34 Years of Flight Simming

[Airflow]

My first was the F-19, which was horribly overpowered, but had all the elements of a proper flight sim - missions, physics, objectives, big maps, stelf... Hard to imagine how I could ever play that, but it was huge fun at the time.

Then came the LHA, a helicopter sim. Also overpowered, but the variety of missions put it above the rest. Sometimes all you had to do was rescue a few dudes. Don't worry, wasn't anything easy about that.

Got to give kudos to DID throughout. Every sim recognizable, and mostly, looking back, they tended to strike the best realism/fun balance for every era. I remember playing their final creation, the F-22 TAW, and thinking "no way a real plane would fly that well, be that easy to control, or have the systems as accessible". Now after trying out TAW, I figure they were reasonably close to the mark. There's still a community playing and extending that sim, though most of them play DCS as well. Tiger if any of you are here ))

Visuals are overrated. It's the games that make me feel like I'm in a plane on a mission that I remember. Though good visuals are really cool.