Carrier sims

1942 The Pacific Air War was a World War II air and sea combat simulation from MicroProse -- you could regard it as the spiritual predecessor to the wonderful European Air War. It allowed you to fly in WWII for the US Navy or the Imperial Japanese Navy (an update also gave access to USAAF planes such as the P-40, P-38, and P-51).

Part of the most complex and popular World War II sim series of the early 1990s. It had detailed cockpits, different for each aircraft type and some of the most detailed ground objects seen at that time in a VGA sim.

One of the earliest and most addictive real time strategy games, it also had a flight simulation element. A classic sim in it's time which integrated many of the elements of addictive gameplay.

"Carrier Deck is a fast paced time management game where you will play as the Air Officer on board a CVN-76 in the midst of active war."

Mobile sim focussed on carrier landings.

Mobile sim focussed on carrier landings.

Graphic Simulation's F/A-18 3.0 sim set new standards of fidelity and was playable on an average PC! It was actually released on Mac first, unusual for flight sim nowadays but back then Mac's had better graphics capabilities than PC's.

IOS sim from the makers of a long line of PC and Mac F/A-18 sims. Based on F/A-18 Korea

Released in 1988 by Electronic Arts, F/A-18 Interceptor was written by Bob Dinnerman who founded the enormously successful Jetfighter series.

Jane's F/A-18 was the successor to their magnificent F-15 simulation. It modelled the US Navy's next-generation F/A-18E Super Hornet in great detail. As the F/A designation suggests, the Super Hornet is built for both Fighter (Air-to-Air) and Attack (Air-to-Ground) missions. In this sim, you operate your F/A-18 from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in the Arctic Sea, flying missions over Russia's North Cape area. The F/A-18E SuperHornet came alive with a 200 page manual, which was necessary to study if you were to have any chance of fighting in the machine.

Korea was one of the most realistic flight sims around 1n 1997 and it ran very well on a modest (Pentium) system. Royal Australian Air Force pilots regard this sim as a very accurate portrayal of the Hornet flight model. The flight model was one of the most fluid around and energy management in a dogfight became a desperate necessity! This sim was worth buying just for the in-game training tutorials. The Hornet was conceived from the word go as a dual-role aircraft, hence the designation F/A-18, which means Fighter-Attack. It was meant to supplement the role of the F-14 Tomcat, providing shorter range Air defense and to totally replace the A-7 Corsair and A-6 Intruder.

This sim reflects the dual role with an incredible array of Air-to-Ground weapons and systems. It was an updated and 3DFX enabled version of F/A-18 3.0.

Enhanced version of F/A-18 Korea, which was originally developed by Graphsim and released in 1998.

Enhanced version of F/A-18 Korea, which was originally developed by Graphsim and released in 1998.

This sim demanded your full attention. It detected you were not giving full attention... and then turned around and bit you hard! The computers did their best to fly the plane where you pointed it, but couldn't rescue you from gross errors of judgement like my full loops at low altitude! From a hard-core point of view I like this... it forced you to correct sloppy habits and get into the checklist mentality.. getting into a "landing state of mind" when landing... not dwelling on the fantastic dogfight you just had / didn't have. This indeed is the essence of creating an immersive sim!

Fighters Anthology brought the DOS sims US Navy Fighters, Marine Fighters, Advanced Tactical Fighters, NATO Fighters and the Windows sim USNF '97 into one collection under Windows. It gave you over 100 different aircraft types to fly! It was the culmination of an ambitious series which bought hours of fun to flight sim fans the world over. A great introductory sim series. It was extremely ambitious in scope and I for one spent many hundreds of hours in the virtual skies of this series. The method of presenting flight information in user defined windows still hasn't been improved on 10 years since the series started. The reference CD is worth the price alone.

A high fidelity sim of Naval and Navy Air Operations set in the early 2000's.

Fleet Defender, released in 1994 by Microprose, was the most thorough treatment of Carrier Fleet Defense ever seen to that date on a personal computer. The graphics were VGA 320 x 200 and based on the F15 Strike Eagle III graphics engine. This sim gets about as much detail as it's possible to get out of VGA.

Adds the U.S.S. Nimitz Carrier and flyable F/A-18C Hornet, F-14D Tomcat, A-7E Corsair II, TA-4J Skyhawk, S-3 Viking and E2C Hawkeye to Microsoft Combat Flight Sim 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002.

Flight of the Intruder, released in 1991, is one of the classic combat flight sims of all time! It was developed by two teams, one in the USA and one in the UK. Flyable aircraft were the A-6 Intruder, F-4 Phantom, MiG-21 - this was the first time I got to fly a MiG-21! I remember flying head-to-head against my brother - he in the F-4 Phantom and myself in the MiG-21. Somehow he could always tell which aircraft was piloted by me despite my best efforts to send in the drones first! Until Falcon 3.0 was released, Flight of the Intruder led the pack in features. I remember getting FOTI for the Atari ST, sometime after I came across Falcon, and being amazed at the depth of the simulation, especially the mission planning options.

Mobile sim focussed on WWII aircraft, in particular landing and carrier operations.

The graphics were of the first generation of sims that used 3DFX cards and satellite mapping techniques.

Michael Woodley developed the scenery for Flight Simulator II. He recalls: "The game 'Jet' was developed by Charles Guy using Bruce Artwick's technology. He adapted it for the IBM-PC. I don't recall any version of it for any other platform but that was years ago so it may have slipped my memory. It had the interesting feature of being able to run Scenery Disks developed for Flight Simulator." My readers found several cross-platform editions, check out the exhibit for more info.

Jetfighter FullBurn was a standalone expansion of Jetfighter III. It had Russian and U.N. Forces, and you could fly for either side. It continued the Jefighter tradition of fast and furious action within a storyline. Four CD's with lots of full-motion video in the campaigns added to the atmosphere and sense of a storyline. Campaigns were set in the Nordic states and the terrain corresponded impressively closely to real-life operational navigation charts (ONC). Verdict: very atmospheric and a lot of fun.

Fluid flight modellling and carrier landings combined with dogfighting in the F-22 and YF-23 made Jetfighter II an incredibly popular combat flight sim.

JetFighter III, released in 1997 was probably the last of the great DOS Combat Flight Sims. It was one of the first to support the 3DFX chipset and portrayed very detailed terrain... but still ran at a playable speed! The Navigation and Weapon systems were simple in operation so you could concentrate on turnin' and burnin'.

Fourth in line of one of the most popular combat flight sim dynasties, JetFighter IV returned to the San Francisco scenarios of 1988's "Jetfighter: The Adventure" and thus provided a neat summation of where graphics had evolved to by the end of the 20th century.

First in a long line of popular combat flight sims on the PC.

JetFighter V was released in 2003 under the title of "Jetfighter". It is a stunning looking sim which still serves the purpose of providing an action arena for neophytes to the genre, but old hands will be frustrated by the lack of controls and options.Unfortunately the Jetfighter dynasty seems to end not with a bang but a whimper. It's as if there were two design teams - one who set out to make a fully functioning virtual cockpit and one who vetoed the implementation - the whole sim is like that. Heaps of potential but nothing much is finished.

Mobile sim focussed on operations of the Italian Navy, including fixed and rotary wing operations.

Part of the most popular combat sim franchises in the 1990s, NATO Fighters had the biggest line-up of flyable aircraft ever seen in a combat sim to that time.

Navy Strike was developed by Empire and published in 1995. It was a DOS based sim released which combined Strategy and piloting.

Richard Leszczynski, who provided the scan, had a valid question: "Why the F-14 on an advertisement for a Harrier sim?"

Featured a Split Screen, 2 player mode.

Top Gun: Fire at Will was a light sim based on the movie starring Tom Cruise. It was originally released in 1995 then again in the Microprose "Powerplus" series in 1998. The sim introduces the player to basic concepts of Air Combat with plenty of commentary and advice coming from your back-seater and instructors.

Overall a good sim for newbies, more experienced players will probably find it lacking in challenges and want more control over landings and takeoff's.

US Navy Fighters was first from the stable of Janes Combat Simulations. This sim was the successor to the wildly popular Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat and started a series that ran to the end of the 1990’s. It focussed naturally nough on US Navy operations, set in a hypothetical conflict of the future (1999) in which US forces help Boris Yeltsin. The campaign that shipped with it led you from the F-14 to a navalised F-22 and then to the Su-34 Flanker variant. Get an overview of the series in the Fighters Anthology exhibit. The combat focussed gameplay was enhanced by the atmospheric and user friendly interface. The ability to tweak most aspects of the sim from the graphics to mission waypoints and loadouts made you feel in control without overwhelming you with detail. It still remains a model of good interface design. The first mission of the Ukraine campaign remains for many fans a reminder of just how atmospheric a sim can be. Check out the videos, showing the entire first mission from briefings, through mission planning, arming, carrier takeoff in the F-14, intercept and carrier landing.

This CD ROM edition contained US Navy Fighters and the 1st official add-on, Marine Fighters.