Six months or so ago I posted a post in the general community forum, lamenting the fact that over the years I've gradually lost my love of flight sims. But I said that rather than give up, I was going to upgrade one last time, to a very fast system, and see if that helped.

So that's what I did. I picked out a spiffy new Alienware and selected top-drawer components for it: a liquid-cooled system, a fast-as-fast-is CPU (thanks for the allusion, I-76 :), 32 GB of RAM, a 680 that was subsequently swapped out for a 780 TI, two monster hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration (so that I could install basically every game I've owned and loved in the last two decades)--the whole nine yards, backed up by my preexisting HOTAS and TrackIR and whatnot.

It didn't really work. Sure, CLOD was now a viable option (thanks in large part to the great work of Team Fusion), and BOB 2 (one of my favorites from way back) was finally smooth even when I was attacking bomber formations with probably hundreds of planes, and I even had better luck getting some old favorites like Janes F-15 to run (the Alt-Ctr-Del trick finally worked!), but at the end of the day, stutter-free gameplay and incredible graphics weren't really funner. They were nice, and maybe even necessary, but not sufficient.

I began to worry that I'd wasted my money and--more importantly--that I had finally reached a stage where I was beyond recovery in terms of the joys of our hobby. But then I bought WOFF (I also have OFF but hadn't played it in a while), and in playing it, I rediscovered much of the pleasure I used to feel back in the day, when Sierra/Dynamix and Microprose ruled the world, and when games like the Red Baron and, later, Falcon 4 just about wiped out my college GPA.

There are lots of reasons why, for me at least, WOFF is such a pleasure to play (and in celebrating it I don't mean to disparage other worthy programs like ROF and BOB 2 and the alpha version of IL-2 BOS--which is absolutely kicking my butt at the moment--and so forth; I support them all, both with my purchases and with my forum comments). But rather than list WOFF's particular strengths in detail, I simply want to say this to the people who are responsible for the program: Thank you. You've done amazing work.

DKM

I agree, This game rocks. Great Fun. My flight of three was bounced by 5 N-17s. We knock down 1 and managed to survive and all our a/c had light damage. Another time My 2 a/c went to help our top cover of 6 who were jumped by 2 flights of N-24's. ( 8 or 10) They hit then ran for home. The top cover had 2 forced down and 3 Lt damage 1 pilot wounded. The French 0 shot down. I am surprised every time I fly WOFF. Thank You for putting fun back in sims.