Sole criterion is how much I enjoyed playing the game.

Falcon 3.0
F15 Strike Eagle III
Tornado
X-wing
TIE Fighter
Star Wars Rebellion
Star Wars EAW
Joint Operations
Armored Fist 2
Jane's 688(I)

This feels like old home week. I am thinking about a lot of games I hadn't thought about in years.

Something else about this that interests me is that most of these games had crappy graphics. None of them were cutting edge at the time, but decent for the time period. We had different standards back then because gameplay was king. If the graphics were just ok, we could live with that as long as the game was fun.

Another thing is that we had to figure so much out on our own. For a lot of these games, it was back when the internet was basically having your 300 baud modem dial up a BBS. Now there are walk throughs for every game out there and a lot of help which I don't know if it is a good thing or not. There was a huge feeling of accomplishment when I would figure out something on my own. The downside of that is that if I got stuck back then, the game would get put to the side and never get finished after a week or two of trying different things.

Gaming sure has changed over the years and this thread reminds us of that.

I forgot about subLogic's ATP - God..I spent hundreds of hours plying the virtual skies in that sim..

Ah, you mean just like what many gamers ended up doing with the Myst games!

LOL that was one of them

Grand Prix Legends

EF2000

Warbirds (online)

Actually from what I remember the graphics for a lot of these were cutting edge at the time. People kept complaining that the newest games kept forcing them to upgrade their systems and the reason why graphics and sound cards were able to get off the ground for general use.

Elf

Deja vu lol.

I remember having to do that as games got more complicated. I remember playing F 19 and having to have the floppy in the drive because I didn't have a hard drive. I couldn't ever figure out how to land it and there wasn't anyplace to really get help with it, so I would just fly back home and eject. I do remember games when they were 4 color and then when they went to 16 color, I was totally amazed at how great they looked. I do remember going out to buy games and seeing Microprose on the box and buying it because I knew Microprose always had good games. I am not saying that to suck up to you. I just felt Microprose and Sierra were the two best at the time. IIRC Microprose had their own BBS and I thought it was so cool that I could log into a gaming company BBS. It was still a local call for me on top of that.

That was back when customer service seemed to be important to a gaming company. There are a few out there like that now, but there are so many more gamers now, than there used to be then. Now there are so many of us that we are faceless.

To this day, GPL is the single most difficult simulation I have ever played. Just keeping the car on the track and not spinning was hard enough but then to try and get good enough lap times so that I could actually not finish near the back of the field? That was almost impossible for me unless I was willing to spend several hours playing it on a daily basis! In simpler words, GPL kicked my ass!