Lock-On is pretty good, but it must chew some juice, 'cos it shuts my machine down after about 1/2 hour playing, after screaming out "Damn, it's hot in here!"
I'd forgotten that your were one of those square chinned good looking flight boys Baker Hope your well and HNY to you and Mrs Baker Cheers
Has anyone played this?? Bloody hell, the manual is 716 pages long! It is very involved and complicated. BRING BACK FROGGER!!!
Falcon 4? I bought when it originally came out in 1998, but never got that much into it. The manual was just as thick then. lol From what I've read, the guys that put Allied Force together did a great job. Lock On: Modern Combat is just as in-depth, but damn its pretty. The graphics are very nice. I still play Jane's F-18, but it's in-depth too. Found some mods that breathed new life into it for me. There are a couple of sims I want to try out: Wings over Vietnam and Strike Fighers. Both look very interesting and don't appear to require 3 weeks of flight school to get to fun parts (blowing $h!t up).
My colour printer at work got a work out printing it all out. Rest assured the bulk of that stuff is Encyclopaedia material just so you know not to shoot down that Sukhoi over Yugoslavia as he is a friendly or to know which airport to fly to and which direction to line up for the runway landing too! Although you still need to know more than where your stick or rudder is located in your cockpit.
Falcon 4 is good - but hard work. I recall playing it with my father in law. He was flying, and I was reading the manual and telling him what to do. After half a dozen goes we managed to find and engage another fighter and shoot it down, all outside visual range, and only realized we'd got a kill after we got back to base (I think we lost the landing gear in the "landing"). All up a success, but it was clear that we needed to spend a few says of intensive study to get close to it being good. After a while we discovered the guns, and somehow put the enemy figthers into "stupid" mode, and shot a couple down. That was a lot better fun, but probably lost some realism .
Do you have the original Falcon 4 or the re-released Falcon 4: Allied Force? If you have Allied Force, let me know how the updated graphics look.
If you're looking for a hardcore in-depth flight sim, go with Falcon 4 or Lock On: Modern Air Combat. The one thing that keeps me from buying Lock On Gold version is the fact that is uses Starforce copy protection. Starforce, imo, is completely destructive to computers. Here is some info taken from this article :"the Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. " & "The Starforce drivers are often linked to system instability and computer crashes." I do not purchase any software with Starforce protection. Here's a link of games that use it. http://www.similarities.org/starforce.html If you want a more casual flight sim, look into Project Strike Strike Fighters or Wings Over Vietnam.
Just read about this 3rd party update to Jane's F-18. I bought this game when it originally came out in 1999 and it is one of the best flight sims IMO. The game could probably be easily scored on Ebay for cheap. Here's a thread previewing the upcoming update. http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=32;t=009627 /edit The above thread just talks about the upgrade. Here's the link with some screenies: http://tsh.war-fighters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7871#7871
