What is your favorite Combat Flight Sim?

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

Eh. Glad to see at least somebody has had a good experience. Might as well try it again. I would recommend to you Birdds of Steel, or the pc version of the game,World of Planes. In it, you can play as British,American,Russian,Australian,German,Italian ,or Japanese. You can add 2 emblems on any part of your aircraft, select loadout realism and much more. You receive missions like combat air patrol, ground attack, head to head dogfight, tank bombing, city bombing, escort missions, and 2 main campaigns with 14 different dynamic campaigns. Here is the website:http://birdsofsteel.com/ I've got the Xbox 360 version of the game!

I think that's a very cool online game, but TBH I would be VERY careful about calling it a simulation. I'm actually curious to try it, but I really wouldn't expect it to be a vehicular simulator in any strict sense. It's built for having fast fun in a diverse, cool-looking online environment, it's not built for recreating the exact systems, controls, missions, weapons, tactics, etc. etc.

The key mark of a simulator is realism, i.e. how well it recreates "what really happened" or "being there". On that point, BoB II may not be the most fun, challenging or good-looking - but it's really as close as anyone so far has got to recreating that conflict in a game. Personally I'm not really hung up on realism or anything, but I think there's a real difference between true simulators, sim-lite, and flight games. They might share the subject (flying airplanes) in common, but the actual gameplay and appeal of these games couldn't be more different from each other.