Flight Sims?

[J T]

So I picked up the Logitech Attack-3 flight stick today for a whopping $4.00! Now I'm eager to try out some flight sims. This is a new genre for me. Pilotwings on the SNES and N64 are about as close as I've come to flight simulators. Also Top Gun on the NES gave me some appreciation for how hard it is to land a jet fighter.

So, I'm looking for some advice. What flight sims are recommended? Which are the most realistic and which are the most fun (not necessarily the same thing).

I have IL-2 Stumorvik: 1946 but I haven't loaded it up yet. I've heard good things about Microsoft's flight sim series. What else is there to pay attention to?

[Niode]

Flight sim is good. I know a pilot, and he has a HUUUUGE set up that he had made. We're talking like a gazillion buttons and everything. He teaches guitar at the college I work for, but in his spare time he flies all over the place. He brought the full rig in to college at the end of the term and set it up. He said he would give whoever could take off a free ride in his plane. Nobody could get it off the ground. The closest we all got was to start the engine and move the rudders a bit.

So yeah, it's mega complex. Then again, he might have just made it impossible to make a point.

[Anapan]

The last one I really got into was Terminal Velocity. Still a good game. I did try out the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. After 45 minutes I still couldn't even get a plane off the ground. The graphics are amazing, but you actually need most of the official controllers to play it correctly. Way too complicated to be any fun at all, tho if you're planning to become a real pilot, that's what they train on. The older MS Flight sims are kinda fun.

Emulate After Burner II

[t0yrobo]

I've been eying Rise of Flight: The First Air War for a bit now. It's been getting fairly mixed reviews, but it looks worths a shot. Also if you go back a few years pretty much any sim by Janes was really good.

[fastbilly1]

The last sim I got into was X-Plane. Just grab the demo and see that Flight Simulator X has nothing on Xplane. Ive yet to find an aerospace engineer or pilot that doesnt prefer Xplane. Partially due to the just stupid amount of planes and partially because it is good enough you can teach someone how to fly with it - Delta uses it in their 747 training pods.

[Ivo]

I think the last one I played was F15 Strike Eagle III - that's DOS! It was fairly realistic but depending on the difficulty level you still had some "arcadey" parts in it (which lets you take out many ground gun emplacements on a single mission and so on).

I prefer "Space sims" like Privateer and such though (although calling those "sims" is a bit inaccurate).

Ivo.

[crux]

I have X-Plane and a four engine Saitek setup for controls, but I've actually yet to run it. I didn't think my old computer had the power to run it decently, but I did get a laptop in the last month.

Even as a controller collector, the complexity of setups for commercial flight simulators is really impressive. There's rutter pedals, yokes, flight sticks, throttles, even switch, radio, information and multi panels. And that's just consumer quality. Get into the prosumer range and the prices reach into mortgage range.

If I ever get into them, being able to remove the on-screen panels and have them sitting in front of me is pretty incredible. Not to mention support for stuff like head tracking.

It's also worth mentioning that because of the complexity of flight sims, you don't actually need a range of software. One good flight simulator will last long enough.

[Hatta]

I played a lot of Jetfighter 2 back in the DOS days. That was pretty good. I prefer the arcadey flight games over realistic sims. Crimson Skies, Ace Combat series, Propeller Arena, all good stuff.

Edit: Has anyone tried Skygunners on the PS2? I just read about this one, and it looks great. Localized by Atlus too, which is always a good sign.

You might consider Flight Gear. It's free, and fairly realistic. Also for something different, check out Orbiter. That's a space flight sim, and it's realistic enough that you need to learn some orbital mechanics (math!) to actually do anything. Real shame they won't open the source of that one.

[MrPopo]

Fun games to use with that joystick:

X-Wing
TIE-Fighter
Descent
Freespace

[J T]

Thanks for the recommendations guys. Unfortunately, that cheap flight stick was cheap for a reason-- it's dead. It doesn't even get detected by my computer and it's supposed to be plug and play. I tried downloading some software from Logitech for it, and that doesn't recognize it either. Crap. I threw out the receipt too. That was dumb.