Warbird Information Exchange

I hesitate to post this here, but don't know where else to ask the question with hopes of getting the kind of answers I want/need. Guess y'all are spoiling me.

I'm no gamer outside of Solitaire while waiting on downloads, but I used to get a real kick out of the Microsoft Flight Simulator programs from early on up to Flight Sim 2000 (if I recall the version correctly). I probably have that last disk around here somewhere, and it will probably load and run okay on this machine, but I keep thinking it might be fun to have a shoot-em-up program also. You know, one where you fly Wildcats against the Zeros like my little brother used to have (we're all in our forties and fifties).

I gave up on trying to find this sort of thing a while back, seems like all the modern "games" involve deep story lines, steep learning curves, and outrageous system requirements. I don't want to make a career of it, just want a good straightforward mission that's relatively easy for me and my machine to pick up and run with, like we used to do way back in the '90's. My weary old pooter's a 2 gig dual core with 3 gigs of RAM and 32 MB vid card running WinXPSP2, so it isn't totally a thing of the past (as I seem to be.......).

Thanks for indulging me on this, I feel so dopey..... But hey, it was fun!

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Cheers,
Kurt Maurer
League City, Texas

PIC, Ford 6600 pulling Rhino batwing up and down the runway

IL2 Series is good for WW2 era stuff and its not too terribly arcadish, but relatively easy and fun.

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Robert "JP" Spivey

My choice would be any of the Microsoft Combat Flight Sims.
1 thru 3.
I personally like the Pacific Theatre!

http://www.microsoft.com/games/combatfs2/

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Mike

Ah yes, There we were, left engine on fire, right engine feathered...ahh yes,...there we were, ..Screwed! No Kissing!

Will these sims work with Vista 64 Bit system?

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*When you meet a Veteran shake his or her hand and thank them. They earned your freedom*

I would go with the ThirdWire series if you want combat without a lot of power requirements. I'm running an AMD FX-series single core without any problems.

www.thirdwire.com

Mostly based around jet-era combat, but there's a healthy WWII addon community out there based on the CombatAce website (www.combatace.com) and the process of installing addons has become very easy with the new system for Strike Fighters Project 2.

With the IL-2 series, you can fly on any WWII theater, with more than 200 aircraft, and also join a huge community of virtual squadrons all around the world.
Now the game is moddable you can also move to Korea

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I Googled up IL-2 series, got a bunch of tedious study material to pore over and sort through, quickly lost interest. So may I ask a simple Q?

Where does one go to get it? A WWII sim thing, no jets. I like props.

Thanks, guys!

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Cheers,
Kurt Maurer
League City, Texas

PIC, Ford 6600 pulling Rhino batwing up and down the runway

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Flight-C ... 094&sr=8-2

That has IL2, Pacific Fighters and LOMAC

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Robert "JP" Spivey

Aces High is good fun if you like online dogfights
.

European Air War...An oldie but a goodie.Very immersive,runs well and good multiplayer..Has been modded well as well..
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/f ... r_War.html

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Those who think it,s impossible should leave the ones doing it alone..
http://www.spitfireprojecta58-27.com/

http://www.amazon.com/IL-2-Sturmovik-1946-Pc/dp/B000N4JENW


you got to purchase il2-1946 which is a dvd with complete il2 series since the beginning

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Well, European Air War looks and sounds closest to what I want, except there's still one little bitty rub ....... I can't figure out how/where to get it, either.

Used to be you went to the computer store and bought a clearly labeled box with the program disks inside, went home and loaded it, and bango: you were playing big time fighter pilot. I guess all that's a thing of the past now; you're either a gamer geek who knows his way around skins and add-ons and all that or you just don't play. As I said in my original post, I don't wish to invest a lot of time in this. Is there any hope for the old fashioned casual flight sim crowd?

As an aside, the only computer game I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D. Now that's the kind of learning curve and gaming complexity I'm looking for! I haven't played games since W3D refused to work on Windows, as I don't want or need any more "story" complexity or graphic detail. I'd rather that a game ran smoothly than sport photorealisitic graphics that never seem to stop being jerky no matter how hot a machine you have, but I guess that's a thing of the past too.

It's all too often I miss my old 486-66 and MS-DOS ...... which is more than what runs the ISS right this minute ...... now that was a sweet running computer. Ah well, back to Solitaire.

_________________
Cheers,
Kurt Maurer
League City, Texas

PIC, Ford 6600 pulling Rhino batwing up and down the runway

I think European Air War is a good choice for you. I have a lot of newer and more involved sims including FS 2004, CFS3, and IL-2, but when I caught a virus and had to reformat, EAW was the only sim I reinstalled. It is by far the simplest and most immersive, allowing huge numbers of aircraft to be in play at a time, and at normal combat distances it is only slightly less good-looking than the newer, much more resource intensive sims.

At this point I would say that ebay would probably be your best source for the game. Amazon has new and used copies also. Then you'll want to spend hours on the fan sites getting add-ons to pimp it with. There are too many mods and options to keep track of. Since it's a small (1 CD) program I used to keep several copies installed, one original, one set up for Pacific, one for Mediterranean, one for East Front, and one where I could swap in anything I wanted. Great fun.

August