“Cubey,” my imaginary sidekick asks me, “why do you build planes in SL?” If I had a dime for all the times someone has asked me why I build virtual planes, why then I still wouldn’t have any money, but it’s a fair question. I guess I’m a computer plane addict. That’s right. And it’s all the fault of those programmers from the eighties and nineties who had the same addiction, but had to make do with primitive graphics and limitations of early PCs.
Alright then. In order, here are the flight games that contributed to my virtual aircraft addiction, with links to screenshots. I did play others besides these, but these were landmark titles in my mind.
- Jet (1985, subLOGIC) (screenshots). Loaded from a single 320kB 5.25″ floppy diskette onto my dad’s Hyperion 8088 computer, this game was all dots and lines drawn in glowing amber on a tiny screen. The only purpose of this “game” was to fly around a stark, mostly empty landscape until you ran out of fuel, and yet I must have spent hundreds of hours doing rolls and loops in that lousy simulated F-16.
- Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer (1987, Electronic Arts) (screenshots). By this time, I had access to a 286 with EGA graphics, however the grey monochrome monitor made it nearly impossible to differentiate the sky from the ground.
The word “advanced” is relative, I suppose, but this one offered several planes to fly, including several experimental planes, and each had its own flight characteristics. There was even a mode where Yeager would guide you through different aerobatic stunts, and offer insults when you failed.
- Battlehawks 1942 (1988, Lucasfilm Games) (screenshots). Finally, a combat flight sim! And in glorious 265 colours! The purpose of this one was to fly different types of combat missions against badly pixelated, blobby sprites that were supposed to represent enemy planes and ships. Lucasfilm distributed this one on a single 5.25″ floppy or a 3.5″ floppy for the technologically advanced.
- Red Baron (1990, Dynamix/Sierra) (screenshots). I think I can say that this was my all-time favourite combat flight sim. Even though the graphics weren’t much better than Battlehawks, it had an particularly engaging career mode, where your pilot would fly in historical squadrons from aerodromes on a map of northern Europe, and many historical notes and photos to set the mood. You could almost forget that you were shooting at blobs no bigger than a few pixels across.
- Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1990, Lucasfilm Games) (screenshots). Visually stunning, historically interesting, challenging… and nifty rocket planes! Even though the graphics blew Red Baron out of the water, it was somehow less engaging.
So that’s my “best of” list of flight sims that really hooked me. Notice that I don’t include any of the Microsoft titles. Even though I own Combat Flight Simulator 2 and Flight Simulator X, I found them only mildly entertaining. And head-to-head play loses its appeal when you’re up against thirteen-year-olds with lightning reflexes and foul language. I suppose the only way to really enjoy virtual dogfights is to make my own combat flight sim using the SL platform.
If you’ve made it to the end of this long list, and you’re not snoring, then chances are you’ll like my Airco DH.2 and Nieuport 17, which include the Terra Combat System. Ha! This whole post was a setup to make you buy more of my planes!