Nice vid (I admit I skipped some parts, but will watch it fully later). I need to comment on few things though. I got triggered a bit - FLAME WAR COMMENCE!!!! :). Oh man, that F-14 review was painful. For campaign selection in Fleet Defender go to Squadron and then Campaign - you can choose North Cape, Mediterranean and Oceana (training) for Atlantic Sqadrons and if you switch to Pacific Squadrons you will be able to choose between Korea, India and again Oceana (for training). You can use time compression to make long missions shorter (up to 8x), I can't agree about your view of Fleet Defender's campaign. I always knew what to do and where to go - just pay attention to the briefings and your waypoints. I agree that Falcon 3 had better music (in fact it's one of my favorite OST from a flight sim), but they couldn't "bring back" the composer, since Falcon and FD were made by completely different dev studios (Spectrum Holobyte vs Microprose). In fact devs that worked on F-15 SE3, Fleet Defender went on making Jane's F-15 and Jane's F/A-18, while Falcon 4 was made by the same people from Spectrum Holobyte that made previous versions. Spectrum Holobyte bought out Microprose and then renamed themselves to Microprose because they felt that brand was more recognizable on flight sim market. You called the Fleet Defender mission planner "bare bones"? It was used to make all the campaign missions in game and it's pretty capable. Sorry, but you should spend more time with the manual before you start judging. I will however agree with you on what you have said in the outro. I woudl like to see some other worthy flight sims not inlcuded in this vid like Gunship 2000, USNF series (It's not really realistic but fun as hell), Jane's F-15, Jane's Lognbow.
The man himself! You definitely have more experience with every 90s sim - and my Fleet Defender portion was a bit rushed. The music thing was moreso a joke :) . And just realized it tells me in the Scenario manual - things are really split-up for this game! My opinion on Fleet Defender should still stand - I'd just rather play DCS as it does everything Fleet Defender does but better. And that's saying something as I'm not too big a fan of DCS.. You should let me know your overall tierlist just as a list - your expertise should give a fully holistic view for sure. I also wanted to avoid putting in helis and WW2 - but if I would I'd include Longbow series and Comanche vs Hokum. The latter being a pretty in-depth game with a ton of mods. And in the WW2 side IL-2, European Air War, and 1942.
I agree it seems like I'm totally shitting on Fleet Defender but it's still WORTH playing which like I say in the video there are many many sims that don't have the depth FD has.
@@andrewa837 Haha, I often feel quite opposite - while playing DCS and getting frustrated by the AI, in FD my wingman usually does what I ask of him. Regarding your tier list my only change would be putting JSF somewhere between B and C, really. I flew all campaigns (finsihed first 3, currently on North Cape) and I have to say this game is surprisingly good IMHO. I would also added Jane's Fighters Anthology as a culmination of an iconic series. At the time of the release it didn't had stellar graphics compared to other 3dfx capable titles, but the sheer amount of content compensated for that tenfold. Also the wingman control options and its AI in that game had to be one of the best I've seen to date (maybe surpassed only by the Falcon 4). Back in 1994 when first USNF came out this was possibly my GOAT flight sim for some time. To the list I would perhaps addded AV-8B Harrier Assault by Domark. It was released in 1992 (one year later after Falcon 3.0) - it had pretty solid dynamic campaign, which you could have much control over it. Its flight modelling rivalled the one from Falcon 3.0 in my oppinion, it felt really fluid and realistically presented VTOL characteristics of the Harrier - it's hard to explain but the flight model feels pretty modern, it's like someone made a game today with retro graphics. Just take a look at that vertical landing: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wqHiRBtgtWY.html There were plenty of other flight sims, but to name them all with pros and cons would take me a day ;) I also liked story-driven ones like Strike Commander or Top Gun: Fire at Will (by the makers of Falcon 3 and 4!), those were curios games worth checking out.
@@damsonn Thanks for all your insight. Jane's FA seems very insane with its content for sure, and I've been meaning to check it out! I didn't know that Harrier had such depth in its gameplay! Shame I missed it, seems totally worth a discussion. JSF is fun for sure, but I'd rather play other games if I wanted any of what it brought to the table. It is true that you don't get any more airbases to start from, right? I wanted to be accurate in that statement. At least it seemed that way to me after a few missions.
@@andrewa837 Regarding JSF, IIRC you can land on other airbases further in the campaign, though I can't recall if you will start your next sortie from that airbase? I will need to check it out next time I play it.
On the Mac, Parsoft's A-10 Attack! and A-10 Cuba! were some of the best sims of their time. Great clickable 2D cockpit, airframe damage modeling, and flight model physics. Graphsim's F/A-18 Hornet series was great as well.
A few of points about JSF. The entire globe was modeled. There was a cheat that would allow you to fly any aircraft in the game. You could control your pilot after ejection and he had a pistol.
EF2000 looks amazing. I never played any of these (just recently got into flight sims), but man, graphically that's miles ahead of anything I've played back then. Absolutely mind blowing how the devs managed to make it work.
The Holy Grail of Tornado (yet another elephant in the room) is the missing aircraft's shadow! For a flight sim where most of the action takes place below 1,000 feet, adding a dynamic shadow (like 1989's JetFighter[!]) would be an absolute blast!
Apart from being the premier sim from the 90s Falcon 4 had an interesting turn of events, after a number of years Microprose stated they would not support any more updates for their sim, the community asked for the game code to carry on the work themselves but Microprose refused, a short time later the code mysteriously ended up being leaked to the internet. The sim went from strength to strength and is now called BMS
in the JFS you could maneuver your parachute, once you landed you could walk and shoot. I still listen to his music to this day while flying in other simulators. Excellent compilation
Great video BTW, hence my many comments- But Imagine if DCS had half the content and just plain fun of these 90s sims? We've effectively traded hyper realism and aircraft ultra fidelity for worthy content! Fun fact - the ground attack capabilities of the F22 were greatly exaggerated in those old sims, as no one really knew the IRL capabilities of this state of the art super secret aircraft. In reality the F-22 only has a 2 JDAM or 8 GBU 39 (no Rifles or Magnums or rockets!) payload as the aircraft has no built in targeting pod or the means to carry one - Its a pretty much a strict air to air fighter!
Great balanced overview of what was on offer in the 90s. You've picked up where I pretty much left off flight sims (end of the 80's / 16 bit Atari ST) but I never lost interest. I've been collecting these & will be playing all of them. Just need Falcon 3 & 4 to finish off this list.
Sims didn't die, the sim craze moved from the West to the East. Lock On and IL-2 Sturmovik both released in the early 2000s, with Lock On being a sequel to 90s Flanker (which I wish you've included)
Awesome video for sure! I’m making a combat heli sim that has roots in a lot of the 90s sims. Thanks for all the effort you put into this video. One that I’d have loved to see was US Navy Fighters Gold Edition!
@@JamminGameDev that's super neat dude. I'll have to check it out! Thanks for watching and hit that bell because in a week there's a new review I'm working on.
Such a great video, and the only video I've seen that goes this in-depth with each entry, and is presented in this way for 90s sims. More videos about the old sims would be awesome, there's barley anything out there aside from gameplay, very little actual content of substance when it comes to the older sims like your video here has. Thank you so much! Hopefully you continue down this track and we see further in-depth videos on old sims. If not though, at least we got this one so thank you.
@@andrewa837 Honestly, you really should! The fact this video only covered modern-day-set games is... honestly a bit criminal if you ask me, lol. Sure WWII didn't get that many great sims up until about IL-2 and Battle of Britain II, but to be fair Rowan's games are owned by a publisher who isn't interested in working with GOG or Steam, so... IL-2 and its ilk are pretty much all we get.
I heard that a guy from Finland made the first ever source code mod to Tornado and that was not way back in the 90s. It was something like 6-7 years go! It's fun to see that people are still into old flight simulators!
thank you for making this video. the only 90s flight sim i played was TFX. We never got to play other sims mentioned except Falcon 4 because they were not popular in Pakistan. But this video shows alot of awesome flight sims I missed and how feature rich they were.
You forgot “Flanker” by SSI. The predecessor of current day “DCS”. Had the best flight-model at the time. It was arguably better than Falcon 4 except it lacked a dynamic campaign. It did feature an amazing mission editor.
100% Flanker's only weakness was the lack of something to do, especially in a gaming scene where most of us had limited if any internet access. If it had shipped with even a decent single player campaign I think it would have usurped a lot of Falcon's thunder (and I played both sims heavily as a teen).
@@doltBmB Blame the community, DCS has all the tools to allow creation of whatever campaigns you want. If people were interested there would be hundreds of campaigns around
@@thatdude3938 I work a lot with DCS Mission Editor, but creating a free-of-bugs campaign is rather difficult task. There are very few campaign makers who can do it professionally, but the more complex the mission is, the bigger the possibility of bugs is. Even in "Raven One" I had seen Hornets permanently connected to tanker, so I had no chance to refuel. But there would be nice to have a campaign added to every released aircraft.
As a 90s kid I was always fascinated by hardcore combat flight sims but didn't played much of them since they were too complex and hard to get into. Especially for a non-english speaker kid without access to game's manual (and without eagerness to read such thing in a first place). I remember messing around a little bit with Flanker 2.0 and IL-2 Sturmovik but didnt went far with them. Though the idea of getting into such games one day or simply know more about them was still there. Jets are just too cool I guess. F/A-18 is probably the most beautiful aircraft I've even seen (maybe on par with Su-27). So it's really insteresting to hear more about games of this genre from someone who actually know a lot about them. And I hope you'll do more such stuff in the future.
I got Janes USAF when it was released in 1999. Loved that game! I remember having a hard time getting the air refuelling right, but once I did, it was so satisfying. Also loved that several aircraft were modelled in the game, as well as the proper era's for each aircraft. I've been longing for a game set in/during the Vietnam era ever since!
this should be a part 1, as there are still a few great sims from the 90s, fighter squadron SDOE is a good example, and was developed by the same teams that designed EF2000 and TAW
I grew up on JSF, thanks for mentioning it! For me it was so hard to get into any other flight sims because the fractal-based terrain engine made every other game look like ass by comparison. You're entirely right in that the world feels a bit lacking; a lot of the time the game feels more like a tech demo than a simulation. A couple of things to point out: It is actually possible to capture enemy air bases to land on. All you have to do is destroy all nearby enemy units (AAG, SAM, and any stray hostile vehicles or fighters); the SLS landing assist will turn green and you'll see the message "Allied Airbase" on touchdown. So at least there's that, in terms of campaign progression. As for the damage model it does indeed include avionics (and there's even trim plane settings you can use to compensate for damage), the engine and even the landing gear, it's just that damage tends to insta-kill you more often than not (like you pointed out). When it comes to the JSOW the A variant is pretty useless, however the AGM-154B releases IR-tracking sub-munitions that home in on vehicles; enabling a single JSOW to knock out most of a convoy if you place it just right. Good video :)
@@andrewa837 I don't like them much as well, never liked USAF for example. But they had good stuff from EA Baltimore (F-15 and F/A-18) and from Origin who made Longbow for Jane Origin had quite a lot of sims on their own too, Pacific Strike, Strike Commander, Wings of Glory, and of course Wing Commander space sim series
Loved to play Jane's WWII Fighters back then, still have a copy of Falcon 4 + manual over here.. it was the pinnacle of modern jet combat sims back then. Thanks for the video!
I've been asked about this game lots of times. But does it have anything worthwhile going for it compared to DCS today? (Most games here still have something to offer even today to put them above DCS sterile museum)
A couple of other memories I'd love to see revisited - that F117A game (can't remember its name)? Also what about Flight of the Intruder? Also -loved the EF2000 music tracks that came on the CD!
As for Tornado, this is one of these games I had seen on the spectrum holobyte upcoming games poster, but NEVER could find it in the store! Long before the days of Steam, you had to HOPE your local store actually got a copy of the game you wanted...sadly mine never did so I assumed Tornado was just forgotten vaporware. Honestly, It wasn't till recently watching some YT content that I discovered it actually existed..among some other sims I wanted as a kid!
I was ignorant as a kid and only knew of Novalogic games in elementary school. I remember playing the Comanche 3 demo mission 1000 times. If only I knew about any of these games. EF2000/TAW was my favorite in highschool as well as Falcon BMS 4.32. I only play BMS religiously now, this was kind of my love letter to all the old sims. Some Falcon 4.0 versions are still worth playing, though.
How does one leave out Janes Fighter Anthology? The ability to fly so many different aircraft was amazing. Also left out TFX.. USAF.. Not sure how many others you missed out on.
Great video! The problem with some of the older games imho is that the low resolutions make them painful to play… eg Tornado when you’re coming in to land and collide with another jet on the runway that wasn’t rendered until seconds before impact. That said, other titles to consider would be: Flight of the Intruder F117 Nighthawk TFX A10 Cuba Flanker Also, because of this video (😉) I installed Falcon 4 on my laptop! Ah… the memories 😆 I had no problem running the vanilla version but the Superpak 4.2 version is giving me lots of trouble (even though I’m using DxWnd). Please could you share your DxWnd profile? Thanks!
I would use DGVoodoo2 nowdays for SP4.2 - usually the problem might be your GPU scaling settings. Try messing around with them while keeping DGVoodoo2 on the default "unspecified" scaling
Ok....spoke to soon....DGVoodoo2 got my F4 Allied Force working, but I still can't get SP4.2 to work. I get to the menus but when I try to launch a flight the whole thing shuts down and I get a cryptic message titled "Failed to set up rendering context"???
@@andrewa837 Yup. I know I did that bit right because F4AF now works. I’m using Falcon 4.0 from GOG…I wonder if the SP42_OCI installer isn’t compatible with that version?
@@runninggames771 most games had static button mapping, so I constantly had to have the keybinds pulled up, joystick was just for control of the aircraft. I used vjoy and joystick gremlin to get the stick working.
any thoughts on European air war, chuck yaeger's, red baron(3d), or MS combat flight simulator? Im on potato hardware RN and no money so im looking hard at this era. Wise words in the outtro as well.
Nice vid, but without A-10 Attack!/Cuba, Harrier Assault SVGA, F/A-18 Hornet Classic, Su-27 Flanker 1.0 this list is light years away from being complete. I would even say, I would put the ones i mentioned anyday in the list instead of the ones you mentioned, if I had to choose.
Harrier Assault should've made the list, I agree. A-10 I've heard of, but never played. How is it / what makes it unique? I wanted to at first include ww2 and helis, but I'm an impatient guy and decided not to. Mig Alley is the only one I regret doing. It's for sure A-B tier. Gimme ya tierlist.
@@andrewa837 Well, A-10 Attack! is one of the best flight seems of its era because of several reasons. First of all the best physics engine for its time. Second is diverse missions. When you put this into mix you get huge replayability, every sortie is unique, you can play same mission dozens of times easilly. But to get all that it should be played on Mac. Because only on Macs you can drag Cuba files into Attack! folder, and get the map view. You can check on my channel, I have a video with it, which basically highlights all of these. On Macs there also was F/A-18 Hornet. When it was released in 1993 it was hands down the best flight simulator, you can search on youtube: "F/A-18 Terror on Hawaii". I recorded with best possible graphics: 1152x864. Can you imagine resolution like that back in 1993? It looked simply wonderful. So, my top tier list, in not particular order (not including helis, WW2, WW1): F/A-18 Hornet, A-10 Attack/Cuba!, Su-27 Flanker, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, EF-2000, F-117, Fleet Defender, Harrier Assault SVGA, US Navy Fighters, F-29 Retaliator.
Great video! A somewhat philosophical take on the lack of information about player impact in Falcon 4 around 55:00: Maybe the game doesn't tell you what flattening that power station does to the war effort, because it's realistic. 😊 Advocates of the air campaign will say: It's working! Other will have their doubts. Intel tries to piece together a puzzle from a myriad of sources. Diplomats compile nuanced reports on enemy morale or allied resolve. But: Nobody can be certain, and the fog of war doesn't lift before it is over.
@@ticotube2501 I thought that too. But at the end of the day this is a game with code, everything has a value. TAW is a lot nicer in this respect but it may also give too much info.
@@andrewa837 I wonder what "the right amount" would be for a flightsim with a dynamic campaign. The best way would be that the gameworld itself represents the effect of player action. E.g. that the airfield you clustered in Tornado stays out of action for a while (does it? I don't remember), a destroyed bridge hinders ground movement, or the enemy reacts by shifting AAA to an industrial area. This would probably work well on a limited map the player gets familiar with - less so with a huge campaign as in Falcon 4.0.
@@ticotube2501 falcon 4 totally has this concept. We know bombing runways and bridges is super useful to campaign. Now that more is revealed to us, power plants supply power to a city with factories, so always best to take out plants then factories. The grid is hidden but in BMS, mission commander can reveal it.
You have mentioned DI's Super Hornet and Jane's Super Hornet, I would like to mention Hornet 3.0 by Graphic Simulations. It was a superb and realistic sim, but today to make it run, I need to use VirtualBox with Windows 98 installed.
45:00 yeah a lot of old games use the fullscreen LUT on the gpu to do color and gamma correction, due to how fast it is. this does not work in windowed mode, only exclusive fullscreen.
Oh my guy you NEED to play Jane's F-15 Strike Eagle. It is the best by far, having played most on your list. From the menus, to the game modes, to the campaigns, to the vibes. Everything felt so great and it looks like magic to be a game from the 90s. I remember spending nights playing this just listening to the many radio calls and just looking at the empty void, with just my cockpit screens to look at. Wonderful experience, really should look up. Way better than USAF and Hornet. Other game that I love, but I don't know if you include helis, is Commanche vs Hokum, since it has an entirely simulated war behind the excellent chopper models, quite easy to play too.
One you missed was "Back to Bagdad" - it was interesting in that it did a VERY accurate simulation of the radar system in the F-16, and if you had an old CGA card and monitor laying around, you could put that into your PC and use that as a dedicated radar display! The manual was like 70% how to work the radar. But I don't think it was widely known about and didn't get as much market as Falcon 4.0.
@@andrewa837 Yeah it wasn't well known. I got in on the beta program for it, but my PC was so marginally capable of running it at the time. But that CGA radar display was really cool IMO and something you just didn't see anybody else even consider.... Almost an early home sim cockpit setup.
Not bad - but sadly missed one of my faves "Flight of the Intruder" 1990 Spectrum Holobyte - and yes it was cutting edge at the time and top of the flight sim charts.
I just made a big move and don't have a proper gaming PC to run modern flight sims(BMS might run, but i doubt it). I've been thinking about trying out some of these older flight sims. They look like fun, and i do enjoy retro games!
Nice walk back through memory lane! I think Jane’s F-15 was superior to the sequel, F-18, but it is unfortunately not available any longer as a playable title on modern machines. I think combat flightsims stopped being developed because their market was increasingly niche, compared to the vastly growing market for first person shooters and RPGs. PCs got ever more accessible and with it the market for games grew exponentially. However, flightsims by their nature are games that most often take quite some time and energy to get to basic proficiency. That matched well when PC ownership was much more rare and limited to early adopters who didn’t mind tinkering with the software and hardware. When PCs became truly mainstream, the market for games dramatically grew, but not for each type of games. Games which required long manuals to learn became niche or faded to obscurity vs games which can be learned to play instantly.
56:45 I don't think that Eurofighter Typhoon was terrible. It might not have been great, but DID at least tried to do something a bit different with the stagnating genre, with the selection of pilots that you would switch between during the campaign. It was released by Rage software, I believe, not Infogrames/Atari.
@@andrewa837 Oh yes it was lacklustre. It was more arcadey, and I think that the cockpit was less detailed than EF2000 (not that I've played either in over 20 years so I'm probably mis-remembering some details). I still think it's worth trying out if you get the chance. The campaign was implemented very well, IIRC
To play Falcon 3.0, I remember having to spend 60 bucks on a memory manager so my computer could access RAM above 640k. I still have the manual and maps from my copy I bought back in 92'
DOS memory is mind boggling. I grew up with Windows 95/98 so never had any DOS experiences besides playing some games, but even in DOSBOX falcon 3.0 can struggle to run.
still waiting for that modern flight sim that matches the mission editors and ai from 2 decades ago. something like Falcon BMS + Il2 1946 + DI tornado. Also would need a proper flanker sim; my favorite jet
Wow I thought this vid would've had way more traction given the quality kudos to you! Great job keep at it! You've definitely earned a subscriber!! (Edit: grammar)
Why no F-15 Strike Eagle 3, a true sim classic, or Flanker? If I recall correctly, the Strike Eagle had the most authentic avionics modelling of its time, and mastering the systems and planning the missions was quite crucial. The massive manual was hence quite necessary.
@@mechantl0up funny. I'm just hearing about it. From what I hear it's a bit flawed, missions are just you versus enemy without wingman, missions are bland compared to falcon3 too. But it caught my eye and I might do a video of it in the future.
@@mechantl0up by that I mean I heard about it and was interested in playing it a week ago. Damsonn made a steam forums post comparing it to fleet defender. And I put that in D tier.
I am missing Jane's Fighters Anthology. Not realistic at all, but for me the most fun sim of the 1990s. I spend hundreds of hours playing the campaigns in that game.
@@andrewa837 all of the above. The Iraq campaign was very accurate to what they did in the actual gulf war and the missions varied depending on how well or bad you did them. Almost the entire cockpit was clickable. Mission editor was really powerful as well.
Joint Strike Fighter with a Voodoo card and a OC'ed Celeron @ 400mhz. You could even put in a cheat and fly all planes in the game. Why the hell do I remember this.
Can you provide a link to the superpak patch for falcon 4.0? I have spent 2 days trying to find any sort of patch that will let me run 4.0 on windows 10, with no success. Everyone tells me to just play BMS but I dont want too, I want to experience the classic version that is less complicated in terms of systems.
andrewa837 Thank you for your reply. I cant seem to get that to work, when I run the installer it just removes my falcon4.exe file for some reason. bummer
andrewa837 Ahh I see. That works but for some the game does not respond to my keyboard inputs when im actually in a flight. I'll have to look into this on my own, as this is a weird issue. I might end up just busting out my old pentium 3 rig to play this game on lol. I will say this though, Falcon 4 allied force works perfectly with my modern system after finding a patch online. Thank you for this video! I cant wait to try all the games you listed here. Wish more people made content on this subject (90s combat flight sims) as there is so much content to try out.
@@andrewa837 I honestly haven't tried to run it in about 25 years. I remember the B-61 nuke being pretty cool. I still catch myself singing the cringey intro song occasionally. I have my copy in storage if you want to try it out and can't find one.
i used to play flight sims as a kid, but since i didn't speak any english back then, i couldn't get far in these games (played battle of britain, F 19 stealth fighter, F22 lightning 2). but lately, i've been itching to come back to flight sims and got myself a brand new HOTAS from virpil and some panels and MFDs from Winwing. i don't understand the DCS hate i've been seeing in some areas of youtube. why the hate? the game looks great, seems to have really good physics and high fidelity aircraft. i even found a dynamic campeign via a mod which is free to download.
The main issue of DCS is that it's sterile. It's a switch simulator not a game. If you like a "museum" aspect in which you can fly a plane at the highest possible fidelity DCS is for you. But if you want a fighter pilot experience, DCS is NOT for you.
@@andrewa837 well, i did buy the F-18 for DCS and i also got Falcon 4.0 on steam, so i intend to try out both games :) though i must say, DCS looks really beautiful. thanks for the quick reply though!
9:00 -- RE: Falcon 3.0, LoFi Graphics, and a Math Co-Processor; Funny thing, but you've kinda glossed over the "amazing" part here. *No Dedicated Graphics Acceleration,* that's why a Math Co-Processor would have been required to draw wireframes with vector information. *AND* Math Co-processors weren't something which you purchased as an expansion or an add-on. As 386s gave way to 486s and Pentiums the co-processor became standard equipment on all CPUs. It wasn't until 1996 or later that video cards which were specifically meant to handle accelerated 3D graphics and/or mind blowing particle effects entered the consumer marketplace. Nvidia and ATI had their true heyday in the 21st century, 10 years later.
@@andrewa837 If they used Vector graphics it would have been faster with a coprocessor. I was reminded of another pair of games when you were going through the list, both of the stealth fighter games released by MicroProse (F-19 and F-117). As I recall, both were tiny and didn't need more than a couple of floppy disks to install, and F-117 boasted of having an improved 3D rendering system which is probably dependent on a coprocessor whereas the earlier game will basically run the same on a 286 or 386.
You should change the title to "fixed wing aircraft combat flight sims" as you missed out all the great helicopter sims from the 90´s (well, you mentioned Hind and Apache Longbow by DI). Glad you came up with Fleet Defender in the end, but i´m still missing F-15 Strike Eagle III, Jane´s F-15, USAF, IAF and a few others. And imo, DI´s F-16 Fighting Falcon is very much worth to list, as it was pretty close to Falcon 4.0 in terms of realism. Besides that, i agree with the list. Played all of those (except JSF) plus those i just mentioned.
Yeah, I regret not including EECH or Mig Alley (which I just included in another video). DI's F-16 doesn't have anything too unique to make it worth it here. IMO.
@@andrewa837 I have to disagree. F-16 Fighting Falcon was part of DI´s digital battlefield project wich made it possible to play Hind, Apache Longbow and F-16 Fighting Falcon all together on the same server, in coop and PvP. A early try of the concept what DCS is today and way ahead of it´s time. Sadly too much ahead of it´s time and failed, but that was pretty unique at the time.
@@r4dio4ctiv3man9 I'm not sure if that was fully fleshed out or not. I know HIND can play with Apache. Funny enough the lead dev of EECH mentioned that he wanted to also do that, but better, and made the game multiplayer focused from the start. I'll get around to making that video, I even interviewed him for it, but yeah. Probably D tier if I were to put them on the list (Hind, Apache, F16)
@@andrewa837 Well it still suffered from problems, but worked in general. There was even a box that included all three games (and Tornado as a bonus) for this purpose. I still have the CD-ROMs of that box laying around here. Played this for countless hours with my brother via serial connection. I think they even planned on a russian/soviet aircraft simulator to complete the concept, but DI died proir to that IIRC.
No particular reason, but I heard it's very hard to get running and downloads/info on it seems very sparse. Also maybe I was suffering from hornet fatigue XD
You're gonna get so much hate on the F-14 review. Nice job getting all these to run and record. I love playing Falcon 3.0 and I recently picked up Tornado. I wish Falcon had that terrain. It's so annoying to fly low level and have a mountain pop up in your face.
I want to revisit Fleet Defender but at the end of the day the gameplay loop is very minimal, if I'd rather play DCS (a C tier game) then that's where it goes. Sorry not sorry. Still love it, still it's worth talking about for sure. Falcon 3.0 vs Tornado is all about macro versus micro - and both do it super super well. The micro world of Tornado just sucks me in more as well as the amazing mission planner, enough to elevate it a tier.
