I've determined that I am an anachronism of sorts.

Games like Strike Fighters 2 are too simplistic (and getting simpler) and well, too ugly. It's just not a fun game.

Neither is DCS, in which SAM sites can shoot down your missiles. I'm sorry, but that just takes a large item called a Fun Eraser and thoroughly wipes it down. What the heck is the point of attacking something if your own missiles get shot out of the sky? You expend all your ordinance and then fly home. Woo. Hoo.

I miss Fighters Anthology, Israeli Air Force, USAF, all those old Jane's games that catered to guys like me.

I may have to build a damn legacy machine now...

I enjoy and appreciate Thirdwire but I hear you PFunk. I miss those titles too. If I remember correctly, FA will work on a modern system.

I remember just loving to fly the Aurora as high as I could, flying the X-31 off the deck supersonic with my thrust vectoring nozzle pointing my nose down yet I was flying straight and just watching myself in flyby or flying the B-1 or B-2 and just dropping a crap load of MK-82s on a target.

I've been missing the old sims lately.

SAMS shooting down your missiles in DCS? Never come across that.

I think those Action Flightsims have been replaced by Arcade Flight games or whatever they call them. Like Hawx, Jane's ASF and Ace Combat.

I saw a thread about it on ED forum, something about patriot missile shot down kh59 ASM.

and yes I'd love to have a modern version of FA, but there's no market for that kind of sim anymore, majority of ace combat fans aren't even able to play games like FA or even Strike Commander.

I would really like to see modern versions of Jane's F-15 & Jane's F/A-18. But that will probably never happen.

DCS fills that niche quite well. As for FA and USAF they don't exist because noone's making mid-tier games anymore. They all have to be big productions and have to sell millions of copies to recoup the gigantic budgets.

A fun eraser? Seriously? The Kh-59 is an anti-ship/land-attack subsonic cruise missile, fully capable of being shot down by SAMs.
Furthermore I have only ever seen Mavericks and sometimes HARMs get shot down by one specific SAM system, the SA-19 Tunguska. Air-to-air missiles going supersonic can't be shot down.

You complain of SF2 being too simple and then complain when DCS includes realistic features of modern combat. Perhaps you should take a crack at making your own game.

P.S. In Jane's F/A-18E, I can shoot down cruise missiles. I guess you'll have to find another legacy sim to cater to your needs.

I always thought that the SF2 series scratched that FA type itch, though it's actually a bit more complicated than FA. Especially with some of the mods, SF2 is the ideal simple flight sim.

Unfortunately, TK has stopped supporting the PC crowd in favor of the Android, and many of the modders (myself included) are migrating to DCS.

BTW, you should try some of the scalability settings in DCS World (e.g. labels, unlimited ammo), at least until you get a feel for things. No point in going "full switch" realism if you're not having fun, and you can always turn the settings off once you get comfortable.

I also identify with PFunk; I spent probably hundreds of hours on FA. Sure, it was a bit arcady (okay, a LOT by today's standards), but it was really easily accessible and came with plenty of content (quantity vs quality). I spent orders of magnitude less time in the SP missions than making my own, and that was part of the fun of it - even the mission editor was really REALLY straight forward. With our eyes of today we see it as simplistic, but when you ratchet up complexity, difficulty and realism, everything takes more time, gets slower, and to quote something I read in Scott Elson's great article, it just "feels like work".

In theory, SF2 would have been perfect, but it just didn't quite play out - not enough of that quantity meant you had to spend quite a bit of time grabbing the albeit excellent 3rd party mods and making sure they played well together before you could get started, even then there were things you couldn't do depending on the flavour of SF2, and there were many.

Yeah, I miss being able to do stupid stuff that hardcore simmers would shake their heads at. Like recreating the opening things from Flight of the Old Dog in a B-52 (c'mon, a B-52 with A2A MISSILES!!!!), taking things that shouldn't off of aircraft carriers, playing thought experiments pitting random countries against each other, and who can forget the Quetz?

On modern flight sims, I feel like an old crotchet being presented with his first computer, full of strange buttons and switches which all do something that I don't understand or don't have time to understand, all of which have very nasty consequences if you take your eye off the ball because everything is so close to reality.

Ugh...you just gotta laugh at someone when they bust out the old "Why don't you make your own game" naseum. It's amazing how folks take it so personally.

It's a game and somebody's opinion....get over it

How is this taking it personally? I see some other people didn't like what they saw in today's flight sims and at least tried creating their own simulator and kept plugging away at it.

How would you like to respond to the rest of my valid criticisms, are we just playing the personal attack game today?

I think you started it though lol.

Lion,


Really? That's your position?

I'm going to use a quote from Liam Neeson in his role as a Hollywood director in The Dead Pool:

"You know how they say F--- You in this business....trust me"

The same applies here...in flight sim speak...when you say "Why don't make your own game?" that translates to "Your insulting the game I worship...shut up and I don't care for your opinion". This applies 100% of the time without exception.

You can't really expect us to believe your solution to PFunk's missiles being shot down problem is: To spend a year or two learning to program software, another year or two to learn 3D modeling, another 6 months learning assembly, another year studying flight characteristics of the plane model...and then another 6 years producing the sim like your friends at SevenG (still isn't out yet).

Please spare us the "It was an honest suggestion" act...we all know exactly what you meant. When someone produces a sim and then asks for money for their work, they open themselves up to criticism and opinions.

Since this seems to be the point of contention, let me reiterate the parts of my original post which you lot seem to be ignoring:



So what if your weapons are getting shot down? Adapt and try a different tactic.

Or you know. Give up.

Your right...it's just that your above statement becomes secondary when you add this:




You can't deny that the above is definitely going on the offensive...perhaps if you left that part out, it would have been better?

I have quite a few DCS products, Lock On, FC2, Black Shark 1, A-10, and I find myself bored with the offline play. They do an awesome job modeling the aircraft but fall way short of making you feel like a pilot in a war. Not much in the way of AI flights carrying out their own missions, No wingmen to care about, No squadron kill board, No rank, No medals, linear campaign...etc. Again...this applies to offline play...can't comment on multi as my connection is to erratic.

I'm a crap pilot to begin with. I don't need people laughing at my flying while online. Plus, I have very rural DSL.

The problem, as someone has already alluded to is the sterility of DCS products and the fact that ThirdWire Sims have glaring production value faults.

I would love to make my own flight sim. I just have none of the relevant skills to do so. I wish I could be the project manager or whoever was in charge of saying "this is what I want in my game, now get to work."

Ultimately I imagine slowly watching that dream die one feature at a time. Too hard to implement. Not enough time or budget. Grumman refuses to license aircraft likenesses... Etc. If the project ever did release, I imagine no one would like it but me. Too hardcore, not hardcore enough, too arcadey, not arcadey enough... Wrong era, wrong aircraft. Not enough multiplayer focus, singleplayer sucks... Flight models are all wrong. Sigh. It's a wonder that any flight sims get made at all these days...


I still miss the old Lucasfilm flight sims. "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" especially. Still the most fun I've ever had in flight simming. Sure they were extremely "sim-lite", but they made up for it with sheer enjoyment.

Actually Rank and Medals not only are there but have also been improved as of late.
All the rest is actually as you say.

I can add just one thing though, working in the Military simulations field, it's all quite like in Real Life simulators.
You have to "act" it, then it get's immersive.

Still we could totally use a Squadron thingy, pretty much like the simple yet good-enough SF2 series...