Nostalgia may play a role for some, but I certainly have none. I never played any combat flight sims back in those days.

I bought Fleet Defender in the 2010s and played it in DOSBox, and enjoyed it far more than other modern combat flight sims.

FD was very much more a "game" than modern sims. The campaign threaded me along a path which came and went with my success. I have a "pilot" character that lives and dies. I have a selection of wingmen I can rotate and train. Each mission threw me a curve that maybe demanded a bit more than the previous. When it goes south, it's game over! Next play, my skill is better, and my results are better. A campaign expansion let me live it over again in a new theater.

And like most games, eventually after a few runs through, they are put away and enjoyed as a memory of all those experiences.

Most of those ideas would be called corny and dumb in a modern combat flight sim. I can only imagine the response if a sim developer for a modern jet combat product previewing a release in which the player could die and lose their progress, or be demoted in rank and their play ends. Start over? Huh?

Anyway, just some thoughts on the gameplay elements I found enjoyable.

Fair enough Arthonon. I regret using your name in quotes, as I wasn't trying to disprove what you said, more to counter the general feeling that the golden days produced superior games, I think we just liked them more. And for what it's worth, I don't load Mavs in BMS for the reasons you mention.

I love the sim, it's the only one I fly, but your point is a fair one.

I am just thankful that at one time developers put out products that could make money and a bunch of people enjoyed the hell out them.

I'm not sure I fit in any category. I play DCS on and off. I may play it a lot for a few weeks then stop for a month or so. Then I return again. Right now I am waiting for the Su-33 flight model to hit the release branch.

Besides the soulless factor, what's killed flight sims for me is that you can only take the experience so far, within the limits of sitting in front of a narrow 2D screen and inputting most of your commands through a keyboard. Sure you can home build a more immersive "cockpit" but tat's hardly practical for most of us.

There's also the fact that other gendres of gaming have become a lot more mechanically involving than they used to be relative to flight sims, which used to be easily the most complex and demanding games available.

For example, it took me longer to learn the ins-and-outs of Fallout 4 than it did ANY of the sims I played during my simming heyday! And Fallout 4 is indisputable a dumbed down game, can you imagine a more in-depth and serious open world RPG of the same scope?

was hardcore online falcon player, AF RV(sync error fest it was but I did love the clouds and campaign) OF BMS4 and DCS.

Searching and learning documents, AFTTP and etc, getting input from real fighter pilot, it wasnt that long before we(vfw crew) noticed that what modern fighter pilot experiencing(avionics and tactics) is completely different from what WE CAN DO in publicly available sim(missing key features). So we tried our best to push available sim to a maximum, (we chose DCS FC3 mainly for C2 issue, developed 3rd party avionics program etc) but soon we reached to a critical point that we should stop and just wait.

Im thinking DCS F/A-18C will expand a possibility of "how we play a sim"


Now, I just fly BMS and DCS for currency check, try some new module available for DCS.

I love flight sims, but the rollout of BoS and the long wait for DCS 2.0 kind of soured me on them. I went from buying BoS when I had zero interest in the Eastern Front, just to support 1C, to uninstalling it completely and spending my time elsewhere. I really loved RoF.

I would not consider myself young at 33, but as part of the Millenial generation I know how rare it is to meet anyone my own age or younger that is interested in such games. I have the patience and inclination to learn them but it would seem that most do not. It took me 3 weeks to get my first kill in RoF when I first started but I stuck with it and learned to fly. Most others that I have watched try similar games played them once, died quickly, and gave up because they weren't immediately good at them. I suppose that is just the nature of a lot of the younger crowd these days.

My biggest complaint with contemporary flight sims is that they often feel sterile. They are visually stunning and technically complex but they are often devoid of anything resembling life or a human experience. For me, more than anything else, I play games to experience activities and events that I could not otherwise experience. That means I play to experience an approximation of what it was like to be WWI flier over the Western Front (RoF) or to immerse myself in antiquity (Total War titles). I suppose that is why I have spent so much time playing submarine sims and shelved my flight sims. That said, I do miss RoF when there was still hope of further development.

Cheers.

I still feel the true magic and fuzzies when I think about when I bought U.S. Navy Fighters. I would love to have some more sim-lite survey sims but that have the heart of the older sims which were focused on being fun and having background story and colorful pre-planning briefings and debriefings. I miss the full motion picture stories that accompanied some these sims like Navy Fighters and Top Gun: Fire at Will.

I fly P3D mostly and frequently - and have been for years now

it replaced FSX which I flew since 2007.

I would spend more time on it if I did not make skins as well.

Right now I'm playing...

Fleet Defender
Subwar 2050 (underwater flight sim)
Descent (flying shooter)
Wing Commander (space flight sim)

Turning 50, I cleaned out my office and streamlined my game collection. I have lots of games in waiting and they all share one thing in common...DOS (DOSBox).

I also cleaned out my library...



...leaving only what I need to develop my own 16-bit 3D game engine (not completely from scratch as I'm using examples from CD-ROMs/floppies that came with the books). I'm having a blast and learning so much about PCs and programming in general, but I'm not even close to attempting a remake of F-19, first I'm going to try to remake the original Project Stealth Fighter for the C64 (minimal 3D).

No matter how far I get, I'm sticking with DOS. Sooo many games (including flight sims) I've yet to play.

EDIT: I'm going to start a new thread soon and show you guys some of the stuff I'm working on.

I think for GenXers and Boomers, flight sims were the cutting edge of PC computer development. Every year starting in the early 80s computer technology improved and flight sims improved along with them, so there was a big geek factor that tied flight sims to computer culture.
The first time I saw 3D accelerated graphics (Voodoo 3dfx ) I WAS BLOWN AWAY! -- the game actually looked like the picture on the box.
So like someone else posted, I went from being a little boy with a hockey stick and Baa Baa Black Sheep on TV to dropping a couple of thousand dollars on a Pentium cpu with a 8MB Voodoo card and Janes Fighter series. Exciting times!

That said, I do think flight sim developers have spent too much time on graphics and overlooked sound when it comes to immersion.

I think that most of us, at least us 'old timers' aren't much different from other gamers in other genres. As we age we tend to lose some interest in playing these games. I have buddies that were big time into games like StarCraft or Doom, or games of different genres and most of them don't play games either.

Our brains change as we age. Just like we don't always listen to the same music we did when we were 18-25 or like the same books or movies games don't seem to have the hold on us that they did when we were young. We can say that they are too complicated, or too sterile, or not immersive enough but lets not fool ourselves. We aren't the same kids we were when we were in our 20s. We all have different hobbies than we did when we were kids. We had more free time to goof off flying virtual airplanes or driving virtual tanks when we were younger. When my son was born in 1997 I knew my big time game playing days were going to be numbered. I still did for about four more years but as he got older my focus (rightly mind you) went toward him and less to the toy in front of me. Over the years things take us away from sitting down in front of a computer. Whether it is baseball practice, or a band concert, or your wife's choral group or just hanging out with new friends that you developed because you had kids the same age I found that the free time that I once had before my son was born is significantly less.

Now, at 50, my son is grown and I have more free time but I am not sure I want to get completely back into it. I fire up the box from time to time. I still have some gee whiz toys, most of which I probably shouldn't have purchased. But the desire to sit there and try to program the Warthog isn't quite there anymore. I start to do it, get irritated and say 'screw it'. I find that if I do bear down and try to get a game set up on a game then I either forget what I programmed or an update comes along that wipes out everything I did. That level of frustration tends to lead me to do something else. It's spend three hours reprogramming my HOTAS or go to the sportsbar and have a couple of brews with some buddies and watch the baseball playoffs.

Most of us are now middle aged men. Middle aged men don't act like 22 year old men.

Great post Wklink!

Yeah solid post there great to put things in perspective I guess we all look back to days past and somehow wish to recapture the magic,,

Like with marriages!

same with me - I rather spend my time with Arma III or Alien Isolation than some of the more fast paced games that I used to like



that is why I moved to FSX-P3D , since I love flight sims I found there all the entertainment and none of the frustrations I had in combat sims, and I don't have to program my X55 which I use only for the precision that it provides.

If proper diet and daily exercise isn't enough to give you that boost, go to an airshow and watch the Blue Angels performing to "Thunderstruck" and "Kickstart My Heart"! Feel the afterburners!

I'm itching to see the Thunderbirds for the first time.

Something else worth noting regarding the popularity of flight sims...

Back in the 90's, not only were there books specific to flight sim development, but even books on general graphics programming included flight sims as examples as they were so hot at the time...

This is a good point. I thought the same when thinking about this after my previous posts. Coot mentioned US Navy Fighters. This game came out in '94 or '95, DOS based. It may have been my first fixed wing sim, and led to a 20 year love affair with flight sims. It's hard to put in to words the effect it had on me. But what if that exact same game, with modern graphics, was released today? How would it be received? Missions are the canned sort where you need to 'beat' one to move to the next. Maybe you have to protect your task force. If the enemy destroys two ships you win, but if they destroy 3 you lose.That doesn't fly so well these days. Briefings would, I think, be considered rather corny today.

Forum member damson has posted a number of great videos of these old sims. Check out his posts. Here is US Navy Fighters

http://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4253810/re-when-flight-sims-were-pure-fun#Post4253810

Brings back great memories! "Get this guy" "Atoll inbound, drop flare" I remember it so fondly, but would I want to drop $40 or $50 on it today? What would I think if it were a new sim just released? This is my point.

All this talk about older games made me think of this video I made a short time back. Two guns-kills in an F-15 - one in my first combat simulator, F-15 Strike Eagle on my Atari 800, and one from DCS World 2 with the Nevada map.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cvDl-zW5WM

F-15 Strike Eagle on the Atari was fun for its day, but I wouldn't go back