I bought "Falcon 3.0" on a family holiday to the French riviera when I was around 12. Did go swimming, but when I got home, I had read the whole manual (500+ pages) in the car going back. Best summer ever.
Excellent list, I'm quite happy to have my own boxed copies of all mentioned :) I loooove playing and collecting old flight sims, it's just unreal how much they pulled off on the limited hardware of the time. It was like stepping into another reality. I really need to cover some more of them sometime.
+Robert Wenzel Exactly what I was thinking! LGR chiming in is great. Granted MJR likes PC games (well more than likes them) but most of his vids are about consoles and console games. LGR has to like something on the consoles too. He has carts laying in random places. I'd love to hear LGR's thoughts on some consoles. No I want to hear his soothing voice.
Man I spent so much time on Falcon 3.0 that I could tell by the sound of my hard disk when the game engine's "tactical module" was about to load in enemy aircraft nearby.
So glad you showed some of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat!! That was my fav sim for a long time! I also loved the Janes series and F/A-18 Hornet from Graphic Simulations. All the Novalogic sims were wonderful too. Comanche, f-22 lighting with their voxels! Thanks for the vid MJR
I owned a Macintosh at the time and Novalogic's Commanche and GraphSim's Hornet 3.0 were my flight Sims. I remember spending my early years in the F-18 at night, flying over Honolulu and The Persian Golf, as well as destroying tanks in Columbia in my RAH-66 while dodging missiles. Great times!
I always had a soft spot for Fighter Bomber, it was so ambitious, even the ZX Spectrum version was impressive.All time favourite though is to load up Falcon on 2 ST's (or an ST and an Amiga) and play head to head (null modem cable). Going from Fighter Bomber on the Speccy to 2-player Falcon on the ST was huge :)
+Ltrain44 yeah, IL2 eventually morphed into IL2 1946, which is on Steam - that thing has all the Oleg Maddox games in a giant bundle - the pacific stuff, the WW2-46 stuff, something 30 or 40 planes to fly; and it runs fine on modern machines. Look it up, it's always on sale.
It is amazing to see how far flight sims have come, now with games like DCS and MFSF 2020 pushing the limits I’m so glad these old games were around to make what we have today possible
Flight sims! F-117A on IBM which i would watch a friend play when i was a kid, was so enthralling to watch and the game world it was in seemed so full of activity. For me later Gunship! would become one of my absolute fav sims and still runs today.
Hey guys congratulations! I rarely get so excited about a video coming up in my sub box but flight sims really don't get a lot of love nowadays. Man i never got really much into combat flight sims but i spent most of my gaming life on Flight Simulator (since the 2002 edition) and man, talk about an obsession like that, you're always wanting "more real", just that more realistic scenery, just that little more detailed plane and flying on-line, registering your flights, doing it more and more realistically, every step of the way, every check, man, it got to a point where i would spent literally half an hour just setting up like 3 or 4 programs besides the flight sim itself so that flight would have meaning, man its crazy, i'm sure Dave knows it! And the community it's truly unique, you can go check the live maps of the main 2 servers for online flight simming right now (IVAO and VATSIM) and you will have at any time more than 200 (peaking at more than thousands) pilots flying and a handful of people doing real ATC live! People sitting in their homes with headsets and lots of aviation charts around them doing Air Traffic Control for the pilots with real procedures, can you believe that? Man, it's crazy and i think it's a really good topic to get on with Dave! Anyways, keep up the good work Jesus and good flights to you Dave! Cheers!
Use to love all these games. Joined the Army in early 90's & my drill instructors couldn't believe how I knew so much about weapons systems. Learned it all from playing & reading the novel size instruction manuals.
This video brought back so many fond memories. Had a good chuckle recalling DOS memory management :) Boot disks, autoexec.bat/config.sys files, the command prompt... kids today don't know what they're missing!
Great video. Dave Nunez has great taste in flight sims (probably because I agree with him on most of these titles haha). Falcon 3.0 is IMHO the creme de la creme of DOS-era flight sims. It was the perfect mix of hardcore sim (adjustable to your tastes) but also accessible and its dynamic campaign system, which is still pretty unique, made it infinitely replayable.
In 1986, a highlight of my life in gaming was being introduced to MS flight sim using DOS. I was learning one of the earliest Autocad versions at a tech school and my instructor broke from teaching to show us this flight sim that made me realize there was the possibility of games that make you feel like you are flying. It was a big jump from my earlier years of Vic20 and Atari...Great vid guys! BTW, fun game on the Com 64 was "Ghost Busters".
A10 Cuba was a blast due to its detailed damage model. Engine fires, blown tires, loss of wing structure etc made it fun just to damage the plane then try to fly and land it. Also, shooting the friendly aircraft, especially the C-5s just to the point of significant damage, requiring them to return to base and try to land....that was golden. You could almost feel the panic of the pilots inside those wounded planes.
Been very fortunate to play some of the above-mentioned PC combat flight sim game titles when I was young. The early 90s defined something for me and this largely comes from playing such games.
Dave is so well-spoken and knowledgable. I can really see his passion shine through and it is great to see someone with such genuine excitement for games. It is also great that you both are showing some love to a genre that gets very little attention on RU-vid. Great episode guys! Let's see some more of Dave in the future.
Wasn't a huge flight sim guy but I did play a few of them back in the day and always really liked them. This was a great video. Always appreciate the vids about older PC hardware and software. It seems to be a segment that's often ignored in gaming retrospectives. Would love to see more!
Some memories there. I started on C64 with ACE, ACE2, Gunship, Project Stealth Fighter, Spitfire 40 that I can recall. After that on Amiga I had Gunship 2000, F19 and F117, Jet Pilot (EE Lightning & F104 Starfighter), F16 Combat Pilot and Tornado by Digital Integration. When I finally got a PC in 1998 my first flight sims were European Air war, Longbow2 and F15.
Before I watched this video, I really had no interest in any type of flight sim. But after listening to you and Dave talk about them, my interest has really peaked! Dave seems like a super cool guy that is very well-spoken and intelligent about this topic. I'd like to see him back again!
I'll never forget receiving "Su-27 Flanker" as a kid. My dad was in the "chair force" so I suppose he thought it would motivate me. And you guys are absolutely right, the manual was so detailed (203 pgs. EA!). I'm happy to say I can fly/dogfight in an outdated Russian fighter jet if ever the case.
I wish you had talked about Falcon 1 and 2 as well. That really was the golden age of flight sims. Oh ... how could I forget European Air War! And Gunship!! They were amazing days.
+MetalJesusRocks anytime man I certainly love the videos. At first I was like awe man a flight sim? Good stuff . I look forward to your videos every week.
You'll always be sad bro. You're just looking for something to complain about. If they had everything in the list, you would have complained that it was too long. LMFAO!
F/A-18 on the Amiga was so good in the day. Had polygon 3d graphics and awesome intro sound track. As a youth that seriously left a mark on me, and I ended up becoming a pilot in real life.
best video in a long time, like that it is much longer than those of late, and seeing those classic games, great work, more flight sims and classic sierra games including walk throughs or discussion of some classic space quests etc would be a treat! Thanks MJR!
Excellent video! I loved the early 90s "golden era" of PC gaming and I was a huge fan of MSDOS flight sims when I was a teenager. More videos on various sims and Dos gaming in general would be awesome as there's not a lot of quality videos on RU-vid.
This whole video was one big nostalgia trip for me!!! I had multiple different joysticks back in the day. I had at least half a dozen of the featured games from this video. I want to see a video about the hardware, this takes me back to pre y2k
Loved the video. It was really special for me since I started my solo videogame experience by playing F22 - Raptor, Comanche and some other games in this genre.
I had so many flight sims on my Atari 400 - Atari 800XL and Amiga 500. Microprose was so deep, I loved it. DID made F29 Retaliator, TFX, EF2000, F22 and the brilliantly title Wargasm!
One of my greatest gaming memories was playing Secret Weapons over Normandy and Heroes of the Pacific. Those were two of my favorite all time games on ps2. And I think one of my favorite if not favorite games of all time was a naval simulator called PTO IV, it was just amazing.
I think I still have my Red Baron 2 manual somewhere. I loved that one. It went through the history of aviation before and during WWI and went into the lives of some of the aces you could find yourself randomly either flying with or fighting against in the game. I know I met some of the members of the Flying Circus in one battle.
Brilliant vid!Proper blast back to the past seeing some of these MS-DOS flight sims i used to play. Makes me sad i never kept any of them now. I got rid of them all. Wasn't bothered at the time but soo regret getting rid of them now. Gave them all away. :( Thanks for making this vid. Serious nostalgia seeing some of these flight sims!
F-16 Combat Pilot + Fighter Bomber, FTW!!!! Great video, thank you for sharing. I used to have many of these games. Their biggest enemy were the fans and the constant change of technology. The first wouldn't shut up about how the game is not great because it is not accurate/realistic enough thus it doesn't deserve to be bought. The second was the stupid changes which made it very hard for some games to work in the first place.
I really appreciated this topic! No hard feelings that there was no discussion of the flight sim that turned me onto PC gaming - Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat
I had Dam busters for our Tandy 1000 when I was a kid, and loved it! The manuals taught me aspects of WWII that I would have never learned about otherwise. And the gameplay, trying to follow precise flight paths while bombarded by flak, dropping the payload properly to get the bouncing river bombs to hit the target, it just sucked me in. I think all the history of it is what really drew me in.
+Wayne Christopher in 2013 when they had the 70th anniversary of Operation Chastise, the RAF was live tweeting as if the mission were happening, and I was playing Dambusters on my C64 emulator - good times. If you haven't read Paul Brickhill's book or seen the 1955 movie on this - try to watch that; Paul Redgrave as Barnes Wallis, good stuff.
Awesome video . I never played this genre and even wasn't interested about it . But it was really well made . Introducing games , talking about different platforms, what was included in box , hardware .... I really enjoyed watching ! Looking forward for another vid ! :)
i have to be honest and say i didn't think i was going to like this video but it was actually really interesting to see these old school flight simulator games. I'd definitely like to watch more of these since I currently play bf4 and love flying the choppers on there, keep these cool videos coming MetalJesus.
oh man F-117 A that game was my childhood, my dad would fly and I would be the bombardier, also a local computer wizz gave it to him as a pirate copy an said that he hacked it off the Swedish military, not so sure dad fell for it but at 5 I was sure I was playing a hacked F-117 training program, hahaha cheers for the video guys
Absolute YES to the Janes series. I started with USNF and Marine Fighters and finally on to Fighters Anthology. There is still a modding community for FA.
+DarkHalmut yeah, I got sucked very deep into modding for the whole USNF/FA scene when I was in college; I think two of my tools (Airbrush and Ptr2Cache) still get used in that world.
Wow! US Navy Fighters was maybe my first pc dos game. Ive played it at a friends house in the 90s. His father was a GI in Germany. So I'm German. What a surprise!? :) This game was so cool. I played it for hours!
Thanks Dave for your passion. So interesting and so much memories. Even on CPC 464 i had a blast in the Eighties. And i love your 3d printed Mini Comp :)
I was so happy to see Tornado on this list. To this day the dynamic campaign and extensive mission planning really hasn't been duplicated in another sim. You could easily spend as much time planning the missions as flying them. Its almost a case study in mission planning because if you plan correctly you can pretty much fly the whole mission from start to finish in auto pilot with ordinance dropping and takeoffs/landings being the only time you ever have to touch the controls. Its probably one of the only flight sims you can easily get away with just playing with a keyboard and mouse. The SAMs and AAA are brutal and deadly even at Mach 1 and 200 ft. Its a real shame that DID never really followed up with anything that equalled Tornado. EF2000 was a completely different game.
It's cool to see more people talk about 1990s flight sims. I have quite a few of the Jane's Combat Simulation titles complete in the box, they're awesome.
My joystick when I played WW2 Online was the Microsoft Precision sidewinder pro 2 or something like that, lol. I loved that joystick. I used it for planes and tanks and vehicles.
Ha! I loved Falcon 3.0 and had the glory of a math co-processor in our PC as well. It was all well and good but as I eventually discovered, drag wasn't modelled in the "hi-fi" flight model, so you were actually better off playing in "complex" rather than math-co-processed mode. Absolutely on the money with "Tornado", "1942: The Pacific Air War", and "F14 Fleet Defender". Awesome games
Another great video. Thanks. We don't hear much about flight sims anymore as the modern consoles only seem to do arcade type flight sims. I remember having several on the Amiga. They were so much fun with a steep learning curve but made up by the sense of accomplishment once you master it.
Loving these video's man!! I remember playing Air Combat on PSone as a kid, Played it non stop lol. And alot of Ace Combat, Never forget the amount of enjoyment they brought. Also Euro Air War on PC was awesome, WWII.
To add to the F-19 story, Northrop was trying to find a buyer for the F-20 Tigershark at the time as well. Someone noticed the designations went from F-18 straight to F-20.