Solo Flight

I had Snowstrike for the C64. I really liked it. It was most definitely a sim. It was very flashy, the graphics were solid polygonal and were as good as the C64 could possibly get.

Even your home carrier was solid. The combat and handling was quite decent. The terrain was both land and sea, with carrier and runway takeoffs and landings.

The missions were innovative, pretty detailed, and were composed of air superiority, bombing missions, rescues, intel, even covert ops insertions/extractions. Some missions had goals which would change mid-stream, and many missions had multiple sequential objectives with refueling/rearming stops.

It had a slick graphical computer terminal type interface for mission briefing, pilot campaign management and intel. If you were forced to eject, you would whistle through the wind and adjust your body attitude to control your descent as you monitored your oxygen reserve and altitute, pulling your ripcord at the optimum time to slow your descent before you hit the ground while not hanging yourself up in high altitude too long. You also wanted to try and steer for land.. this was an important part of the game since survival and rescue meant you wouldn't have to start your campaign over.

: ).

There was one serious problem with the C64 version: extremely slow frame rates. I seem to remember 2-5 FPS, and this made it difficult. Just too much going on for the poor little Commodore.

One interesting thing I recall was that it was the only flight sim I've ever played which had a parachute simulation built in.

It had you flying a single engine mail plane from small town to small town in America, with the weight of your mail influencing the handling of your plane. the flying was pretty realistic and the most famous thing about it was the speech synthesis, in the form of flight control guiding you through the flying, telling you to pull up your flaps, etc. and taking you through your landing routine.