In 1991 I was immersed in Falcon 3.0. The incredibly vivid F-16 flight simulator. It was very similar. You really needed to learn aviation jargon, weapons and countermeasures capabilities and mission tactics.
I always looked forward to a future where Falcon 4.0's offspring were played on superfast PCs with incredible graphics. I was really annoyed when that genre of flight sims basically died off. The last I played was EF2000.
I’m of two minds on this. I loved the original Falcon on the Amiga (it actually talked! “Pull Up! Pull Up!”). I thought I wanted more and more realism. But at the same time I feel like all the sims lost their way trying to be too realistic. I was a huge avaiation buff as a kid. I loved flight sims. But it all stopped being fun when I had to learn so much just to play. It turns out ramming the afterburners and chasing down bad guys is a lot more fun when you don’t have to worry about scraping the engine on the runway on takeoff.
