This was a dream come true after my time playing Time Gate.

Flying a real Sptfire against real Germans! The graphics were again almost non-existent, but the dynamics of the Spit' were great. It really was fully aerobatic and allowed you true barrels rolls and stall turns.

The cockpit was spilt into 2 screens. One for the out of cockpit view, which also included a rear view mirror ( which worked! ) the second for the control panel, which was still one of the most detailed panels I had seen in a sim.

The down side was there were only a couple of airfields to land at, but if you got lost you could land anywhere. The enemy only appeared in the shape ( ! ) of Me109's.

After much flying, I realised that I couldn't shoot the enemy in combat unless I was inverted!

This usually happened as you would always get "bounced" by the 109's, and the best way to avoid being shot down was to roll to the right and keep on rolling at full power. The 109 would eventually get pushed out in front, and when the killer shot came I always seemed to be upside down for some reason. You could keep a combat record if you wanted, but this never seemed to work correctly, so I never really got the chance to have a career on Spitfire '40 - when it was time to pack-up then your pilot was lost for good. You could choose between several ready made characters of different nationalities, English, Polish and French are ones that spring to mind.

There were also special missions that you could fly after completing a certain number of ops. These also never seemed to work. The only one I kept on getting was to overfly a secret weapon at low level as part of a test. Every time I flew over it the screen went blank and the computer reset!!

My finest hour on Spitfire '40 was one Saturday, I managed to equal the score of a real Spitfire pilot Wg.Cdr 'Paddy' Finucane ( 32 kills ) It took me most of the day to get there!. After that, I can't remember ever flying combat missions again, I just stuck to training flights doing aerobatics and circuits.