after I started playing.
It's changed alot, some for the better. Some for the worst.
When I first started playing, I was in the training arena all the time. Flew with RTRider and SirB all the time. Back when you could actually kill people in there and Aurleius (sp) would be in there all the time.
First time I seen NATEDOG in the game was in there. Testing a 109 bug or something. Can't remember. I remember him saying he bought a new truck. :)
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I'd started playing A10-cuba over Kali.
Then one of the guys I flew with regularly asked if I had any interest in WWII birds.
I of course said yes, why. Well see there is this online flight sim called warbirds that has free H2H.
Took it hook, line & sinker.
Flew H2H, & free Fighter Ops the first year.
Hung out on Deft's H2H ladder a lot. Flew with some VERY good sticks that flew online & eventually took the plunge.
I had to cap my hours at 50$ a month, but I still got some good flying in.
Then eventually this young pup in our squadron told me about a new game that HT was working on. It had just released a beta. Was working on being a good thing.
So off to HTC I go, & started flying both. (the beta was pretty bare in spots)
Eventually however I got disgusted with WB & came full time over to AH after it went pay for play. Managed to bring half the squad with me.
BTW that young pup ended up turning into a fairly decent young man. Still entirely too cocky, but at least he has the skills to go with em.
Take a bow Wilbuz! Its all YOUR fault!
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Ive had in interest in WW2 since I was a young kid. (Im 37) and I was putzing around on AOL one day after joining the internet community and wondering what the hell was so great about it when I saw the Air Warrior listing in the games section. And its been a rollercoaster ever since. Lost a girlfriend over it, lost a lot of work time over it.
I have been with 2 squads only, Motley Aces and my current squad which is on its 4th name change but same hardcore members. Ive met 3 squaddies in person talked to many more offline and developed some real relationships...whoda thunk it?
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I had been interested in flying since I was 9 and flight sims since I saw my first one at age 20 in 1986, but never had one of my own until 1991 when I temporarily moved back home with my parents. My Dad had a PC, and a friend gave me his copy of both Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator and F-16 something or other (I was never into jets the way I am with WWII and earlier aircraft.)
Then got a copy of Chuck Yeagers Combat Simulator (for it's day it was really good) and MS Flight Sim 4.0. All flight sims were fun for a while, but then I'd play them too much and get bored with them. The AI in various combat sims (CYCS, F-18 Hornet, A-10, Red Baron, a WWI sim for the Mac whose name now escapes me) all were similar in that after you played them for a while the AI would become very predictable; and the only way to make them more challenging was to up the number of simultaneous bogeys.
I had taken a year or so off from any flight sims when I came across an ad in Air & Space Smithsonian for an online WWII combat sim named "Warbirds."
I took all night to download it on my state of the art 28.8K modem (this was 1995.) I was immediately hooked. I played for hours at a time. Sometimes the monthly bills were quite high. When Dawn of Aces came out I tried that too. Loved it too. I was beginning to burn out on WB when I heard about AH. AH has a huge improvement over WB.
Flight sims have come a long way.
I still get burned out sometimes. I'm actually just back after a 3 year hiatus. I'm currently severely addicted again.
That's my AH story.
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Just checked my account history and my account started 2nd March 2001.
I live in the UK and had heard nothing of all these online games until Warbirds was included on a demo disk. I loaded it up offline play and couldnt get anything to fly. Yea Im one of those people who only read the manual when something goes wrong. So I gave it a miss. This must have been around 1995 when I got my first PC courtesy of Hurricane Marilyn hitting St Thomas USVI (6 weeks @ $500 a day sure was good money for me ).
Anyway I eventually saw an article on AH in a UK Computer magazine (probably PC Gamer) and decided to give it a go.
Spent the first 10 minutes online giving country info out on Channel 1 until the error of my ways was pointed out to me. And the rest as they say is History. I am still as bad as the day I started but who cares I enjoy it. I fly what I want when I want to and enjoy every minute of it.
Adjuster
P.S.
HT with the weak dollar an ad campaign in the UK might be useful it only costs £8.50 sterling a month to play AH2 and not many know about this fine game over this side of the pond !
Just a thought
Adj
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I got to my first submarine in 1999. my LPO and a guy in my division asked me if i was into gaming. i told them i liked playstation and such. they told me "no, we me like onling gaming?". i had no clue what they were talking about. so they told me about this game called air warrior. how they got to fly these planes and shoot other people,not drones, down and talk crap. well, i got intrigued by these manuvers and planes they were talking about. after a few months of reluctance i figured id give it a try. to say the least, i was hooked. i really stunk at it, but it was fun and drawn back in, just for the chance of blowing something up. after some time, about a year, i started to get somewhat better. i stuck with one plane, P38, and started to get better at it. i was a regular from then on. AW was a way for me to keep in touch with these guys (they ended up transferring to shore duty or getting out of the navy) so i was very happy with it. then this big, bad corporation of death bought AW and did away with it, them buttholes. so, i just followed the "herd" from AW to AH and here i am. my friends i flew with in AW came to AH, some didnt like it and moved on, others stayed and are still here. as am I. well, thats my story.
~S~
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I saw a commercial on Wings (discovery Channel).
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I was wandering around in a software shop in 1993 and stumbled upon a box that said "SVGA Air Warrior". It was on sale, and looked kinda interesting so I bought it. Started flying online in Oct '93 and played until the Warbirds Beta in '95 and quit games alltogether. I dont remember how I found AH or why I even got interested in games again, but when I saw that HT and Pyro were the guys behind it, I knew I need not look further for an online flight sim. I started back flying AH in January.
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Thank you Skuzzy.
LOL alot of really old hands here. i always knew that, but it really makes me feel like a newbie still knowing guys were in this game last century,
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Found Air Warrior in a store sometime around 97-98 I think. Found it online soon after. Moved here when AW was murdered by the evil Electronic Arts slime. Could barely play for a while and was bucks down, so I had to quit, the computer just wouldn't take it, the crashes would literally trash all my data. I hung around and tried several times to make it stay working, to no avail. Finally my RL situation improved, and I built a decent rig.
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Went to the 99 AW con...3 or 4 327th steel talons went to the airshow along with Moss and a few others...anyway Moss and I were talking on the bus over and he mentioned the beta (sept 99) and I signed up...AW was getting old and stale so I guess I showed and never really went back (kept my AW account for a good year but never flew cept KOTH and squad night)....
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Nice Read 73!
For me it was close to 3 years ago now I think. It was a rainy day here and I was bored out of my skull. I had gotten the... I dont know, urge to "fly" an airplane game is what I called it at the time lol. So I started looking around for something to download that I could play with on my computer. I had all the stupid little games you could think of.
Finnaly I checked out cnet.com and came to a game called Aces High. It looked pretty cool so I downloaded it and installed it. I had no Joystick, no headset no nothing. A keyboard and a mouse.
I turned on the game and found this odd clipboard which I finnaly figured out. I clicked Off line and got even more confused. lol. I got into the first plane that I could figure out how to make get to the runway and it started taking off on me automaticly... Until I bumped the mouse and hit the ground lol. :D Well I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fly with a mouse which was a real sight to see. Within the next few days I went out and got a Joystick. It wasnt even a "twisty" stick or anything fancy. Just a plain jane joystick with a trigger and some buttons. lol.
So I hooked that up, got it working and went back into the game. WOW It was alot easier to fly with this new Joystick lol. So I thought I was Mr Bigshot flying about from base to base off line while thse stupid plane circling around above me would follow me around even after I awqwardly shot them down!
One day I decided to check out this "On line" thing. So I made an account and and went in there. During my first few weeks on line there is only one word to really sum up how I felt back then... Confused... Beyond confused even. I'd up and before I knew it, I'd die before I could even see what was shooting at me. Well that sucked! I said haha. I found the B17 tho. And that sucker had a tail gun! I could see them and shoot at them too! So I spent many days in that bomber.
I didnt know how to type, or which channel to even use to type to someone lol. I was just another n00b that had no idea what was going on or how to play the game.
Im not sure who it was and I wish I could remember so I could thank him... But one day I was flying blindly as usual in a SpitV and this 51 came up and started messing around with me. I think he was probably laughing so hard that he felt bad to shoot me right away. lol. Anyways, watching how he flew was damn cool to say the least. And even tho I was in a turn fighter, I had no idea how to really turn fight or even what turn fighting really was. All I knew is that it was the easiest plane to fly. lol. He out turned my little spitV with his P51 and I had to know how he did it.
From then on I was on a never ending quest to really learn what ACM was, and how these people were doing what they were doing with these planes. That was then this is now and I'm still here, and still learning cool little tricks and still having a blast.
Not to take away from 73's story, but in the end, right now, I am still here because of all the great people I've met along the way. Both in real life and in the game. For this very reason I will most likely be here until AH decides its time to close the door. (I pray that day will never come)
So there's my little story on how I got here.
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In ye olde 1980s days of Atari ST (4k memory!) was browsing a shareware rack and found a plain little floppy with Air Warrior typed on it.
What's this? I asked the store owner.
You play it on line, he said.
On line what? I asked.
GEnie, he said.
What's that? I asked.
Get a modem, dial your phone and play it on line, he said.
You're kidding, I said.
It was local long distance call to Rockville where General Electric let people with new-fangled home computers use some of its lines at night when they weren't so busy.
$6 an hour for Air Warrior, $7 an hour for local long distance, total $13 an hour to see little stick figure airplanes with big WWII names. You shot at them and PEOPLE operating them shot back at you! Real people, not AI robot responses!
Been a WWII flight sim enthusiast ever since.
And now $15 a MONTH for UNLIMITED play on GIGAHERTZ machine over CABLE high speed connection! And even talk real time audio with buddies while flying.
Totally incredible.
Progress, ya gotta love it.
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This is by memory so some of the details might be a tiny bit off - feel free to correct me ;)
In 1995, I was going through pilot training at Laughlin AFB, TX. My internet connection was a long-distance dialup connection to netcom in San Antonio, for about 15 cents a minute. FWIW, my largest phone bill that year was $1100 and I also spent a couple of hundred on WarBirds that month too.
I had been playing microsoft flight simulator since high school and enjoyed the heck out of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, but as my real life flying skills increased I wanted a bigger challenge. I'd heard about AW and even tried out the boxed game, but it never clicked with me and I didn't have any money until 1995 anyhow. Then on alt.games.pc.flight-sim, I heard about this cool new game you could download and fly online for free. Getting online was a bit of a hack since it required a telnet connection (the tcp-ip connections everyone uses now were still almost unheard of at home), but on my old 386 DRx2 based system, all things were possible. I had a shiny new degree after 4 years in a computer science and engineering program, so whacking about online was second nature. I already had the thrustmaster FCS/WCSII programmable setup, so I was ready for the game. This was in mid 1995, with CK .8something if I recall correctly.
At the initial game setup, I couldn't think of a good ident so I chose "suck" because I'd read some newsgroup threads about people showing up and bragging that they were "good at flightsims" and I wanted everyone to know I didn't think I was so good. It turned out to be a good choice even though after my second day online my K/D never dropped below 1 (so I really WAS "good at flightsims"? LOL. I still suck, just ask Drex.)
My first online experience was a mixture of luck and pure dweebery. It took me less than an hour to figure out how to get off the ground in one piece. Once airborn, I proceeded to shoot at all these guys with red icons because red guys are bad, right? Well, it turns out that all new players started out flying for red, oops. After 3 fairly quick kills I read the text buffer, apologized, and set out on my way to find some real opponents. The terrain at this point was pretty flat, with some hills but definately not what you'd call "rolling". That came later.
I met up with a guy with the callsign "grdr" (for grinder), and he gave me my first virtual BFM lesson. I learned firsthand how flat turns at the merge don't work, so we fought and I died. We flew a lot against each other and at some point I started being able to hold my own. I switched countries to fly with him, and we ended up making a pretty good team. He'd get kills, and I'd scare people off of his 6. I never minded letting him get the kills and I can say my greatest online flightsim skill is being able to help others survive and get their own kills. That's the only reason Drex and I were any good at the dueling tournys - I focused on keeping us both alive so he could do the actual killing, and it worked just like it did back in 1995 winging with grdr.
Since I was living in the dorm and had some extra cash to spend, I ended up buying a screaming fast ZEOS pentium 66 with a full 32 meg EDO ram. At the time, 66 mhz over 60 mhz and 32 over 16 meg ram, let alone the EDO, bought a huge price premium. I got the ZEOS with all the bells and whistles because it was hands down the fastest prebuilt system on the market, plus it had the magic touch - an S3-968 based video card. That was important at the time because CK temporarily used a graphics engine that used S3 specific hardware to allow for some neat rolling terrain at what was then the amazing resolution of 640x480. Although the graphics engine changed and we went to what turned into WarBirds, that S3 video card remained about the fastest on the market until the Tseng ET-6000 hit the street.
Near the end of 1995, I found I was going to be assigned to the F-15E so I changed my ident to "eagl" and I've kept it ever since. I even dueled one person to keep the ident, because he was using "eag1" and the font in WB at the time made the 1 and l look the same. I won a best 2 out of 3 duel, and he was really cool about the whole thing and changed his ident to something else.
I resisted the move to the windows version because the dos version flew better. Oh yes, WB was a DOS APP! For a long time too, since the dos version really did fly better than the windows version for a long long time. Looking back, I can't believe they developed both the dos and windows versions for so long. Technology marches on, and going to a windows-only game enabled a lot of things like real TCP-IP connectivity (even though the base connection was still essentially telnet for a long time) and lots of other features that kept HT from having to code for specific hardware.
At some point Tone did some coding, and that had mixed results. Tone's Wildfire / HQ was an interactive text "bot" that could act as an intelligent message handler, provide realtime scoring inflight, track squadrons and create virtual radio channels by accepting text commands and sending private messages to anyone on the virtual channel, etc etc. It was a perfect ground control executive officer, but it relied entirely on parsing the text from the game and a database on his own machine, and this had multiple ramifications... Ultimately the telnet and parsable text interface went away and HQ died with it. In the many years since then, nothing has come even remotely close to the functionality it provided players and scenario managers.
The second thing Tone (and several others) did was create Roger Wilco, a voice app that ran quite well in the background. RW had hooks into MSIE, various messenger services, and basically sparked a dozen competitors that eventually crowded RW out of the market. Too bad, but of course AH has voice and that might not have happened if Tone and the crew at Resounding hadn't proven the technology. They did radio-quality voice over a 56k modem and it didn't cause warps, amazing.
Anyhow, that's a bit of what I remember from way back when. Hopefully my memory isn't too inaccurate or biased.
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well...i always had a bit of a thing for flight simulators, having had a blast when i was like 7-8 playing ace of aces...so when we got a new computer in 2002 (typing from it now) and got the internet hooked up (this was during a teacher strike, so i had lots of time on my hands) i started poking about for a ww1 flight simulator, having also messed about with red baron on a 486, but couldent find anything. then i saw this game, thought "ONLY 50mb, it cant possibly be any good" then after going past it a few times over the course of a couple days i finally thought oh what the heck, and got er...the fact that i didnt have a joystick didnt bug me, so i spent most of my 2 week free trial in the training arena just figuring out how to keep the damn thing in the air. after that i was HOOKED, at christmas that year i got a joystick, which lasted about 1 week, then it broke, but by that point i was fine with that as i wasnt much good with it anyway...took to long for the planes to move about...the next thing i know i am replying to this thread...
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I tried Air Warrior back in 1994 and was less than thrilled. I joined Warbirds during open beta and was enthralled with the game that Dale/Doug had created. They continually improved the game through incremental patches and add-ons (sound familiar?) until they sold it to a crazed madman and a bunch of suits who totally killed the game I had come to love. Took a look at WW2OL when it went closed beta as much of the staff was former friends and adversaries from teh WB era. But WW2 was a joke, and as much as I disliked iEN I could not see quitting WB for WW2OL. I cancelled my Warbirds account when AH went open beta even though AH was raw and obviously incomplete. Almost 5 years later I have never regreted that decision.
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Well I got started not in WB or AW. I got started in Fighter Ace. I was just goofing one night and came across it on MSN. I thought to myself.."Flying Online in Real TIme?" HmmIll see what this is. Well I D/l'ed it. There I was flying some stupid looking plane thinking this is pretty cool. My wife laffed and said you go get em Fighter Jock.
Well I stayed inj FA for a while. I joined a squad who had a physco for a CO. But , I had made some online buds and we decided it was time to make our own squad and move on. So we did in Fighter Ace. Before long we were basically killing everything in sight. In Fighter Ace you used to get a star by you ID in the game signifying an Ace. So every 5 kills you had without dying you got another. So I had at one time 10 and was working on my 11th when I got killed. Talk about attracting a crowd. Like 3 low and slow Spit 14's in here and 30 guys with Alt and Speed.
Well my buddies and I had heard about WB. So we thought we would try it. In the process of getting ready to go there I found Aces High. So I D'l'ed them both and compared. Not much comparison to me. So we all had an RW meeting and decided we would as a squad go to AH. 6 of us made it.
We spent HOURS augering and getting our tails just handed to us over and over. Here we were just Aces in FA to be totally owned in AH. We were almost ready to quit when we just decided to make it work. So we got better and practiced and watched the better guys at the time til we finally got to where we could at least land a kill or 2.
That was back in like 2000 I think. It has been a great time. I have taken a couple of breaks from the game. Still suck but I enjoy it more than I did when I first came online here. VMF222 was our first squad we joined when we got here. JEBO44 was great. Airbat , majic (i think it was) Crawfish , Acid , and a few others were great to fly with. That squad as since gone and I am back again. I have had a couple other ID's.
Aces High is the greatest thing going in online Flight Sims. We tried WW2 Online when it came out. Not even close to the same thing.
I'm happy to be back. Game has changed , people have changed. What hasn't changed is those few fights you get. The ones where the hands are sweating..Legs going a 100 miles an hour. Heart pumping. Waiting on that angle or snapshot. Tryinmg to manuver onto the other guys six. All while either at 20 k or 200 ft. The fight lasting for what seems like hours and its only been 5 minutes. TYhose are the times , beit not as often as they used to be , that keep you glued to playing.
The commraderie that you have with your squaddies. The friends you make. Even tho you may not meet em ever in real life you share thoughts and daily things that happen. It's a great place here. This community sometimes (myself included ) tends to forget how good we have it.
A great staff that loves to make the game better...even tho we don't always agree...They have the best and are the best.
Thanks HTC for everything.
VFJACKAL , 99Vette (I think it was once) , RedTop
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I was visiting my hometown talking with my friend Bill, and I had mentioned that I decided to finally go online since AOL started its new unlimited access plan (thinking it was around nov-dec 95). He told me there was a game on aol, airwarrior that was free to play. He hooked me up on where to find it, and which arena to find him in when I got it installed.
I signed up with my first inital and middle name for a CPID (TDale). I was completely clueless when I got in there. Planes had always interested me, and I could identify some of the plane set if I saw one in real life, but I knew absolutely nothing about air combat. Before I even took my first flight, my friend Bill had his CO recruit me. Carlos "fedex" Colon, and Kurt "Fike" Clark took me in right away and helped me along with the basics of what I should be doing.
Prior to that I had always enjoyed gaming, but this was different. I was hooked right away by two things. One I was playing aginst real people from all over the world (still a novel idea at the time), and two, the guys in the squad were really great to hang out with, and I was learning as much about computers/web/html from them as I was about the game.
About 8 months later my friend Bill and his wife came to visit and stayed at our house for the weekend. He watched me fly, and I was explaining what I thought were cool moves while doing them. When I landed he just looked at me and shook his head in amazement. "Dude, I have no idea what you were doing. You're using buttons that I didnt know were there." After that confidence booster, I became a hopeless adict.
After another year, when AW2 was beta testing on AOL, I decided I wanted a more memorable ID. Having just looked at a newspaper article where the cornor ruled the cause of death was murder for a man found dead in his truck with a shotgun blast through the back window (DUH! how hard was that to figure out?), I tried a 5 letter version of murder. It was avalible, and I stuck with it since then.
Years later when I checked in on bigweek, and seen all the Kesmai Studios people were laid off, and Kesmai was shut down, I realized I better start looking for a new game. I had dabbled in Warbirds, and I really liked what I saw there, but prefered the friendships and community in AW. I had heard that the HiTech of WB had went out on his own and started AH. Being that I liked what HT did in early versions of WBs, AH was the logical place to start.
I downloaded AH very shortly afterwards, and when the flood of AWers came in a few months later it felt like home.
:)
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I just followed all the sheep. Mbaaaaaaaaaaaa!
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The Readers Digest Version is on my Squads Webpage in the History Section :)
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Playing anything online wasn't really an option till we got broadband about 4/5 years ago. Much earlier to that I'd been into games on my mates Spectrum and Amiga, loading the games through the tape deck wasn't funny but if it all hung together we'd be playing all night.
Got out of the habit as I grew older, didn't have or think about a PC until the Mrs needed one about 8/9 years ago. Splashed out £1.5k on a IBM Aptiva (soon to be renamed CrAptiva) with a 100Mhz Pentium and 32Mb of RAM. Had this tiny 12inch goldfish bowl monitor and a whopping 1Gb hardrive.
Picked up games where I'd left off and as I'd built model planes as a kid, I started looking for something online when we got broadband. Found AH about 4 years ago and been playing off and on since.
I knew sweet FA about planes or the game mechanics, pure RTFM material. I remember the first time logging in, trying to avoid colliding with my teamates on the runway thinking, these guys are nuts! (turned out most of them were but for different reasons) I spawned in hangars for the first month, just in case.
I used to choose my plane purely on how much ammo it carried, my reasoning being the more ammo, the more people I could shoot down. Getting shot down for the 4,592 time for no kills was a pivotal moment, it began to dawn on me there was a bit more to all this than I first thought.
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Nice reads all of ya :)
Octavius got his start flying back in '95 with a boxed Navy sim called "US Navy Fighters GOLD" (the gold included a few new aircraft such as the Sea Harrier and AC130U Spectre Gunship). My buddy and I would stay up all night creating kick bellybutton custom missions and having eachother give them a run. Oh how I wished that game had multiplayer capabilities. I was barely breaking 12-15 frames per second on my old 486 and would scream with excitement every time I saw it break 20fps :D Oh the polygons were beautiful.
Then one day I was surfing around on AOL's lovely (pitifull) game selection and came across a game called "Air Warrior." It was free, so I gave it a shot. Took all night to download on my 28.8. The next day I was disappointed to find out I needed this crap called "ram" to run it. When I discovered this "ram" cost about $80 for a few "megabytes" I flipped. I ended up borrowing my dad's laptop in order to run it. The laptop had no serial port for my ancient CH joystick from 1993. I think it was called a Talon...? 3-4 button, right-handed stick (and I'm a south paw). Anyway, stickless, I used a mouse.
Air Warrior rocked my world. I do remember scoring a few kills with my dirty, jumpy mouse. There were so many aircraft, I had no idea what to pick. I just remember seeing a wall of black profiles of each aircraft and clicking the "coolest" looking plane. The only particular sortie I remember involved a fully manned B17. I think I flew for the green C country. Cz or whatever the L337 AW crowd called it ;) We made it to the target, dropped a bomb that missed horribly, and successfully RTB'd with multiple kills for each gunner. It was great seeing my crew cheering on the text. I flew under the handle of "Maz." We ended up dumping AOL and thus lost free AW.
A few years down the line, I'm reading a PC Gamer article and I see this flight sim called "Aces High". I think it was a winter issue in early 2000. I just spent a half hour looking for it, but with out avail. I think, "Hey, this looks a lot like that Air Warrior game..." I go to the website, download it, and install. Bam, I'm hooked. I instantly open an account after flying offline for a little bit. I still remember those original non-custom sounds for all aircraft. If you want a serious flashback, replace all your sounds with the originals from the early versions.
After dweebing around for a while in Tours 3 or 4, flying anything and everything, Sunchasr invited me into a squad called "The Mad Bombers." Yeah, I was a buff dork, mainly the B26. I had a model of a B26 a long time ago and freaked when I saw that it was in the game. We went on HQ runs, base captures, all kinds of neat things. The old tours were great. We were amazed when the total numbers in the MA exceeded 100. I still had the handle "Maz" at the time. After my tour was up, real life got in the way and I was AWOL.
When I returned, I used the handle "Executor." Shortly after, I think it was July of 2000, Ripsnort invited me to the VMF-323 Death Rattlers for an "experimental squad." It was all downhill from there. I was introduced to the fighter and JABO. Very organized, very quick, very fun.
Eventually my old CH stick called it quits. I bought a Cyborg 3D Digital with a twisty rudder (NO MORE KEYBOARD RUDDER FOR ME!) and a wave of skill washed over me. Hehe, my gunnery improved tenfold. I still sucked though. It took a while to get where I am today. A lot of flying, a lot of frustration, and a lot of reading.
The Death Rattlers called it quits after a few years. I dweebed around as solo for a few months and then these tards called The ASSASSINS, an ancient squadron of divine sticks with roots in WarBirds, invited me to fly with them. I've been the newguy for a little while now.
..... aaaaaand this brings me to now. Aces High has changed a ton, but the more things change the more they stay the same. I am still a freakin dweeb and I still love the feel of wool on my skin.
Thanks HTC for this game. And thanks for this BBS... a large portal to the instardnet. :cool:
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Umm, was looking for a WW2 flying sim and stumbled across AH1. I had it for a month before I finally took my 2 weeks online. I was hooked.
3 weeks in a guy named Jamx contacted me in the middle of me fighting 4 rooks trying to defend a base. He asked me to join a squad. Best thing I ever did after playing Ah1.
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I was over at Beemers and it was 13th TAS Squad Nite.
To put it simple , they were having fun and I couldn't believe a bunch of guys from Kansas and Europe were talking to him like they were having beers across the table from each other.
Flying is the second reason I still love this game HTC
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One day in bandcamp...
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Cellmate told me all about it. I got out. Hooked.:cool:
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First online flight sim was Red Baron 3D. When things got to the point of logging on to see only a couple people on each day I gave it up. Looked around for another WW1 online flight sim but bumped into Aces High. I liked the website and the two week trial deal so I tried it and the rest is ..well, over three years later and I'm still here.
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I had the bug for WWII avaition since I was knee high to bucket of ****. Did a bit of RL flying when I was in college..
My first computer was an Amiga and I bought 1942 Gold..followed by Red Baron, Secrets of the Luftwaffe, Flight simulator etc. etc.
Used a cheap little joystick for all those but found I needed a "setup". Bought a TM flight control system in early 98. ( Finally retired it two months ago ) and with it came a CD for Warbirds.
Went online for the first time in July of 98. Was on for a few days and this guy comes on with blue text and says "Welcome nopoop, glad your here" My introduction to HT.
Spent 4 or 5 years over there battling with lazs on the boards. Did some sparing over the axis/alllied thing. The BK's were still there at the time.
Made a brief appearance at AH beta and registered on the boards. But it was beta and I wasn't a beta guy at the time.
Like most at WB it finally came the time to pull the plug. Came over here to find the passion that I had lost. Few days after coming over this guy comes on with the blue text and says "Welcome nopoop, I'm glad your here"
That felt good. I was home.
With a stint with a great bunch of guys the Mongrels I found myself in the same place as lazs, Codger and Apache each and every night. It was a natural progression that's gone full circle.
Anyone want a rabbit ??
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I read about AW on Delphi on my C64 computer. When I made the leap to a 486 66 MHz PC, the first thing I did was dl it. I was taken in by the CAF, and have been playing AW, then AH ever since.
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Aside from hearing my grandpa constantly telling WWII stories from my earliest recollections, I have always been a fan of WWII. In 3rd grade, my classmates were reading about Curious George and I was checking out every WWII book I could get my hands on.
I had a Apple IIe growing up, and Wings of Fury (played it from 1986-on) would by my first "sim" if it could be classified as that. I wore out 4 joysticks playing that.
In the late summer of 2002. I was working at the General Motors Call Center, then a person there had a Hog on his desktop. I asked him if he was into WWII as well. he replied "Yes, I play this sim online called Aces High" I told him I had flown Microsoft CFS 2, and Jane's, and he said "that's watermelon compared to this". When it was time for me to punch out for the day he took a "smoke break" and told me all about it. I downloaded it, and was hooked when I rolled a 38 in the TA (I was thinking "damn this is good"). I got nailed twice by some idjit. Got pissed off enough and followed him back to his base, watched him land, and I "vulched him 3 times", watched him whine, and went to the MA. I started in NAZGUL, and am now in the Cactus Air Force.
Thanks BoxBoy28 for getting me hooked! <>
Karaya (formally known as Karaya2)
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I've got the most intriguing (sp?) story of all.
A couple three years ago I had the day off and was bored with all of the AI sims, CFS2, FA, FS2000, IAF, got on Google and searched for Online Flight Sims. I saw Warbirds and figured I'd give it a try. Turns out that my PC was not up to par and I had to scratch that.
I went upstairs and flipped on Discovery:Wings. Sure enough, the first thing i see is a virtual Corsair landing on a CV. I say to myself, "Hey, that ain't real." Then off comes the AH commercial. I franticly search for a piece of paper so I can write down the coveted website, http://www.flyaceshigh.com.
I raced down the stairs, dialed in on my wonderful 56k modem, and waited the 3 minutes for the website to load up. After getting a little confused and overlooking the links at the bottom of the page, I get frustrated. I see the HTC link, click it, and find downloads. I download the game. It was a fast download, only took 20 minutes. I immediately race into my two week trial. Smart move, idiot. After getting blown out of the air for those 2 weeks, I decide that I'd subscribe later.
Now Im here, with an off-and-on subscription and I have no intentions of leaving anytime soon.
Wow, I only intended on that being a few lines...:lol
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Started out about 6 years ago online with Red Baron as Schadenfreude, then moved to FA for a couple of years, even got the nod to join the FA Damned Squad - lasted a week, didn't have enough ego to put up with those boys - went from 2.5 to 3. whatever - got tired of the wonder woman cockpit view and the crayon room physics moved to AH a couple of years ago.
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Originally posted by Captain Virgil Hilts
Found Air Warrior in a store sometime around 97-98 I think. Found it online soon after. Moved here when AW was murdered by the evil Electronic Arts slime. Could barely play for a while and was bucks down, so I had to quit, the computer just wouldn't take it, the crashes would literally trash all my data. I hung around and tried several times to make it stay working, to no avail. Finally my RL situation improved, and I built a decent rig.
^ His story ... my story ... bout identical. Except he's a dirty ape fanatic and I'm a VF-17 devotee.
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I first tried AH during the very early beta. I was not terribly impressed, seemed like alot of eye candy to the detriment of playability. In retrospect I was probably just jaded from 7+ years of AW. In any event, being a creature of habit I went back to AWFR until EA destroyed it. In disgust I took a year or two off before trying AH in earnest in September 2002. I have been here ever since, much to the chagrin of my enemies. ;)
I have always been a WW2 history nut and especially air combat history. Playing the game to me is like living, at least in part, the lives of those brave souls who fought in the skies over Europe and the Pacific. I try to approach the game as they may have approached their combat sorties as a way of remembering and honoring them. I find this especially important today as those who actually fought during WW2 are passing away, forever removed from living memory. The history and our celebration of the 'golden age' of air combat is all that will remain.
Zazen
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Nice story 73
AH was my first internet flightsim experience. I have been playing offline flightsims since the early days of Commodore 64 and Amiga, and my all-time favourites are Yeager's Air Combat, EAW and now AH.
My AH introduction is not as interesting as JB73's though. I was playing some CS and DoD on the net and I bumped into an old friend of mine who told me about WWIIOL. Naturally I was very interested, and checked it out ... THEN as I was looking at the WWIIOL homepage I remembered a tiny article on a game called Aces High in a computer magazine I read long ago and decided to see what was out there before subscribing to WWIIOL. I found AH to be more interesting because of the more pure A2A gameplay and bigger planeset. Signed up for the 2 week trial and got hooked ... bad.
So you could say that I was hijacked on the doorsteps of WWIIOL by a tiny, tiny article in a magazine that sparked my interest. :)
Edit: Oh and this was in the spring/summer of 2002.
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I've only been playing a month now :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol
Atleast it feels that way some nights :eek:
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In 1977, I was in SLC, walked by a hobby shop, and saw some Gamers pushing wooden stands around with models on them, went in got involved and started making models <72nd scale still got em> the Game was M&M was really hooked thought to my self a computer could do this... got in to the Army got divorced, went to Germany, came back end of 91, , talking to the MnM crew heard about Fourms on Genie Net, and AW, finshed my Xfer to Ft Riley, logged on signed up, played a month......450.00...... <$12.00/ hr LD charge to nearest node, $8.00/hr for GeNie, $6.00/hr for AW..OUCH> cut back to an Hr a month, played on and off till I got out of the army in 96, by now AW has moved to AOL, and the hourely rate WENT AWAY....... 2 weeks later my wife turned off comp, threatened mayhem, I caught my breath.... eventually I ended up on the AW3 Beata test team, suffered till the end and AW Died. Was Xfered to ZAB ARTCC saw AH Signed up found my RR Squad from AW, also found my FR Squad but the had all joined the Dammed, but ran in to the Hammerheads first, continued to play. Still cant Shoot, have wrecked a GNPs worth of Sim AC, and fly as many Scenarios as I can.
Gunns
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October 99 .... Heater, I still blame you for this...as does my ex wife!
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Sometimes long ago in the mailbox days i downloaded Warbirds 2D and was very impressed by it, buzzed the bridges in a B-17 in offline mode a bit. Had played a lot of flight sims on the Amiga, later on the PC. Made some camos for Jane's F-15 and stuff. Somewhere in that time range, Air Warrior had a 2 week free play and i tried it out. Found myself to be a bad fighter pilot, found a B-17 pilot called jimmi and decided to gun for him. 2 Weeks of pure fun.
Then sometime around 98 a european/german Warbirds server was opened, starting with a free beta. Got hooked kinda fast, stayed there and eventually became a Trainer (not that my fighting skill was any good, but i could explain stuff good i think) and a CM. Even started some programming to write a program that sent the CM dot commands to configure an arena so you could set it as you liked it offline and transfer all the .commands in a short time online, without typing all over and over again. Had a lot of fun there in a pure heavy bomber squad, the 487th BG.
The european Warbirds server folded, and transition to the US server didn't really work out for me, with the old squad gone. Around this time AH started beta, and i stayed there and some time into retail. Most memorable moment must've been when Hristo in his 109 dove vertically on my B-17 and blew my wing clean off.
Checked out games from other ex-Warbirds devs too - WW2OL, Terra, didn't feel really at home there though. Then sometimes in 01 a space 3D game called Jumpgate was in open beta, i tried it and it was fun. After the US beta ended, i settled in on the EU/german Jumpgate server, made some cash fast, then became OP/GM later. Left it a year ago because the constant *****ing got on my nerves.
Haven't looked into online games since then, esp. because my grandma had to move to a home and i had to spent quite some time and cash renovating (rather rebuilding from scratch) the basement she lived in and where i live now - about 70% finished, only that cash is at -10% now :rolleyes:
Maybe someday I'll hang around in the arena and will be looking for a heavy bomber squad that flies in the european time zone...
Az
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one night, i was toolin' around in AOL land, hit the Games button, found the Air Warrior download. 3 hours later I was in a P-51 in AW1...amazed that all the other planes were piloted by other real-live people. :eek: :aok :D Been flying ever since with a few months off here and there.
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Originally posted by JB73
LOL alot of really old hands here. i always knew that, but it really makes me feel like a newbie still knowing guys were in this game last century,
last century??
try last millenia :rofl
i found AH1 on a free game download site and spent 1 hour trying to find something to kill in the offline mode :)
even tried setting up a mission offline and thought it might send all those planes up against me
lolol
then i worked out the free trial bit and went online and have never been able to stop since.
Damn thing is so addictive yet easily affordable.
the worst drug i can think off yet a way of life we cannot deny ourselves.
AH2 is such an improvement from AH1 and AH1 was superb.
HTC and all you lot that make it fun.
Batfink
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AARP magazine:eek:
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HiTech,
called said he was working on a new game... the rest is History, and HiTech well he is still the one & only PUTZ!
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It was the first Saturday I'de had off in months but the Mrs was at work. I'de done about 2hrs trawling the net and was bored to tears. As I was about to close AOL I noticed on their front page a link to Games. Me thinks ping pong, space invaders or the like. Anyway there was a link to a Combat Fighter Sim called Fighter Op's. Firstly, my curiosity was salamandered and whats a sim? So having checked out the blurb and looked at the amazing screenies I had to have a go.
56k didn't help but 2 hrs later "Stevex" was crashing on take off in a Spit. I asked the newb question and white text said that reading the help file may help. Another hr later + a joystick (no hat switch) I HO (cringes thinking back) the 1st bad guy i came across. I got the kill and was well impressed.
A few months later my squad The League of Gentlemen was born and quickly maxed out at 36 squadies. We were second only to the Krauts (ebola fame). AOL Fighter Op's was sold / given / transfered or whatever to Warbirds FO. 19 of us made the change being pleased to find it CHEAPER had a blast for a year or so but then WB2 came out and as some of you know FO turned to crap. Poor gamey play, reduced numbers, the good bad guys and the good good guys started to leave. It got very samey. Spending less time on line I gave command to Davejh. I'de heard from some players about a sim called Aces High so upgraded my AMD 475 with a Gforce card and made the switch. This was cool cv's gv's guns ect + CHEAPER still. Ok, my FPS was 14 to start with but I manged to get it to push 21 on a good day.
My wife regretes my Saturday off while she had to work but she did buy me a mini fridge that holds 4 cans for me Friday nights.
Question though... has anyone done Physiological research on compultion / addiction with regard SIM. My wife thinks I have a problem. I try to reassure her that keeping "E" in a T&B fight ain't no problem.... :aok
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It was Dec of 2000 and I asked my parents for a computer for Christmas. Well anyways my friend came over my house and was teaching me how to download on my new computer. So he takes me to cnet. Well after a few days of learning how to download, I had gone throgh at least 50 flight sims(on a 56k modem).
Then I came along to Aces High. I Downloaded it and played it offline. At this time i had a piece of poop joystick that my dad got for free after rebate, so taking off would not work. I remember taking off in a p-51d taking off then spining and hitting the ground. This was real fun lasted me at least 2 weeks of fun.
So I stoped playing because my joystick was crap. 3 years later (Aug 2003) on that old beat up system i installed Aces High again(lucky for me i had it on a cd which was like one of the original versions). Well anyways I got online and was thinking this game is cool. My fps were 10 im thinking that was good and im play a choopy game. Well im flying around and some guy named ZIP53 asked me if i wanted to join his squad so i did.
I played my two week trial had 13 kills i was so happy. THat same week my mom said i could not use the computer till my grades got up. So i would sneek in the h2h arena when my parents left. Preety soon i started to get kills. Then in november my internet was cut off. I was so pissed.
During my Aces High Break somebody at my school gave me a Pentium 600 with a ATI Rage. I started to get 60 fps in AH now. So I would practice offline. Then in March my mom finally got my cable internet hooked back up. I went strait to the H2H areana and was landing 7 kills a sortie (thinking I was good).
THe same week I begged HTC to give me a free trial for AH. THey did, So i decided I would get in touch with Zip. I left a message on his squad website. Then Jetb123 e-mailed me to tell me the squad was disbanned and to join Airraiders. I really did not want to join but Jetb123 found me and i didn't want to be mean so i joined.
Then I became best friend with Jetb123 we even formed our own squad. I started playing this game every day. My grades improved in school. So i could play Aces High this year of high school.
Thats how i joined Aces High. I also left out alot of stuff because i would be writing for days.:)
Sorry for the bad spelling
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I flew a sim called Falcon 3.0 with a bunch of Falcoholics that called themselves the F3 group. This group was made up of people who had a love for Falcon 3.0 and also posted regularly in the Falcon forum on one of the major online services back then ( the name of the service escapes me at the moment). Anyway, two of the members of this group (Bebop and Shebop) put together a little get together at there home so we could all meet and have a Falcon tournament. I drove down to Northern NJ to meet my "online" friends. Not only did I have a great weekend of playing Falcon but I was also introduced to SVGA AW on genie. When I got home I joined Genie and downloaded AW. I was hooked!! I normaly tell people that the CAF was my first Squadron I flew with, but in retrospect, this is not true. Bebop got me into the squad he flew with, The Warhawks. Now back then it was a per hour charge and if I remember correctly it was like 10 bucks an hour after you figured in your Genie online time and your AW online time. I tried hard to limit my time online but the addiction was just to great. After a few months of carefull control, I sliped over the edge. My bill hit $500.00 that month. Well, that ended that for awhile. To make a long story short, the F3 group moved to Genie online and soon after AW opened on Delphi. Some of the members on delphi decided to Start a new Squadron so that when AW went live on Delphi we would be ready. The name of this Squadron was the Cactus Airforce. The first squadron that I took a real active roll in.
I flew with the CAF when I could ( it was still exnoodleive to play) but was eventualy forced out do to the high cost of this addiction. Some say Crack will force you to economic disaster. Brother, it has nothing over a SVGA AW addiction!!! That ended that untill AW moved to AOL and was a no charge game!!
I played AW up intill I heard about Aces high. I moved to Aces high just after the beta and have never looked back. Anyway, thats my story and i'm sticking to it.
< S >
Vati66
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Thanks JB73 for sharing with us your story. It was great reading, and it reminded me of my story that I wrote while I was still on AW when it was still on GameStorm.
Here's that write up again, although some things are obsolete, links do not exist anymore, but it was the frame of mind then... I hope you enjoy my story too...
=====From GameStorm=====
GameStorm: Around the World
Air Warrior and its International Community: It's Bait and Getting Hooked
By Flying Dutchman
To My mentors, squadmates, and friends on AW:
Greetings all you Air Warriors (and players on GS) from the other side of the Pacific (Japan)! In this article, I would like to demonstrate that regardless of who or what we are, we still share the same passion and desire to have fun in a similar fashion, which can also be life-threatening all at the same time.
My start on online gaming began with MegaWars I, made by a U.S. company, Kesmai. The game is basically a space war done all in text format. All read-outs come out in text every time you enter a command. It was offered on "Nifty Serve", a Japanese counterpart of CompuServe run by Fujitsu. Although it completely lacked any sort of graphics, it was extremely fun interacting with all the people there. The key word here is interacting. Unlike in the standalone computer games, with online games there are people on the other side of the of your terminal. Every time, you beat someone, you can see the other guy screaming "aaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!" just like you when you get beaten. This aspect of the gaming was so appealing, it was the only way to go, which I am sure most of the people who play here agree. The idea and the philosophy here is very simple, get back at the guy who got you!
Even with no graphics, it was so much fun, I stayed online for hours on end, picking a fight anywhere I could find. By the end of the first month, I had basically fought with everyone there and they gave me the Fighting Spirit Award of the Month. The only drawback was that I completely forgot about my wife and my bills. God knows what happened after that! (Ahem! . . . Sound familiar? hehehehe)
I started AW purely by chance. AW4W came with the CD-ROM I ordered for the upgrade of WinCIM. I had always been playing flight sims and AW4W interested me a lot. However, I knew I would get hooked on it. And I couldn't resist installing AW4W. At that time, I really wanted an excuse NOT to play. So, when I first went to the Air Warrior section on CompuServe and the menu came up which said "Click Here to Play", I kept mumbling to myself, "Please don't connect, please don't connect, tell me that the network congestion won't let me play half-way around the world, I am gonna get hooked . . . " . . . "SHEEPDIP, it connected . . . " This was the start of another Nightmare . . . hehehe (and the Squad I belong in too!)
The first thing that happened to me was that I was totally lost . . . I barely had an idea of what I was doing. Flipping through the .pdf file that I printed on the Flight Instructions and Operations Manual for Air Warrior (My God, it's thick!), the first thing I did was go to the radio and catch a glimpse of what it was like online through the Internet. There, the first online communication I heard was either in Dutch or German and not English.
I thought to myself "WOW, Europeans are playing too??" Talking about serving the entire world! The first thing I said was, "Do any of you speak English?"
After a week I gathered enough points and got kicked out of the newbie section and to the RR European theater. That was the start of my AW life. Soon after, I went shopping for a squad to get in. The AW community was so big, I needed a close-knit group to talk to first. The first squad I got in unfortunately went under. The CO suddenly disappeared. Well, maybe it was a blessing in disguise, because, after that I was able to get into the best squad there is! And there I met Root, a bloody British (ah no offense intended there:))
The Nightmares Squadron, like some squads, offers a forum for its members where we can discuss freely what we think and give feedback to other members. There I did my best to contribute to provide input for the community we had. At the time I joined, we started moving to FR from RR, and needless to say there was a huge discussion on how to fly there. For starters, we discussed stick scaling. We had all sorts of suggestions . . . and I eventually ended up doing an analytical review of it, which is posted at my Web page the Dutchman's Den, http://member.nifty.ne.jp/flying_dutchman/.
While in FR, I picked a fight with anyone who I could get my hands on. One was `Cat, my mentor, an American living in the England at the time. I also had a shock of my life when I dueled a guy who started AW at about the same time I did and who I enjoyed dropping eggs on over his head in his flak. This guy was 7blue and he outdid me every time I went up. Devastated by this, I sought training which `Cat with Nowi and `Badz had offered and 7blue was already a regular. There I sat there listened, absorbed all I can. Since then 7blue, a German, and I, a Japanese, have been winging every chance we get. We haven't met in real life, though I hope to someday, and we are very good friends. That goes for all my squadmates, who I have the joy of flying with every week. Some us are from Germany as well.
My squad had a Member of the Month Contest, which was to emphasize Situation Awareness. (It is taking a break right now as the transition to AW3 had been difficult for many of us in many ways, unfortunately.) won the first one; I won the second; won the third. It was great fun for all of us and did wonders to our way of flying. RTB alive and carry those kills with you.
I also have another project going with and . We started an informal training course offered every other week in ACMs and Plane Characteristics. Anyone is welcome to join BTW ;)
and the Nightmares Squad had another project going which was to write up something for each plane on AW3. I did my share by writing on the FW190-D9. It is currently posted on 's site at: http://home.earthlink.net/~burmma/.
Writing the post on the Dora wasn't easy BTW. While I was writing, my wife saw me and said, "how could you write so much for a VIRTUAL plane!" Oh well . . . But this same wife offered me coffee and and something to eat when I had to wake up at 3AM for the scenario "Target: Germany". There I met a lot of nice people whom I never got a chance to meet, like Lurkr, LW and =JW=.
In the arena, I have the honor of frequently flying against Raven, -MLM-, and Soota, an Aussie and a southern neighbor on the Eastern Hemisphere.
Well, I could still go on and on about my life in the AW community. As you can see, I have met a lot of people from all over the world and will continue doing so. Needless to say, I have a lot of fun participating in this community and I am trying to give back what I absorbed. I hope you share the fun that I have!
CYA in the SKY!!
Flying Dutchman
=====End of Story=====
AW was in its prime then, I think, and the internet became much more common. Then it got bought by EA. A lot of the players were waiting on further developments which brought about AW3 and subsequently AW3 Millenium (which was no different from the original AW3). We had an ongoing discussion on what to do... no developments seen in the game, none expected in the future, people just waiting and hanging on to hopes. Of course, people went out shopping for other games, one of which was AH. Our squad got divided into two games, however, fortunately or unfortunately, the choice was made for us... AW went under. I made my transition to AH slightly before AW died. Most of us made this transition... Badz is Badboy, LW is LoneWolf, Raven I think is still Raven, is BFD...
memories, memories, memories... nice, isn't it :)
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My story isn't great but it is a case of self discovery and a tribute to my willingness to slack-off at work.
Bordom at work leads to surfing and where else will a flight enthusiast roam but to flightsim.com.
It was about a year ago, I'd recently come off a stint of flying with a virtual airline - getting a feel for what a real ATP pilot might do, racking up some 500 hours online. But its boring being a virtual bus driver. And hey I can land a 747 in a crosswind with two engine failures while doing an ifr approach and not come out too badly. I needed a challenge and the standard Flight sim wasn't cutting it.
Then i came across an article on flightsim.com explaining the basic concept behind MMORGs and despite mentioning Air Warrior and Warbirds the author only provided a link to HTC. Small problem... i did't have a joystick - my control yoke - while sufficient for driving my airbus I knew wouldn't cut it.
Finally one week after getting my tax return I found a stick on sale and treated myself, ran, skipped and jumped home and downloaded Aces High 1 ... the rest, as they say is history.
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Originally posted by FDutchmn
=====From GameStorm=====
GameStorm: Around the World
Air Warrior and its International Community: It's Bait and Getting Hooked
:lol I still have the GameStorm t-shirt that someone sent me. :)
My g/f almost threw it out one day.....oooooooh, that was a bad move. :D
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Originally posted by Grits
I was wandering around in a software shop in 1993 and stumbled upon a box that said "SVGA Air Warrior". It was on sale, and looked kinda interesting so I bought it. ...
Hey, I believe that's exactly how I got started! But I couldn't afford to play online at that time. So I flew offline until AW for AOL came out and the cost was manageable. Man, I don't know how many hours I spent fighting those AI planes offline before finally making it online. By that time I was OK at flying, but ACMs against real people was alot different than against drones. I despaired of ever getting a kill. And then the 69th Shepherd's Fold took me in. They taught me team work and helped me in many other ways. Well, when AW finally caved I was in another squad (the WildCards) by that time and we made the decision to go to AH (instead of WB). Never looked back.
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Like a lot of you, I too was drawn to Air Warrior... Managed to get into the beta for it back in GEnie daze. Even managed to get Kelton Flynn to remodel the gunnery for the p-38 at the expense of a road trip to UVA (just down the road at the time), and my copy of "Fork Tailed Devil" This was when I had the Atari 520-ST.
Top monthly bill when GEnie went live with it, was over $2000.oo USD :eek: and that was just to GEnie... The long distance call to Rockville, MD was the killer that nearly cost me my marriage. So I had to relent and just go LAN connection to feed my flight addiction at weekly ATARI abusers meetings.
Eventually, the NET took off like wildfire, and I followed it like a moth. Did all the hardcore flight sims; SWATL, BoB, AW2, Falcon... then, when I was doing some game reviews and previews, Warbirds was brought to my attention. OMG, this was back in what... '94-'95? I think, maybe later. Anyway, I managed to get into the Beta for that, found myself sayin "Jawesome!" with each new update and improvement... Stayed active in WB until about '99-00. (Hey! I'm 51 and long term memories shot full of holes where years come in :( )
I found Aces High when the "big split" happened over the move to NC for the WB staff. Got into the Closed Beta, and stayed there ever until 2001. Had a lot of furballs, and yeahr, I whined a bit in the early years under various names best left dead. I remember the paper tailed Runstangs, and when HT found out he had the gravity or weight of the .50's set to 20mm after a bunch of us were ranting about the balistics... (HT, I love ya man... well, like a brother... ya know? ;) I wonder if HT remembers our argument over who first modeled tracers in online flight sims? :p HT was the first to accurately model the tracers balistics folks... this is fact. :cool: )
Did the wooTooll (WW2-Online) beta also, and suffered through the disastrous launch for 6 months, before bowing out of there... Now I hear it's gotten much better, so I might take a peek at the ground pounder side of the game there.
Why'd I leave AH? Bought a new house, moved 60 miles further south of DC and the commutes were killing me... Couldn't devote my usual 20 hours in flight every week... :( Then too, I found some other MMOGs, and bounced around like the red headed stepchild I am, only to wind up back home again. :) So now that money and time aren't issues, I expect to be flying the unfriendly CT skies once more...
And looking forward to the cat calls; "Runstang, turn n fight!" to which I reply, "Mom's calling!" :D
And that is how I got into AH...
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Well, my whole family has an aviation background, so I have always been fascinated with flight and flightsims. I flew my share of offline sims, but never tried anything online.
One night, many, many years ago, I saw a little piece on a TV show about an multiplayer flight sim and how they got all the old WW2 vets together to try it out. It got me hooked. Can't remember what it was, but it might have been Air Warrior. However, I still did not have an outlet to pursue it.
In 1999, my son David was born. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of time off so, with my wife's approval, I bought a brand new 500 MHz eMachine (woo hoo). As I began exploring, I happened across the Warbirds site. The download was free, so I started playing it. I sucked, but I had such a good time that I decided to go live and fly online. I died, and died, and then died some more, but I had a blast.
During my time with Warbirds I hooked up with the Screaming Death Squadron. They specialized in JABO and base closer. While I had come into the game wanting to be a fighter jock, I soon fell in love with the JABO and strike roll. I can't remember how many hours I flew with LB, rebel, slpsht and cuda (I think that was his handle), but it was a blast. I still sucked when it ended, but I was spending less time killing myself (doing stoooopid stuff) and more time getting killed by the bad guys.
Ultimately, I had more desire than I had money to fly. That combined with other demands that were being placed on my life caused me to have to leave Warbirds. However, right at the end, I spent some time testing out a new online flight sim that everyone was talking about. It was a free download and free to beta test. It didn't have many planes at the time, but I figured it was worth a shot. That was my first introduction to Aces High. That was in early 2000.
I had to leave all the online stuff for some time. Various financial considerations and all that.
In late 2002 a colleage of mine (who didn't even fly sims, but knew I liked them) turned me on to Fighter Ace. I ordered the CD to get the 90 days free. Once again, I loved it. Powered with my AMD 1700+ PC and DSL it was a much more enjoyable experience. I would spend hours online flying, kill, dying. However, I never found a squad I really wanted to hook up with. Because of that I closed out my account in 2003.
During the summer I won a free month on Warbirds during one of their free weekends. It was like old times, but, of course, a lot of the old faces were missing and, having a different handle, most people didn't remember me. Oh well, it was great. However, much as I wanted it to be, at the end of the free month there was just not enough there to make me want to stay. The numbers were way down. There squads didn't seem as welcoming and there was just way to much silly stuff (like these two guys that were fighting in the arena so when I tried to help the friendly, he kept coming after me for the next half hour until I logged). Anyway, I let the free period run out and have not played Warbirds online since.
Well, early this year the itch got me again. I had just built a brand new PC and broke out my fighter and flight sims again to get my fix. It was great for a while, but it just didn't cut it. I went through the rollodex in my head of the online flight sims and decided (after monitoring all the various boards) that since I had not tried the current version of Aces High and since they were showing the greatest numbers on at any time, I would give them a try. I downloaded the game, fly it offline for a bit and when I coulding stand it any more...went to my wife to beg her to let me pay for a subscription...lol. Being the sweet woman she is, she consented.
I set everything up, logged on for the first time, and with few exceptions I have been going strong ever since. I fly exclusively for Knightopia in the MA and probably will until I leave or they permenantly do away with the Knights.
After being on flying lone wolf for about 2 weeks, I was asked by JAMX if I wanted to join the Nasty Dead Men. They had a two week evaluation time (for me and for them) so I figured I would give it a shot. They are a great group of guys and I have learned an awful lot with them during squad and training nights. KODA is the CO and I have move from peon (lol) to XO.
Anyway, that's my story and I'm stickin to it.
I really enjoy AH. It has some bugs and its share of whiners, dweebs, prima donas and like, but it is a good experience and there are a lot of good people on here. My recent experience during my sons disappearance proved that. Not many people know this but I posted the information about my son disappearing on the AH board here because I knew there were all sorts of people from all walks of life that would be will to help. That is the confidence I have it you guys (and gals).
Well, hope I didn't put you all to sleep.
Be seeing you in the virtual skies of AH! :aok
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I suppose you could trace it all back to a few barely playable (1-2 Seconds Per Frame) wire-frame missions of Airfight on the Plato system in the late 1970s, and most of the early boxed flight combat sims for the Apple 2 and PC starting in the late 1980s. Somehow, around 1993 I came across SVGA Air Warrior, which I played H2H with my roommate at the time (Yyrkoon) for about 6 months using a null modem connection and with a buddy from HS (Rutger, who still flys) and a few other friends. Made the move to the online arena using the cost-effective Delphi service, and realized how far I had to go to be competitive in an arena environment. I was pretty good on the actual 1-1 dogfighting, but there was very little 1-1 dogfighting and the whole SA thing was a major hurdle along with the finer points of energy management, which the human opponents easily exploited.
Transitioned to CRIS net when it came along (even more affordable), joined Genie with the absolute minimum plan ONLY to get access to the community support/combat tutorial materials (I seem to remember a few by Pyro). The goal was to get that positive K/D with a primarily stallfighting orientation -- which after a number of painful months eventually arrived. Managed to spend under $40 most months (20/20 plan) but had the occasional $200 month. Played FR, where a good night would have 70 people in the arena and you could find about 7 online at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. It was a fighting arena at the time (the limited “central/neutral” base capture was used to get closer to the furball action) so when the numbers were in the single digits you spent your time encouraging fair fights 1-1/1-2/2-3 or whatever, and you didn’t vulch (“I’ll give you wheels up a 2,000 feet) or gangbang because you didn’t want the limited opposition to get peeved and take his/her ball and go home :)
Followed AW to AOL and Win 95 (had to make the big upgrade to a Pentium 166 and a 3d Virge graphics card because of the performance hit from 95, but the game was free and essentially the same. And then came Gamestorm. I flew in the first “Bigweek” mission of the transition as a p-47 pilot (early CTD after takeoff) and was able to reup in as part of a p-38 flight to experience a full server crash right as I started diving in on some FWs. Flew 1-2 beta sorties and took a year off to let them sort out the system and to get rid of some personal burn out. When I came back it was a different game.
The central neutral capture model was gone (I believe Moggy said there were too many players to allow that kind of concentration with the existing server code). It was replaced by a huge “Big PAC” map with much enhanced land grab. There were also far greater numbers. On my first mission I followed a high P-51 for two sectors waiting for him to engage (a year earlier and a similar pilot would have engaged with agression 90 percent of the time, and engaged with caution the other 10 percent). He ended up dying dive bombing a base with me unable to catch up as the only human opposition within 2 sectors. It was so odd I even e-mailed my buddy Yyrkoon who had also stopped playing about a year or so earlier. It quickly became obvious that this was a new game. You would have large groups from each country off in a corner of a map steamrollering bases with little opposition. Most of the familiar faces were gone (to WB likely) as was most of the fighting spirit of the SVGA and AOL days.
I can remember flying 2-3 sectors in a maxed fuel KI-84 just to try and catch a few enemies alone or in smaller numbers on their way to and from a poorly defended or undefended target. Fuel porking two sectors deep was common (then other forms of base porking when that was addressed). Furball Island provided somewhat of a solution some of the time, but during the last 18 months I was there I pretty much only flew in scenarios and maybe 2 hours a month in the arena (if I flew at all). The EA move didn’t change a thing, and even added poor customer service to the mix. This style of gameplay is what led me to AH. Helped along by an EA board moderator who said (paraphrase): “You should be thankful that EA even keeps the game running, you undeserving little peons). I started looking for a new home that day and found it here several months before EA made the big announcement.
If this sounds like some transition into a slam on AH… It’s not. The current gameplay has shifted in that direction, but even at its occasional worst AH steamrollering and porkage only reaches the average level of Gamestorm/EA. You can still, if you’re willing, switch sides and move around a bit to find a good, old school fight here or there most of the time.
Also, what some of the newer online sim players may not realize, is that in the 8 years I played AW I saw far less development than in AH. Perhaps 8-9 new planes/models total (and none for years at a time), one significant graphics upgrade, no significant flight/damage model upgrade. You might complain that the FW-190 A5 is 5mph slower at SL than it should be in AH (according to this or that data) but you don’t see B-17s out turning Zeroes without losing E, etc. For me, AH2 has been bug free and fantastic. The KI-84 will bring it all home. So it’s not a slam on the HTC folks at all, but gameplay is something I certainly evaluate as part of my customer decision every time I fly. So far, well worth the $14.95.
Charon
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Been interested in flight sims since I was 11. Was looking for a good WW2 flight sim through Cnet a while back in June 2003. I found Aces High, downloaded it, played the 2 weeks out, and ended up paying the $14.99 a month. My handle back then in July was Paul33.
OoO I quickly became an AHAddict. I bought a Siatek X45 and logged in over 120 hours my first month. I also quickly realized that the learning curve was very high. So I used my useful brain to learn, study, and then try out what the better pilot's were doing. You could say my life was the Training Arena and Dueling Arena. My time eventually paid off... In just my second month of playing I had over 1,030 Kills in a fighter (August 03).
Then one very dissapointing day, my parents realized and decided my real life wasn't getting enough attention. They pulled the plug. (Your thinking, HOW COULD THEY??!!) Well, I thought the same way. So I found my beat up computer in the shed 4 months later, took it apart, and put it back together. I quickly looked for my addiction, clicked the little AH icon and tried to get back in only to find that my account was closed :( . But no worries, I asked my parents for a credit card and got back to playing in March 04. My new handle was Paul3333.
Then Art(artlaw) started making fun of my new name a week later and offered that I take a name he was holding, Paul. I thankfully took the offer and was on my way again into living the AH lifesyle.
The first squad I ever joined was with Spitfly. It was just me and him. I got bored with his squad and left looking for another more structured one. Then I met Chaingun, BigB717, 616766 (616Fubar), and the CO, which I cant remember his name, in the DA. I started to fly with them, shooting them down with my mouse, until they asked that I join their squad. I hung in there for a week and then left since it wasn't what I was quite looking for. Well a couple days after, I was flying with bulll in the DA when Damnname came in and started shooting at us. Being the Spit fighter pilot that I am, I upped my indestructable Spit-V and shot down damnname. Being the smart man Damnname is, he asked if I could join his squad, ~~~FATE~~~ Been there ever since :aok
The game might be good, but the people are what makes this game great.
HTC! :aok
-Paul
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Originally posted by Halo
In ye olde 1980s days of Atari ST (4k memory!) was browsing a shareware rack and found a plain little floppy with Air Warrior typed on it.
Like Halo I started in AW a long time ago on an Atari ST logged into Genie. I got hooked on the concept of fighting real people and was seriously addicted for awhile which was a pretty expensive addiction at hourly rates.
I got away from it for some years and missed the whole AOL era. During that time I was flying Red Baron on and off line. When I rediscovered AW I found a great buch of guys in the Ghosts Squad. The squad broke up when AW died and Aces High became the place to be but we reformed when enough of us got onboard.
Air Warrior broke real ground in this kind of simulation but AH and technology have brought it to a whole new level.
Damn. With all this experience I should be a lot better stick!
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Originally posted by Grits
I was wandering around in a software shop in 1993 and stumbled upon a box that said "SVGA Air Warrior". It was on sale, and looked kinda interesting so I bought it. Started flying online in Oct '93 and played until the Warbirds Beta in '95 and quit games alltogether. I dont remember how I found AH or why I even got interested in games again, but when I saw that HT and Pyro were the guys behind it, I knew I need not look further for an online flight sim. I started back flying AH in January.
Same here! Even gave you like your first 10 hours free if you sent in the coupon on the box (I still have the box too). Spent a couple weeks playing offline until I got it figured out and started online in late August of '93.
Got killed over and over, until one flight I see some Cz after a lone Bz Yak (if I'm remembering correctly). I swooped in and caught the Yak at the top of a vertical move and got the "A kill has been recorded" message! Hehe, it was Pyro...my first kill.
Seen WB's (CK?)when Killer and Pyro were showing it off in thier hotel room at a AW con (back in '94 or '95). Got a bunch of us drooling :)
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Originally posted by TBolt A-10
:lol I still have the GameStorm t-shirt that someone sent me. :)
My g/f almost threw it out one day.....oooooooh, that was a bad move. :D
Shirt ... and hat ... somewhere. Probably filthy.
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Newbie. Retired Marine. Always wanted to fly. Discovery Wings commercial. tried it out for the first two. Realized how much there is to actually accomplish in this game, in terms of tactics, skill sets, and aviation tecnical knowledge. Then the aspect of competition and team work was something I really enjoyed, though I think some folks could probably use a bit more time AFK, in the REAL WORLD, where we have our troops dieing for REAL.
Now i'm freakin hooked. So i'll spend some time in the MA killing from the ground, and on ships, and learning how to be less of a lawn dart. ( I do so love killing from the ground
:cool: ) Between poker tourneys, and this, I expect to be a pasty white vampire gamer in the very near future. Semper Fi!
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Hi Mates
I knew hitech and natedog in WB way back in the '90s. Kept an eye on them after they left WB and as soon as they got a server going, I joined up with them while continuing in WB. Still do, but spend most of my time here.
Hey Nate
Where's a B25H for me???? Please!!!
Great game. Super scenario just finished.
The Old Man
Majors
249RAF
Oldest Yank in the RAF
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Well, I had absolutely no interest in flight sims, though I knew my husband was mad on them and always had to have the latest game to try out. Heck, I had had enough problems learning to drive a car, without adding a third dimension to complicate matters!
I remember often watching my husband flying his various sims, and then him telling me about this online one called Air Warrior... at the time, I was more concerned about how much this was costing than anything else, as I knew it was a long-distance phone call to a server in London, apart from the hourly charge for the game itself. I would often find him playing and realise he was 'on line again' causing me to worry constantly about the bills.
However, I knew it gave him a lot of pleasure and kept thinking that at least I knew where he was! I remember him trying to find a copy of AW2 some time after it had been released as he had not played for a while and was itching to get on again. We finally tracked down a copy while out on a day trip and he couldn't wait to get home to try it out. Shortly after that, he got AW3 and subscribed to Gamestorm, assuring me that he now had unlimited play for only $9.95 a month! We still had to pay phone charges of course, but they were now much cheaper due to being a local call to simply access the internet and connect. I was much happier with that arrangement. :)
After a while, he told me he thought he was going to be invited into a squadron..... it was at that point I realised there was a lot more to this Air Warrior than I had originally thought! I was intrigued and decided to watch him that night when he went online to play. I was totally in awe at the level of detail on entering the game..... arriving in the Officers' Club, complete with bar and a 'spy' standing at the end..... a pool (or similar) table, and a table nearby with a flight jacket on it. Fascinated, I watched as he clicked on a door indicating HQ and was instantly in another very detailed looking room with a green Cz flag up on the wall. Sure enough, he met up with Spiff in there and by clicking one of the fields on the map they were both instantly transported to a field ready room. I watched as they each chose a plane and took off to fly for a while...... then a bit later, back on the ground, Spiff invited Zeb into the Krait Squadron. It took Zeb a few attempts to give the proper response to Spiff's repeated invites, as he kept typing other remarks instead like how honoured he felt to be invited! :D
After that, I watched him every night when he went online..... even sometimes badgering him to going on on the rare occasions he didn't particularly feel like it. This went on for about 6 months, and in the meantime progress was being made with our home network (all three of us - myself, 'Zeb' and our son 'Cloud' - had our own PCs) and it got to a point where we could all access the internet at the same time, on one line! This was a great breakthrough! Cloud had by then also got an account on Gamestorm and often he and Zeb would both be online flying together, both as members of the Krait Squadron. Eventually, Zeb suggested that I might like to create my own account - "but I can't fly!" I protested. He pointed out that the cost of playing was cheap enough that it didn't really matter - I could just go online and gun bombers or use the ground vehicles..... I was very tempted and finally took the plunge.
The first thing I had to do was think of a suitable handle/cpid.... I decided I wanted something that was associated with Zeb (short for Zebedee - a character in a 70s cult cartoon, The Magic Roundabout) and considered some of the other characters in The Magic Roundabout. The only female characters I could think of were Ermintrude and Florence. I didn't really want to be named after a cow, so decided on Florence for my handle. I then tried to find a suitable cpid..... I didn't want to be Flo because of a certain character in a newspaper cartoon who was a bit of a battleaxe! So I tried for Floss..... that was already taken.... try Flos, Zeb suggested.... OK why not, I don't suppose the spelling matters too much. So Flos was born! :)
Spiff soon invited me into the Kraits and I found myself going online every night to play, and turning up for all of our squadnights. However, I soon found on squadnights that I was often left sitting in HQ while everyone upped in fighters and only got to see any action if someone felt sorry for me and took a bomber up! Anyway, after a while someone asked why I didn't fly myself. Once again I protested that I couldn't fly..... anyway, I was encouraged to give it a try and with a lot of help from Zeb, finally managed to get airborne. I didn't worry too much about landing as between spins and getting shot down, landing was never an option!
I then decided I would like to specialise in something, and tried my hand at flying bombers, and soon became quite a proficient bomber - and have been bombing ever since! :D
I eventually applied and became a Game Assistant which I greatly enjoyed until EA.com finished us all saying we were no longer required. I was heartbroken..... but unlike others who immediately upped and left AW, I couldn't bring myself to leave the game I loved, and continued right up until its demise in December 2001.
Meanwhile, my squad had decided to move to Aces High in April 2001, and I semi-reluctantly followed, playing both games until AW died. I've been here ever since... in fact I think I have been playing AH for as long as I was playing AW before it..... and I intend to stick around for the foreseeable future! :aok
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My first 2 flight sims were Microprose's (Will Bill) Spitfire Ace and Hellcat Ace. That was probably the mid '80s. Read about AW in Computer Gaming World in '88...but, didn't start playing until '90 on an Atari ST. I met HT there in the Fall/Winter of '90. He was a poor, struggling Bland dweeb...he didn't stay that way for long :D. Have been friends with him every since.
When HT wrote WB, I tried it and hated it. The next time HT and I roomed at an AW con, I told him that WB was very realistic...but, for me, that didn't translate to FUN.
About a week after HT left WB, I got a call from him and he told me that he was working on a new game. He said he had just finished the new view system and that I HAD[/u] to come see it. I was duly impressed. I did help with the Alpha of AH. BTW, the first plane shape that HT had was an F14 (meybe and F18...not sure bout those wimpy jets :D).
Unfortunately, I was under contract with Kesmai and chose not to play AH. About 8 months (and a couple of men in tights) games after I left Kesmai's service, I went to an AH convention just to visit with HT...I got hooked :). Been having fun since then.
Originally posted by Heater
and HiTech well he is still the one & only PUTZ!
You ain't just a'whistlin' Dixie, dood. :)
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I was first introduced to AW by my uncle (Dartman) a few years back, about 4 or 5 I think. I have had an addiction to learning as much as I can about WWII since I can first remember. And would stay at my uncle's house during the summer for a week or two. He got me addicted quick. He first set me up with the basics. I remember the first time I upped in a training mission I found myself in a fighter dead 6 on a B17 formation. My uncle say " lets see how good you are" , expecting that I die almost imediatly. Being the first time on a computer game or even I flgiht sim I myslef expected the same. I moved in slightly facinated by the tracers flying past the cockpit. I pulled the trigger on the joystick and immediatly blew up the center B17. I watched the parts fly by and I quickly finished off the remaining two B17s. I was quite supprised at how easy it was. My uncle said " lets try something alittle harder" and soon I had done all the training missions and I was truely addicted.
After leaving my uncles house I went through withdraws for about a year until I got a computer. I purchased AW and soon was flying offline missions. I wasnt able to fly online because of a lack of a internet. Then with the lack of computer knowledge AW no longer worked on my computer. Still dosnt on my semi new one. So I spent a few months without.
After awhile with a new computer and a internet (dial-up) connection my uncle soon introduced me to AH. It was the greatest and still is the best game I have ever,and probally for the rest of my life, played.
My first memory of AH is taking a p38 to a ammo factory and leveling it. I then asked for a goon on channel 1 not knowing it was uncapturable. And of all people Flossy answered my call. I had mistaken the feild number above the factory and sent Flossy to an enemy feild. Sorry Flossy<>
Been playing AH for about 3 years now. Im in a great squad 418th Hornets
My first squad was the Hornets 3 years ago. My wing was disbanded and I floated around for a few years and met some of the greatest people. I hope to play into the long future.
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I started AW3 in the fall of '98... flew both RR and FR.
Tried AH in late '00 or so but my vid card at the time was too low end.
Once AW folded, I upgraded my vid card and started playing AH, which would make it early '01 with my first tour being 14.
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Originally posted by BlueJ1
And of all people Flossy answered my call. I had mistaken the feild number above
LOL, I remember trying to capture a factory once, without success of course - after eventually finding my way to it! LOL :D
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It was fun to be a real newbie. Still am but its not something to brag about :D
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I loved WW2 planes from the start. Since I was a kid I was somehow specifically intrigued with WW2 planes.
I honestly don't know what influenced me, as my country had no active role in WW2 - it didn't even have an airforce until WW2 was over. (Well, my country didn't exist before WW2 in the first place - was under Japanese colonial rule until 1945).
It's kinda strange, as there are many types of planes spanning the 20th century - and yet, I never was interested in jets or WW1 prop planes. It was always just WW2 planes, and only those.
There wasn't much 'video games' when I was growing up, and the best I could get my hands on was a "Chuck Yeager's" game. Then, in the early '90s Dynamics' "Aces of Europe" and "Aces of the Pacific" really got me hooked into WW2 flight sim games. Since then I tried almost every WW2 sim that came to pass.
And then, at some point in the '90s internet started surfacing, and the first Mulitplater game I got to play was Fighter Ace 1. It was called "Air Attack" in my country, and that got me into some serious addiction.
I started look for groups and communities of Flight Sim gamers in my own country - there weren't many. Unlike in the West, most Asian countries except Japan, don't have any actual war-time aviation history and the appeal of the flight sim genre is generally very weak.
I joined a community called "Nownuri Wings", which was a community of flight sim gamers, which, probably made up 90% of entire flight sim gamers in my country, which again, was not even 100 people total.
Among them were three veterans Raomi/Raaf, Feed, Taillight. I'm not sure if anybody nowadays remembers these guys, but they were one of the most excellent game pilots in my country, and was a pretty well-known figure in their WB days. These guys talked about "WarBirds" - how much it was different from Fighter Ace and etc etc.
When I first heard of WarBirds it was already in a state of decline, and AH was just launching. Overhearing their conversation, I felt cocky and exclaimed, "hey, how different can it be?"... needless to say, I wasn't very much interested in it.
I have been playing Fighter Ace series until FA2.5 arrived, and I was pretty sure that I was a good pilot. I could take on most of the usual dweebs - the famous "Green Horde of Great Britain", mounted in Spit14s. I made it a habit of tracking them down and blowing them out of the sky in a Bf109F-4.
But at some point, I started hearing things about Aces High. Most of the veterans in my group made the jump to AH, and had very nice things to say about it. Finally, I got interested in it and tried a 2-week trial. I remember it to be version 1.04.
My first impression was that the graphics sucked. I selected my favorite steed - the Bf109F-4, and gave it a hop.. except, I couldn't get my plane rolling. I was stuck in a cockpit which I was not used to, and there were no external views...no easy mode helpers... and the planes stalled like a bathroom stall would do when pushed off from a cliff.
"Geez, what kind of a stupid game is this? Is this supposed to be realistic?"
And of the 2-weeks of free playing I played it for two hours, and quit. That was my first encounter with AH.
....
Ofcourse, my first experience was dreadful, and like most n00b would do, I started ranting in my community boards. Again, like all n00bs do, I naturally assumed that since I'm such a good pilot, it's the game that must be warped and twisted... except the veterans Rraf(Raomi) and feed stepped in and explained how my knowledge of realism was messed up.
Since that discussion I started asking questions about air combat, and how my previous FighterAce-oriented knowledge was wrong in what ways. They took the time to explain it quietly. Slowly I began to realize that everything I knew about WW2 planes and aircombat, I would have to learn again.
At that point, I cancelled FA subscription, and started my AH life as a usual n00b cannon-fodder. AH was in its 1.05 version.... and I've been here ever since :)
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I had flown SWOTL for years and went out to find a better game when my comp couldn't run it anymore. I eventually got into Falcon 3.0 and Gen. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Those games got old and we got the internet. I found a fighter ace 1 demo on the Age of Empires CD and go tinto that. Flew there through Fighter Ace 2 and then left when it went to Fighter Ace 3. Came over to Aces High after going through Dogfighting Withdrawel. I found the game on the internet and started flying. Since i had quite a bit of PC flying under my belt I caught on pretty quickly(although GV stuff came at a painfully slow rate). a Ghost Squad member named Swanie recruited me and i jumped right in with the Ghosts 2 weeks before SirBsbk did. Great Squad. On another note, I'm only 17 years old and have started looking at colleges. All of these PC flight Sims have influenced me so much i will most likely be attending Bowling Green or Dowling College to get my Bachelor's Degree in Aeronautics (as well as playing soccer for them). Needless to say these games are a big part of my life, even though i have been absent from the game since it went to AHII. Awaiting a new computer and will be back up eventually. I do have to say that i regret not finding an Air Warrior disk instead of the fighter aces disk, because from what i hear the game was amazing.
-Wrecker
=Ghosts=
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My buddy and squaddie Icer got me to play Longbow on his server. Had a blast playing that ... and when I went to his house one day, he said ...
"Hey ... you gotta see this !!!"
... and it been all downhill since then.
:D
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How to answer this one, (since there are so many great posts)
I D/Led Aces High, Installed, and Then Ran it. Thats how I got "Started" with AH ;)
oh the other version?
Well, Iv been into Aviation for a long time now, But Gunner (GunrCAF) got me flying AW DOS Offline. Later when I upgraded to my first Pentium, I made the plunge online. Well, I got involved with the Squad Gunner was in, The Cactus Air Force, and became very involved.
Then When AH went Beta, BulletHead was Dragging us all over to check it out. I gave it a try for a while and wasnt quite ready to make the switch. As a Squad we were considering it, But it was a big issue to make the switch.
a Few things happened then that made the change inevitable. AW was really taking a dive, AH had a price ajustment, Combat Trim was added. Those things made it clear it was time for change. Gunner was the CO at the time of change and made sure we didnt leave anyone behind and the CAF came to AH for our permanent home.
I expect we will be here for a long time to come. Its everything we always had hoped AW would become and more. Its a fine product overall.
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Originally posted by Crashy
Same here! Even gave you like your first 10 hours free if you sent in the coupon on the box (I still have the box too). Spent a couple weeks playing offline until I got it figured out and started online in late August of '93.
Same here. I still have my SVGA Air Warrior box, manual, and original 3.5 floppys.
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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.
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<
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Originally posted by BlueJ1
<
LOL :D :rofl
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Originally posted by Kweassa
Among them were three veterans Raomi/Raaf, Feed, Taillight. I'm not sure if anybody nowadays remembers these guys, but they were one of the most excellent game pilots in my country, and was a pretty well-known figure in their WB days.
I remember a couple of those guys from WB Kweassa, good pilots, think it was rraf though not raaf, if it was rraf he was a very good hog pilot.
I had a squaddie from your country for a while back in those days, young guy , worked for one of the car manufacturers, can't remember his callsign , was a long time ago, back in WB beta I think..
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Same as SEgunner here. I am an avid watcher of Discovery Wings Channel. Saw a commercial and liked the idea. I had a slow dial up modem for the longest time and never gave it a thought figuring It wouldnt work. When I got cable modem I started and have not regretted it yet.
Muttman
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Wow, interesting stories here :)
I myself was somehow hooked to airplanes at the age of 3. My father held a private pilots license and about since that time I wanted to fly. Little boys and airplanes mix, I tell you! Planes were the greates thing on earth from that point on. Girls made that state pause, you know ;)
When the commodore 64 came around in the various households in the neighbourhood at sometime I saw the game called ACE. WOW! You actually got to sit in the cockpit of a plane and you could shoot at others. With refuelling and everything :) ACE 2 was my favourite, I only had problems finding other children to play with me this stuff for a few hours straight.. Oh well :)
Unfortunately my father died in a car accident when I was 6, so somehow my connection to the RL flying dropped off at about that time. So I was sticking to everything flyable on Computers. Along with that came my general interest of computers and how they work. It stayed this way (offline) until about 96 or so (not sure). In Germany it took some time for the internet to be accessible for the general household. So then I bought a modem and got an internet account. Somehow I didnt try at first the online flightsim stuff (many boxed FSims had a MP option) but at first sticked to FPS and stuff. Then, I went to a Uni to study informatics (computer science, software engeneering), where I and a friend got an, well, not completely legal way of access to the uni-net. ;) At some time I tried EAW online but had connection problems. Then (maybe 99 or 00) I saw something about Aces High and downloaded it and tried it and wanted to try it online, since there was a 2 week free trial. As I didnt want to spend my money on the first available game, I tried Fighter Ace and WB too. Went back to AH quick. Created an account and never looked back.
When I was done with my degree I went to look for a job and eventually found one. You remember, since when I was 3 (about 77) I wanted to fly airplanes, and I had to wait. That waiting got me to the computer-airplane-combination.
Wait till nowthat is. Now I earned some money to get a private pilots license by myself, which I got about 4 weeks ago. You know, it aint cheap, but I wouldnt buy a car just to wait any longer for beeing able to fly :)
Actually the early introduction to airplanes had a very deep impact on my life, since I got to my interest in computers (my job) this way. I dont know why I never joined a flying club while in school, you can get to fly gliders very early and cheap. Really not sure, maybe because (I thought ) I knew that airplanes are VERY expensive. You know in Germany its quite more expensive than it is e.g. in the US. Yes, even more.
Ok, so thats how it actually startet everything that lead to Aces High for me.
Juast to add my story :)
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Its a long story involving too much booze, a shattered patella, and about 4 months of being in a cast in front of a computer.
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Heard about it thru the web grapevine and read the AH UBB Alpha tester reports. Watched the calendar and cranked it up that first evening of open beta. Fun days.
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When HTC was started after splitting off from WB, I didnt come over permanantly to AH.
In about 2000-2001, the designers of what became WBIII insisted on an aileron responce like flying with rubber band bunjee cords. It just wasnt right.
I couldnt fly something that felt noting like reality.
WBIII destroyed the Warbirds Online community and I am still sore about it 3 years later.
We still have Warbirds conventions, although every sim in flown including AH, TR, WWIIOL, IL2FB
Ive had an account on and off in AH since Day 1 went live.
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Originally posted by Arlo
Shirt ... and hat ... somewhere. Probably filthy.
hey... I still have the key holder they gave me... actually my daughter has it... somewhere... :D
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I have a few Gamestorm items most of which I won at one of our UK Conventions. I have a t-shirt, cap, keyring (which I still use daily!) and a small toolset which I also use frequently. :)
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I was recovering at home after partially amputating my right thumb and I was bored to tears. My son in law gave me a puter and set up the game for me. I had to go out and buy the controllers and peds.
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My Dad and some friends of his were with a squad called Black Roses led by ddawg (ddawg died recently if any of you guys knew him) old AW crowd and I never paid the game much attention, but years later, one day I was visting and he said come here and check this game out. I watched as he flew a P51 and started strafing a PT Boat, I was pretty unimpressed until all of a sudden the game beeped and somebody on vox was asking if there was a PT boat there, and I thought, damn you can talk... and next thing I knew I was downlaoding AH and playing it at home. That was about four years ago, been playing ever since.
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JB73, what a great thread. :) Really enjoyed reading your background to this sim.
Been reading the first page for 20 minutes. Have to get back to work. Many papers to grade.
Morpheus, eagl, murdr, octavius, nopoop, jay1988... all fun reads. :) I will read page 2 later and if I have time bore you all with my story. I know all my squadies are tired of hearing it. ;)
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Originally posted by Redd
I remember a couple of those guys from WB Kweassa, good pilots, think it was rraf though not raaf, if it was rraf he was a very good hog pilot.
I had a squaddie from your country for a while back in those days, young guy , worked for one of the car manufacturers, can't remember his callsign , was a long time ago, back in WB beta I think..
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. :D Been here in A/H since beta.
Frodo
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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?!
;)
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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. :D 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.
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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.:)
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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:)
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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.:rofl
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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
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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.
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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.
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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. :p
Thanks for starting this thread JB73. ! and thanks for all the fun times and lost wages HTC!
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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.:)
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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.
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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 :rofl My first campaign (I just happened to sign up on a reset friday) I got 9 kills and died over 1000 times :rofl 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 :)
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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
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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. :D
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. :rolleyes: 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, :aok
RitteR
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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
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Watching the discovery channel.... Thought to self, "self, that looks fun." Never flown in a sim before. I sucked so I would just gv around. Been hooked ever since.
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Been on-line since dos 1.0 and used a puter with no hard drive just 2 floppys to boot it up and a 300 baud modem cradle. Spent a small fortune over the years on per hour charges but learned to build everything first then "jump" on and off.
I then bought a canon puter with 3.1 and an 80 meg hd.($2500)and got a cd called FX2000 back in 1995. (Fighter Experiment 2000--->in the future I guess)
Was an off-line game. Well I finally upgraded to a gateway and when I went to load the game a message popped up saying the cd was spinning at an unbeleivable rate!) As I was still on dial-up at 10 cents a min I never could afford to surf much.
Then I had the chance in 2002 to be a beta trial participant for adsl service. I surfed the whole internet in about 2 hours, just went nuts. In my surfing I came across some on-line flight sim out of Korea, I could load it but the menus were in Korean and I could not get off the ground. So I surfed some more and bingo, found AH1. I loaded it and read enough of the help files to get going, went to take off and blew up, went to take off and blew up.....10-20 times.....I finally saw a plane shooting me (those guys had to love vulching me) so I bailed and went to H2H.....stayed there for a few months then decided to try the MA, so I paid my dues and went through a very steep learning curve as a loner for over a year. Was flying one weekend with a few guys between two bases all weekend, we would take it, Rooks took it back, all weekend. That is where I met In The Sun...he invited me into a squad and I have been with the *NDM* ever since. I still don't have a clue how I ended up a knight, I think when I first got on I was a Bish but knights sounded so cool I switched right when I logged on. I have and will remain a Knight and NastyDeadMan until the game is gone or they have my memorial flight....<>
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Very nice, JB73
!
My stories aren't good to tell, but giving a shot :)
Found Aces High at http://zdnet.com in Winter 2001 and download it, but didn't played until around Spring 2003(Ah yes it long time). I have been playing H2H for long time that I didn't have enough money nor credit card to joined AH Subscribe, but H2H was free that I could practice well before head up into MA in early Summer of 2003.
After I subscribe AH, I remember I went to Squadron Page at Hitech Creations, Inc. Website and I was looking for a F4U Corsair squadron which I was interesting joining F4U Corsair squadron. So after long search of Corsair squadron, I finally found one and it was VF-17 "Jolly Rogers." Boy was I surpised? :D
I was glad that I joined VF-17 Jolly Rogers, I mean Arlo and rest of the guys was fun and it was wonderful time last year, i mean it was a blast. :)
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Well, I am one of the young ones here at 17. I started my computer gaming when I was about.. oh 8-9 years of age. Started off with this brand new game called Microsoft Monster Truck Madness. Hell yeah it was lot of fun - this was before the internet stuff. And then I got into another game called Hellbender. My friend and I who moved to California had lots of fun hooking up a LAN connection and playing. I then got into the war games. Delta Force came around and it looked awesome! I can remember playing on these massive (which seemed like massive) terrains in which there were a good 20-30 people per side. I then continued Novalogic's trend and got into DF2 and DF:LW. I stopped around DF:LW because the next game that was coming out was Task Force Dagger. From my experience in DFLW, it just didnt seem worth the money to buy TFD. I was starting to crave realism. A game called Operation Flashpoint came out and I was immediately hooked to that. A year passed and I really was interested in WWII games but haven't seen any out. I then heard about mohaa from a friend. Ahh yes, the EA generation of WWII gaming. Then mohaa turned into BF1942. I played those games quite often. Again I craved more realism. Mohaa just didnt cut it with it's quirky style of gameplay, along with BF42's unnatural plane model. I thought to myself, hmm, wouldnt it be awesome to stage this huge WWII air battle?
One of my squadmates for BF42 at the time Sisk, who is now with the Nightmares suggested this game called Aces High. I said, hmm ok, i'll try it. I immediately got in the game and I was like, no way, to realistic for me. (I couldnt even get the plane off the ground) I then realized I needed to learn the basics of the WWII birds. That basically started me up.
Sisk stopped playing for a good time while I was having a blast =). I said to Sisk a few months ago, why don't you come back man? (He was more into these other games like Battlefield Vietnam and Call of Duty) I said, cmon man you really gotta play, AH2 just came out and it is twice as realistic as the first. I actually influenced him to start playing again and before ya know it, he's with the Nightmares. And here we are now, I'm now 17 still playing Aces High :aok
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My wife bought me Air Warrior in around 98', but my puter wasn't up to it. I tried it on her laptop and was hooked. Once I got my own puter upgraded, I went online and really became hooked. I flew with the 99th for my first squad, but a lot of the original group started leaving and the squad went downhill. I jumped ship shortly afterwards and was recuited by the 555th and mostly flew in the BigPac. I flew AW for about 2 years and then got out of it for one reason or another. I still kept in touch with HB555 and one day in 2002 he tells me he's flying a game called Aces High and how much better it was than AW. I joined the squad he was flying with right out of the gate which was the 1st Nasty in Sept. 02' and was hooked again.
:cool:
P.S. My wife would get on me in those early days for flying so much, but I would just tell her: "You bought me the game, you're the one to blame"!(lol)
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My first encounter with the addiction that led me to AH was in 1987 when my dad brought home our first computer. I can remember being mad at him because I only knew how to use Apples and he bought a PC. A Laser XT with 640k of RAM and a 20MB hard drive!!! And because his reason for needing it was to bring work home instead of having to stay there and do it, of course we had to have a modem!! Within a week I was desperately trying to figure out Compuserve and Genie. That they had entire online communities was fascinating. Then my dad got the phone bill and hit the roof. Then he got his credit card bill and I'm lucky he didnt kill me. :D But besides being fascinated by the online world, I discovered the MSFS that came with the bundle of software when we bought the computer. I was hooked.
I didnt discover online flight sims until I found a box of AW4W. I tried it out and it was like I'd been addicted to coffee before and now found a way to inject it directly into my veins lol. It was GREAT. But alas I couldnt afford it then with a baby and an expensive wife to support. I got rid of the expensive wife, but it wasnt enough. lol I didnt rediscover AW until AOL in 97. 1.99 per hour. The first time we got a 200 dollar AOL bill, I almost lost another wife. When the next month was 250 dollars, I almost lost my life. Pondering what to do, not wanting to give up this new addiction, I found Gamestorm. And I found out that I could play AW through the GS portal rather than on AOL for a monthly fee instead of hourly. Lets just say I was happy and leave it at that. :lol
I knocked around the RR arenas for awhile, picking up what I could. I wasnt GOOD by any means, but I did ok for myself. Joined a couple squads. The Memphis Belle for awhile, and then one of the JG squads where I really started to feel at home flying with some really good guys (Dago Red and Ribie and BJB). This was also about the time I discovered the Full Realism arenas and found out just how unrealistic "Relaxed Realism" was. Hehe And I discovered what I still today believe was one of the greatest tools AW had. The Training Arenas, or more importantly the trainers themselves. Guys (and gals) who would spend their time online teaching other people everything from how to start the engine to advanced ACM. Some of them became not only good friends, but an extended family for me when my marriage went kaput. They didnt just teach me to fly better, they taught me what the community in AW was all about. So the FM wasnt the most realistic, and the graphics were dated. The community is what made people stay. To all the AW game assistants and trainers who are flying here in AH today, <> to all of you for putting up with my smartass mouth and big attitude long enough to teach me about respect and community (as well as how to fly without embarassing myself or my squad lol).
I spent so much time in the Training arenas they eventually put me to work, and I never enjoyed anything more until the day I discovered Scenarios, another of the great tools AW had to draw people in and keep them. One of my buddies had a passion for zekes, and dragged me kicking and screaming into Pearl Harbor. I flew it every year after that until EA killed it off. Which is funny because now I can climb up on my roof and SEE Pearl Harbor.
When AW died most of the folks drifted over here to AH. Some of them had been flying here for months and were already established. I tried it. Hated it. lol Not really fair to say that, since I never really gave it much of a chance. Too bummed over AW, too much difference to the interface (clipboard), different FM.......I said heck with it and quit. As many of you know though, the itch doesnt just go away. Standalone games just werent enough, and I absolutely could not stand the MSCFS online arenas. I returned to AH a few years older and hoping for a fix, hoping that maybe some of the old AW crowd was still around. One hour of watching the text buffer fly with insults and 's and it felt like home :) I was just starting to really get a feel for the game when AHII came along and I could no longer play. Few months later, several new parts later, I'm flying again with even more changes to a FM I was really just getting used to and even more rust on my wings. Ah well, whats life without a challenge?
SA2
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one day in aug. 2001 i was lookin up cheat codes on gamewinners.com and seen a little banner that siad come fly Aces High with real WWII A/C (something like that it was a long time ago) so i clicked on it and started DLin it thank god i had cable modem of i probly wouldnt be here after i DLed it i went online and with my dumbarse went to the MA didnt know anything bout channel 1 or that there was even a country channel (when i got on all my radios were set to "1 All" and vox was on 101) so i sit there tryin to figure stuff out and ppl are typin stuff about c47 NOE to A?? from A?? and i type on ch. 1 whats a c47 wheres A?? whats NOE i remember that guy got killed and started ******in at me (that would be the 1st time but i would piss many more ppl off in my 3+ year flyin AH) so after bout 10mins of makin a fool of myself some1 said go to the TA so i went after about 30mins i got off the ground usein my mouse (btw i would like to <
> ghosth and widewing for helpin me out back then) so i was flyin around in the TA and offline for the 2 week trial but didnt have money to pay for it cuz i just bought a $10 joystick (was 14-15 at the time and i was usein my lunch money) after that free trial i started anouther one and got used to the stick and aimin and shooting at ppl (this was back when u could kill ppl in the TA) after about the 1week of my 2nd trial i got landing down (no more flyin into the ground for me) after that i started patin for it after it took me bour 2 hours tryin to make a good name "TrueKill" i wanted "TrueKiller" but that was to long back then u could only get 8 litters in ur name so after about 3months playin joined my 1st squad the 367th~Dynamite Gang. great bunch of guys but i hated spits flyin around everywhere and i heard about the CT iv been in there a few time no1 was on and i was so stupid i thought that was were ppl show movies of WWII stuff but then one day i saw ppl in there and started flyin and loved it no more spitVs.spit it was just like real combat after about 2 weeks flyin in there i joined a squad JG-3 "UDET" in witch i flew with for about 1 and a half years and then the current squad im flyin with JG-54 "Grunherz" been flyin with them about 8-9 months and hear i am still addicted to this Drug we call Aces High.
TrueKill
JG 54 Tech Offizer flyin AH from 2001-????
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it all started one early morning...i turned on the the tv bam! there it was..the commercial for AH! i was hooked
PS:9658 is on temporary leave..due to school: "I'll be back" tho
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I lost a bet.
NUTTZ
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This summer, while i was away for a few weeks, my boyfriend started playing AH. When i came home on weekends, i sometimes took over the stick, never really having played any kind of flight sim.
One of those times i recall chasing a b17 all over the lands for over 20 mins. Cant even remember what plane i was in. Might have been a spit, might have been something completely different. and although i dindt shoot him down, i had fun. in the end we both had to give up being out of ammo.
My bf and me were both still wondering how someone could manage to get a kill, much less two, and then manage to rtb and LAND, since everytime we got close to the enemy we had about 30 secs to live.
A few weeks later he was in a squad. I still was taking over stick from time to time. His squadmates wondering about his maneuvers...
Needless to say i was hooked as well... got my own account and here i am, proud member of the 71 Eagle Sqn now myself. Still trying for those two kills, but having fun nonetheless among friends i might or might not ever see irl.
I never once came online with no one saying hello. I think thats a lot more important than any authenticy-discussion and flaming of tactics.
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been seeing alot of newer names in the forums lately... thought i'd give this a
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Err heh friend told me about it :P simple ;)
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Bad Luck? :rofl
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First comp was a TI-99 4/A with cassette loading. no flight sims there just trivia.
First combat flight sim was Top Gun on an IBM PC/AT in high school. Basically a flat line for an HSI and i think asterisks for bullets.
Did A-10 Cuba, MSFS, etc. Then got hooked on Falcon Gold and built my first system with (GASP) 7MB of memory and a 1MB Vesa vid card. Unfortunately 7MB of all mixed up memory is not a good idea but the game was playable with 4.
Met my wife on AOL and moved in with her. She had a mac :-( I soon found myself playing Chuck Yeager Air Combat and Flight Unlimited.
A few yrs later played MSFS 2k and did the virtual airline thing. THAT got me hooked on online multiplayer. ATC, radar, flight plans.. woohoo!
Then that one fateful, cursed, wretched, bastard of a day when I was watching discovery wings.
My wife had to slap the **** out of me to get me to snap out of it. Downloaded, signed up and BOOM there went three years of my life.
Started blabbering about it at work, got Howitzer hooked and he somehow started kicking my bellybutton almost immediately. It took me over a year to get 100 perks lol.
Falcnwing invited me to the BOPS and then I started Dustoff a year ago.
This game takes the best of people and the worst of people and amplifies them. I have had vicious, nasty, flaming vox battles with folks who later became my very best friends.
The AH moment that nearly caused my demise was when DrDea put FoxxBatt online via phone held up to his mic. Fbat was dying and in a cancer hospital but the first thing he wanted to know was how we were.
When I started AH i had no children and didn't understand why someone would expose their kids to this environment. Now I have a ten month old and I can't WAIT for him to be my wingman.
Thank you HTC, Pyro, Skuzzy for a wonderful game.
Lastly, I want to apologize from the bottom of my cold heart to anyone I have ever said a negative comment to about your kids. I truly did not understand what life was about until I had mine.
and check six!
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Always been a flight sim junky.
AH was just a natural progression.
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Brother and father both played before me... looked fun so tried it out... and here I am:)
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Evolved from the very beginning of Air Warrior to WarBirds and then to the best yet, Aces High.
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Not long after Dale and Doug sold their other sim to a psychotic megalomaniac who hired some losers for project managers and fired most of the players who worked on the game at the time, this new sim named AH was released into open beta. It was kind of weak, only one map and about 5 planes but it rocked and was run by people who cared about their players. I signed on and cancelled my Warbirds account, have never regretted it or looked back.
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See lots of guys I remember from AW days! This thread brings back a flood of memories, all good! Want to say hi to NUTTZ, my buddy and wingman for many years in AW! Have been trying to track him down for ages! Howdy to +tiff as well, had a blast flying with the Nomads in AW. Good to see he's still around!
Clip
-CL- in AW
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Started in Fighter Ace right after it went live ($20/month for 1.0! lol). Few years later, heard about 'Warbirds' on the FA bbs....tried it out, flew in a New Guinea scenario, recall a volcano plunge to send off some guys who left, then went back to FA to be an evil sysop and fly FA 1.5. FA was great fun, FA 1.5 was a step in the right direction, but I was looking for something more than it could give. So, when I heard about AH on the FA bbs, I signed up within days of the open beta. Aside from a break of about 8 months during a financial crunch, paid every month since whether I fly or not.
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I just happened to luck up and find this game via a web search for wwii aces,been flyin ever since.
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Good to see ya Key <
>:aok
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Originally posted by Fury
Started in Fighter Ace right after it went live ($20/month for 1.0! lol). Few years later, heard about 'Warbirds' on the FA bbs....tried it out, flew in a New Guinea scenario, recall a volcano plunge to send off some guys who left, then went back to FA to be an evil sysop and fly FA 1.5. FA was great fun, FA 1.5 was a step in the right direction, but I was looking for something more than it could give. So, when I heard about AH on the FA bbs, I signed up within days of the open beta. Aside from a break of about 8 months during a financial crunch, paid every month since whether I fly or not.
In 1.5...you were a sysop? what was your callsign...may have been flying there same time.
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Originally posted by Fury
Hey Fury, say hello to the big guy at Mr Kozak's for me
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Sierra Network Red Baron ---> Met Twist ...Genie AW ---->took a break because I sucked---> AOL AW----> quit because AOL sucks -----> Warbirds ---->quit because WB sucks ----> came back looking for AW...was gone ---> Found WB again ---> still sucked -->WWII Online---> Quit because WWII online sucks ----> found AH --->Now I suck but the game doesn't.
Woof
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I flew in FA as eleigh, 99_Fury_ft, __VMF214__Ash, and for one glorious night as Fury_DD when the Devil Dogs of AH invaded a room. As a sysop I was +eleigh and +eleigh@FA....I think my stint was from '97 to 2000.
Kozak's downtown? Gawd I love their Gyros. Next time I get there I'll say hi.
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Originally posted by Fury
I flew in FA as eleigh, 99_Fury_ft, __VMF214__Ash, and for one glorious night as Fury_DD when the Devil Dogs of AH invaded a room. As a sysop I was +eleigh and +eleigh@FA....I think my stint was from '97 to 2000.
Kozak's downtown? Gawd I love their Gyros. Next time I get there I'll say hi.
For some reason, it tastes better at 3:00AM, lol. Tell Ted his cousin said hi
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>>I have a few Gamestorm items most of which I won at one of our UK Conventions. I have a t-shirt<<
So do I ;) I won it in a contest sponsored by the AW scenario CM group; I came up with the name for a massive AW scenario at the time. I still have the T-Shirt, but rarely wear it anymore.
I got started with AW, first the dos box version, then a few months later with AW4W. Joined a squad (ably assisted by Shebop) the Cactus Airforce (an FR squad). Joined delphi and never looked back. I had a WW2 addiction well before I discovered online flight sims. Had to pay to play over at Delphi (2 bucks or so per hour); ran up some hefty bills and had to cut way back. AW had a very nice offline feature so, I satisfied myself with that in order to cut costs. Learned FR and dabbled with RR but, was convinced by squadmates to stop RR; it encouraged bad habits, the learning curve was too steep to get better at FR.
The AW folks sold out to gamestorm and then EA; with each the game got worse. I heard about WB and tried it out but, didn't care for it much but, it had potential. I heard about AH and joined up as an open beta tester. I had a lot of trouble with landings and takeoffs :) but, I liked it, and could see it was much better than AW became. There was a learning curve but was easier because of my experience in AW; I knew the difference between E fighting, TnB and BnZ :)
All the while I have been with my squad, and we eventually made the move to AH.
While at AW though they used to have these online acm lectures sponsored by Delphi. Various senior pilots in the game would discuss acm and flight characteristics; I even had the pleasure of attending a couple held by Shaw, the well known fighter expert.
These lectures were excellent, and provided a lot of theoretical information I lacked. It was kinda like a flight school class.
Hehe many of the discussions here on this BBs are not new to me; I have heard most of them before :)
AH is a great game, and can trace itself back to AW. I am glad that Hi-tech had his start there, and broke off to begin another sim :) he saw how AW could be better and did something about it to you HT ...yer the man Dawg!!
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My first flight sim was F15 Strike Eagle for the Commodore 64. Many years later, I got my first PC and found Jane's WW2 Fighters. Very cool for its day, but the multiplayer stunk big time. One day while on one of the Jane's message boards (don't remember which one) I got wind of Combat Flight Simulator 2 from micro$oft. Still got it... it's a coaster on my coffee table.
I was online looking for tips for that sim when I found a link to HT's site. Oddly enough, the moment I got to flyaceshigh.com the commercial ran on Discovery Wings. (I had a TV in my 'puter room). I forget which patch number it was up to, but it was still AH1. Flew my two week trial, and got HOOKED. I think at one point I was flying almost 10 hours a day. My trial expired, and I didn't have a credit card, so I hung around the H2H arenas for awhile.
Then my girlfriend gets a credit card, and knew that I was looking for a way to get online with AH, so she subscribes for me. Cool!! Uh-oh... we split up three months later. :( so with no means to pay my account, it gets deleted. Which really sucked, 'cuz I had a ton of perks.
Flash forward about 6 months, and TA-DAAAA!!!! I have a credit card!! Online I go!! After a few flights and a bit of conversation, JOC finds out I'm Canadian and invites me to join the 242 RCAF Sqdn. That was fine, except all the other members were in the UK, so were hardly ever on when I was. After a few months, I withdrew from the squad.
Then one day, Jeffer invites me to check out the squad he's flying with, the 444th Air Mafia. I fly a few squad nights with them, get invited, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the game, there are 2 squads that are part of the 444th - the Mafia Wizeguys and the Mafia Enforcers, and allow me to say, WE KICK BUTT!! :aok
Apparently, now Jeffer is Morpheus and switched countries. I'm pretty sure at least some of us Mafia look for him so we can shoot him down just once.... lol
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Originally posted by Fury
I flew in FA as eleigh, 99_Fury_ft, __VMF214__Ash, and for one glorious night as Fury_DD when the Devil Dogs of AH invaded a room. As a sysop I was +eleigh and +eleigh@FA....I think my stint was from '97 to 2000.
Kozak's downtown? Gawd I love their Gyros. Next time I get there I'll say hi.
TFBC_TREY VF14_JACKAL
I remember ya. Good to see ya.
I remember many a night fighting the VMF guys.
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a very long while ago, i used to play counterstrike like 16hours a day, and i had a nice clan (squad) and we had some real good times. However we started getting bored of CS (they didnt like me constantly killing them ;)) One night the leader of the clan EUK said about this great game, Aces High 1.
we all did our two week trail and had great fun (although i dont think i even KILLED anyone) Once the two weeks was up, it was over. In those days the idea of paying PER month for a game was laughable in my 18-19year old mind.
roll forward 2 years and i get a email about retrying it... and ive been hooked ever since. that was 2 years ago now ;) None of the EUK gang play though... at least what i know of, infact ive not spoke to them for years.....:o
Create Date: 01-14-2001 ah wasnt as long as i thought
03-15-2003 started playing again ;)
edit: LOL
0 kills
32 deaths
Man i was good in 2001 :rofl
first paying tour....lol in 2003
145 Kills
298 Deaths