I always enjoyed the box art and manuals of flight sims more than actually playing them. Some of those manuals were thick, encyclopedic, technical tomes that really made you feel like you were getting so much value for your money. Such good times reading those.
the manuals were even extra cool back then in context. like.. it'd likely be the only book in your house in 80s/90s that had so much military specs and info and diagrams and stuff. you couldn't just look up military airplanes on a whim from wikipedia
Oh the hours I put into Gunship and Project Stealth Fighter. Yeah, the Stealth Fighter game came out before anyone knew what the stealth fighter and bomber were going to look like.
I love how you give time and dedication to these tricky genres. Not many YTs cover this sort of content. Youre right, it takes an awful lot of time to do it properly. Thank you for putting your time in to give us these videos. Its a great modern digital museum you are creating.
Cheers thanks , yeah I've noticed nobody does videos in the C64 community about certain genres its always the easy ones over and over again ... There's plenty more out there if you put some effort into it 😀👍
Confession, I don't really like playing simulations but I watched your video and I was pleasantly surprised by The Dam Busters. I love history and the game mechanics together compel me to have a go. One thing I always found with these type of games was how slow the frame rates were. These days we can speed them up with emulators to make them more playable. Great video as always 👍
Just a little note, in WW2 the biggest warship "to set sail" wasn't the Bismark, but the Yamato, later to be surpassed by several modern aircraft carriers.
Now you're talking my business, so much more into sims and RPGs, as well as adventures, but that could be because I was one of the few British kids with a 1541, so I didn't have to deal with those genres on multiload tapes! The floppy drive was slow, but 1,000 times quicker than those multiload tapes!!! I would still like to see a video with all the C64 "one off's", like Alter Ego, Little Computer People, Kennedy Approach, and Sentry, etc. Games that wouldn't fit any of your "genre videos"!
Yeah a disk drive is essential for these games . Those one offs im gonna try do rapid fire reviews for cause they like you said dont fit in genres neatly. Unfortunately time is not on my side so i dont know when I'll ever get to them my lame real job wastes my fun youtube time 😂😂😂😂
@@BastichB64K It will need editing, answer one question as a kid, and the game reply, then one as a teenager, then one as an adult etc. That should give a flavour of the game?
You deserve the like, sub and comment for the hard work you put into this mate. You got me when you put up F15 Strike Eagle man. That was the one that made an impression, then Chuck Yeager made me feel like I was flying.
Awesome video... I had a lot of those games, and some that you had in background imagery too. Gunship and Harrier Combat Sim were my top players on the C128 I had.
Loved Dam Busters, F15 Eagle. With Gunship I discovered a way to get the congressional medal of honour every time. We had the original disk version for C64, it was a prized possession. Microprose promised a certificate for grecian of congressional Medal of honor. Difficult it was way back in the 80s to make a screenshot. you had to actually take s photo them have the film developed, snail mail from Ellisras in Limpopo to MicroProse in USA, and pray that the package reached the destination. Thirty-five years later and I still haven't received my Gunship certificate. We still live in this exact same address and goose we did 35 years ago!
Activision offered achievement patches for their Atari 2600 games. I had a hoodie that I would sew them on to. There was no bigger street cred in elementary and middle school in the mid-80s than those patches.
I can remember spending so much time on f15 strike eagle on pc. Also the janes simulators. So good. Thanks for the video man, very awesome. I must make a plan to check out the games mentioned in this video.
I liked Fighter Bomber a lot back in the days, since it was the first and only C64 simulator I knew that had external 3d views of the planes. The fps was unfortunately a bit low though. By the way, cool outro music for your video (C64ified Danger Zone).
Yeah I loved Fighter Bomber back in the day but revisiting it was a kinda disappointing especially after later playing the excellent PC version , still I had fun with it back then
First game I ever played on C64 was Flight 64, written in Basic and without much graphics, but controlling speed, altitude and trying to land without crashing was a fun challenge. Played it again recently.
Hmm, good list including some I didn't know about. The Dam Busters team made another one where you bomb the Bismarck?! Heck yeah, gotta check that out!! I spent a lot of time with Gunship, F-15 Strike Eagle, The Dam Busters and (trailing pretty distantly) Chuck Yeager's AFT. Also spent a good bit of time playing with/against friends in Mig Alley Ace and A.C.E. 1 and 2.
Yeah lots of great games , I didn't include Ace & Mig Alley in the main list because they were just too arcady and just had a sim look but I did play them quite a lot as well especially Ace 2 against friends
Man, my friend Chris had Chuck Yeager. The "That's a sorry way to land an airplane" screen would wear out its welcome after a while, but I always loved seeing the digitized picture of Chuck. I picked up F-16 Combat Pilot around the time Desert Storm happened. I still have it, but it's doing a weird thing now where the copy protection is asking to look up a page in the manual that doesn't exist. The game I have the best memories of is Project Stealth Fighter. My cousin Allen and I worked in the warehouse of a company run by our dads. I was actually too young to legally be working. Anyway, at the end of our shift, my cousin and I would go to his house all tired from a day's work, and he'd pop in Project Stealth Fighter. I was in charge of copy protection lookup. Good times! That was the summer I was saving up to get my own 1541-II so I could finally play disk games. One of the first two games I picked up was Skyfox. I loved Skyfox, but it wasn't a flight sim. I'd say it was more like a proto-Wing Commander. Maybe you could do a top ten on those types of games? Skyfox, Rescue on Fractalus, Infiltrator, Koronis Rift... these weren't sims but great games that really gave you the feeling of piloting some kind of craft. Dunno what you'd call 'em, but they might make for a good top ten.
I played F-15 a lot, in part because it was one of the few games I had at the time. As a flight sim, it's pretty bad, but there is a lot in there and the manual takes it very seriously. Play the game, read the manual, and you got a solid foundation for other flight sims. It did have some strange "features", like being able to shoot a missile, it would fly straight off, do a 180, come back and hit an enemy plane behind you. Also, the manual mentions 3 enemy planes, but in the game the all look the same... and nothing like any of those 3 shown in the manual! If you are bored, you can go to the max altitude, if you run out of fuel you can stay airborne by pulling the joystick up and keep hitting the afterburner key. When you only have a few games to play, you tend to discover these things.
I've been trying to figure out what flight sim I used to play on my C64 or Amiga 500. It had a keyboard overlay and you would take off and land on air craft carriers. You even had to worry about wing flaps when landing. Used to play that game hours at a time.
Aaaand again thanks BastichB. Back in the days I used to love Super Huey 1 & 2. As you said, not really realistic, but the feeling when ya got the engines to run and lift off was fantastic. The Bermuda Triangle with the UFOs scared me off as hell 🤣 Solo Flight was included in a games collection with Ushi Mata, Exploding Fist 2 and so on. For my taste it was way too slow. It felt like playing in slow-motion replay.
I had almost all of them and my main desire for the 64 was SubLogic Flight Simulator. Started taking flying lessons shortly thereafter after and went on to earn my Commercial CFI etc….My first flight instructor used to call me Captain Commodore lol
F-15 Strike Eagle - I used to play this quite a bit and I discovered an interesting bug. You could fly off the map displayed in the lower-left of the panel and your plane marker would continue moving over the various parts of the panel. If you flew over the text at the bottom of the screen, it would show up in the 3D view as ground targets that you could bomb. They didn't actually look like the text, they were all just triangles, and bombing them wouldn't remove the text from the screen, but hitting them would give you an explosion sound effect, just like any other target. Or maybe that was just in the cracked copy that I had. I haven't had the ambition to tst it with the copies now available. Project Stealth Fighter - As I recall, word had recently leaked out that the U.S. had created a stealth fighter plane, but nobody knew what it looked like. Someone created a hypothetical design and that became the defacto depiction of what the new plane was supposed to look like. There were model kits, toys, and this game. Of course when the real stealth "fighter" was revealed, it looked nothing like the fantasy design. Ironically, despite the name, the real stealth "fighter" is actually a bomber and had absolutely no air-to-air weapons of any type.
Yeah people have mentioned a couple bugs in that game not sure if it had anything to do with copy's or ntsc pal conversion or is in the original as i never experienced them
226 Likes! Man, I remember when your videos were stuck at 64 Likes. :D Awesome! :D ... I didn't know most of these flightsims. Back then, as a kid, flight sims on the c64 were too slow for me. Great to see what was available back then! Thank you! I think I remember player Super Huey, at least the weird cockpit looks familiar. What I'm missing here is SkyFox 2, but I guess that one doesn't really count as flight sim anyway. :D
To be honest I dont even remember , i did that video a while ago , i mostly use C64 tracks I know but sometimes i use ones like that which I'd never heard before
I was surprised by a couple of the entries at the bottom of the chart there, although I haven't played much Night Raider (by Gremlin Graphics). For me, I would put Gunship on top as I enjoyed it more than Stealth Fighter. One of my proudest moments in Gunship was managing to land a heavily damaged helicopter by performing the risky autorotation (disengaging the engines, diving towards the ground and then raising the collective pitch rapidly). Done right, you can generate enough lift to make a (safer) landing. I was awarded the Purple Heart!
You got the top two right for sure, but I would flip the order. If you're looking at how Flight Simmy a game is, I think you have to give the edge to the game that simulated an actual aircraft (AH-64) instead of one made up by the game designers (F-19.) If you are looking at which one is the best *game*, I think it's neck and neck, but best *sim* has to go to Gunship (best intro music hands down goes to F-19 though, maybe my favorite on the system.) I think Gunship and F-19 were head and shoulders above the rest of the games on this list. They contained the basic building blocks on which flight sims were built. They have all the elements, the graphics seem crude today but by the standard of the time they were pretty amazing, and they represented a full 360 degree environment with terrain, features, and threats. More importantly they both worked. They gave some semblance of flying the aircraft they represented, and the combat systems were well balanced. Neither are particularly realistic. The damage models were laughably forgiving for instance, but they provided a very rough simulation that gave you a sense of flying. The fact that Gunship restricted you to a realistic combat loadout for an AH-64, was a pretty important innovation in sims. It allowed computer flight sims to move away from arcade style games, and towards accurately depicting aircraft. Honestly, it's a wonder those two games were ever made, or were able to run on the C-64 at all. Both games also had really excellent sequels for later systems in Gunship 2000, and F-117 Stealth Fighter. Like the originals, the sequels shared a graphics engine. A bit of unusual continuity in the early flight sim world.
what was the f19 shape from? gi joe, this and theres some model kit etc - where did they pull the similar shape from? as it's not like a real airplane, so someone had to just make up the shape, but who/when?
Not sure the real stealth bomber wasn't out when the game launched so they just had to guess ... It does look like the Firefox plane from the Clint Eastwood movie
It's from the massively popular 1986 Testor F-19 model airplane, which inspired a lot of F-19 or F-19-alikes (such as G.I. Joe's X-19 Phantom). But even before that, there were a lot of artists impressions of stealth fighters. You could see a lot of them in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines and such, from the time. Generally, these artists impressions were loosely based on the SR-71, the only publicly known stealth aircraft. Note that the Lockheed YF-12 was revealed to the public before the SR-71, giving the false impression that this stealth fighter version came first. (In reality, the top secret reconnaissance version was developed first, and the YF-12 based on it.) You can see the SR-71 inspiration in the Testor F-19 - from the curved outline to the inward canted rudders. Canards were trendy at the time, especially because of the HiMAT experimental vehicle. The elimination of the SR-71's cylindrical engine pods in favor of something melded into the body was commonly speculated in stealth fighter artists impressions, as an obvious idea to try and improve radar stealth.
I mostly played Solo Flight I had the game original on tape. Didn't have many original games honestly but found fun game at the time now not so much. Don't have it anymore but a few years ago I tried it but now I can play it even less :-) Nostalgic reason to start it once though and yes i love the box.
I've addressed this question many times in my Vlog series , a top 10 graphic text adventure video will be made at some point a plain text adventure one wont .
Any game where you escape from a monster could technically be considered survival horror the difference is Project Firestarter literally has all the tropes that are still seen in the genre to this day
@@BastichB64K I think that Aliens: The Computer Game, by Electric Dreams, is an earlier example of survival horror on the Commodore C64, but this is just semantics now.
In April 2023 - which is last month - I bought SOLO FLIGHT (the 1983 Edition) for my Commodore 64 as a tape version (loose) from a local flea market in Koivukylä, Vantaa (Finland 🇫🇮). And it only cost 2€ 😹👍🕹️.
Bismarck definitely was not the biggest or most powerful warship ever. Remember it was dubbed the 'pocket battleship.' Meaning it was a deadly combo of big guns in a moderate package for a battleship. Its mission was to wage terror on British merchant shipping and any escorts it faced would be severely outgunned. Only one or two dedicated British battleships would be a match against the Bismarck. But it was intended as a convoy raider, not to fight the big British battleships.
I enjoyed Project Stealth Fighter on the C64 more than F-19 Stealth Fighter that I later played on the Amiga. The upgrade was really a downgrade in realism when it came to stealth. In the C64 version, the aircraft could fly a high profile and remain stealthy just like the real jet. In the later versions, the radar signature increased with altitude. Every mission had to be flown down on the deck. I agree with the 1 and 2 in this video completely. I spent a ton of time on both games.
What? No Rescue on Fractalus? Well, sure, that's a "space game", and quite more "arcade" than many of the more serious games mentioned, but I'd argue it's still a "flight simulator", since all actual player controllable flight happens on a planet, rather than in open space.
Your accent is strange to me, where you from mate? Anyway as a fan of modern flight sims (XPlane, MSFS) this was enjoyable. I had a flight sim (some jet thing) for Amiga but I was too young to wrap my head around it.
Hah.... in modern flight sims I like to use a internet thing called FS Economy, you fly passengers and cargo and stuff for money, it's like being an actual commercial pilot. Sounds like Solo Flight.
Gunship my favourite - still play it Solo Flight biggest disappointment for me. Loved the look of the graphics on the back of the box, but when it loaded up to play, the dashboard was the alternative version - way worse. So never really played it. Still got it in the box in mint condition cos I never used it.
Very well made Video. I decided to check this out because I have an old Commodore 64C Test Pilot that I was never able to opened as a child. 🦨Grounded often. By the time I saw the light of day Sega was being released. I just had to see what I was missing. Now I know. I was always drawn to simulators. I loved Sega's F-22 Interceptor, and M1 Abrams Battle Tank, while my friends all wanted to take a sledgehammer to both, so I would have loved these nightmares even if permanently scarred by them .🤟😹 Seeing this makes me appreciate even older war games like Playstation 1, Warhawk, and P.C./P.S.4 Planetside 2.
@@BastichB64K Right? That was pretty much what I had to say and do. I still have it too. Eeeevery blue moon I will pull it out and play it on my Nomad... Which should REALLY be behind glass somewhere. I owe my skill in advance simulators to Christ and that game. Remember how your plane used to tell you to "Breaaak..." in order to evade something, as if it were a polite suggestion while sipping tea, instead of a life or death decision? Where did priceless quirks like that go?😹
I always enjoyed the box art and manuals of flight sims more than actually playing them. Some of those manuals were thick, encyclopedic, technical tomes that really made you feel like you were getting so much value for your money. Such good times reading those.
I learnt so much about military vehicles from them , planes , warships and submarines ... So cool 👍
So true! Do you still have them?
@@lutfimakarim8258 None of my originals, unfortunately. I have the PDF's for most though, which I enjoy skimming through every now and then.
the manuals were even extra cool back then in context.
like.. it'd likely be the only book in your house in 80s/90s that had so much military specs and info and diagrams and stuff. you couldn't just look up military airplanes on a whim from wikipedia
@@lasskinn474 yeah so true 👍👍
Gunship! was awesome back in the day. Played it a lot!
Yeah fantastic game
Oh the hours I put into Gunship and Project Stealth Fighter. Yeah, the Stealth Fighter game came out before anyone knew what the stealth fighter and bomber were going to look like.
Good times always with Microprose
For me it started on the 2kb Sinclair. Went to the Apple 2, C64 and Amiga 500. Today I'm an airline Captain, never forgetting what's behind
Nice 🕹️👍👍👍
So you´re living the dream?
Yes. Joining Avion Express now
I love how you give time and dedication to these tricky genres. Not many YTs cover this sort of content. Youre right, it takes an awful lot of time to do it properly. Thank you for putting your time in to give us these videos. Its a great modern digital museum you are creating.
Cheers thanks , yeah I've noticed nobody does videos in the C64 community about certain genres its always the easy ones over and over again ... There's plenty more out there if you put some effort into it 😀👍
Confession, I don't really like playing simulations but I watched your video and I was pleasantly surprised by The Dam Busters. I love history and the game mechanics together compel me to have a go.
One thing I always found with these type of games was how slow the frame rates were. These days we can speed them up with emulators to make them more playable.
Great video as always 👍
Cheers for watching , the Dambusters is a easy and fun sim to play , glad you giving it a go 🕹️👍👍👍
Just a little note, in WW2 the biggest warship "to set sail" wasn't the Bismark, but the Yamato, later to be surpassed by several modern aircraft carriers.
I simply meant the first to set sail , Bismarck in 1939 and Yamato in 1940 thats all . Thx for watching
@@BastichB64K I see, my apologies then. Keep making those great vids! Thanks.
Now you're talking my business, so much more into sims and RPGs, as well as adventures, but that could be because I was one of the few British kids with a 1541, so I didn't have to deal with those genres on multiload tapes! The floppy drive was slow, but 1,000 times quicker than those multiload tapes!!! I would still like to see a video with all the C64 "one off's", like Alter Ego, Little Computer People, Kennedy Approach, and Sentry, etc. Games that wouldn't fit any of your "genre videos"!
Yeah a disk drive is essential for these games . Those one offs im gonna try do rapid fire reviews for cause they like you said dont fit in genres neatly. Unfortunately time is not on my side so i dont know when I'll ever get to them my lame real job wastes my fun youtube time 😂😂😂😂
@@BastichB64K As long as you get to them. I think will attract views, as there are no video's on TH-cam of these one-off titles!
@@gamingtonight1526 Alter Ego is great but gonna be difficult to translate into a video due to its been 90% text based
@@BastichB64K It will need editing, answer one question as a kid, and the game reply, then one as a teenager, then one as an adult etc. That should give a flavour of the game?
@@gamingtonight1526 not a bad idea , I'll gave to think on it 👍👍
I LOVED Spitfire Ace when I was a kid. Still play it now.
Thank you so much for making these videos, every time I watch them I get at least three or four games to add to my collection.
No probs glad you found some new games
Chuck Yeager’s AFT was so much fun and I agree that when F-19 Stealth Fighter came out for PC that was incredible!
Great games that never get any respect
You deserve the like, sub and comment for the hard work you put into this mate. You got me when you put up F15 Strike Eagle man. That was the one that made an impression, then Chuck Yeager made me feel like I was flying.
Thanks a lot , It was real difficult to make but im glad you liked it
Awesome video... I had a lot of those games, and some that you had in background imagery too. Gunship and Harrier Combat Sim were my top players on the C128 I had.
Nice , Gunship was gold 🕹️👍
Loved Dam Busters, F15 Eagle.
With Gunship I discovered a way to get the congressional medal of honour every time. We had the original disk version for C64, it was a prized possession. Microprose promised a certificate for grecian of congressional Medal of honor. Difficult it was way back in the 80s to make a screenshot. you had to actually take s photo them have the film developed, snail mail from Ellisras in Limpopo to MicroProse in USA, and pray that the package reached the destination. Thirty-five years later and I still haven't received my Gunship certificate. We still live in this exact same address and goose we did 35 years ago!
😂😂👍 damn Microprose they owe you that certificate, i remember getting the medal but i had a bootleg version so didnt know about that certificate
Activision offered achievement patches for their Atari 2600 games. I had a hoodie that I would sew them on to. There was no bigger street cred in elementary and middle school in the mid-80s than those patches.
Gunship forever 💯 and I still love the engine management of Ace of Aces, that was immersion of the good one. Great video, thanks! 🤘
Great games love em and thank you for watching
I can remember spending so much time on f15 strike eagle on pc. Also the janes simulators. So good. Thanks for the video man, very awesome. I must make a plan to check out the games mentioned in this video.
Yeah these games were real time suckers 🤣👍
Your channel is a delight. I owned Gunship and have the most fond memories of that one personally.
Nice and thank you for watching , cheers
Man , I love your channel! Every time I see the Microprose logo, I go crazy!
Thx dude and yeah Microprose were kings 😎👍
I liked Fighter Bomber a lot back in the days, since it was the first and only C64 simulator I knew that had external 3d views of the planes. The fps was unfortunately a bit low though. By the way, cool outro music for your video (C64ified Danger Zone).
Yeah I loved Fighter Bomber back in the day but revisiting it was a kinda disappointing especially after later playing the excellent PC version , still I had fun with it back then
Fantastic. Thanks for this gaming overview of the highest fliers.
Cheers✅ thx for watching
Excellent video. My number 1 C64 game is your number 1 flight simulator. Nice one.
I miss those manuals 😢
Excellent game ! Yeah you gotta love those old Microprose manuals
First game I ever played on C64 was Flight 64, written in Basic and without much graphics, but controlling speed, altitude and trying to land without crashing was a fun challenge. Played it again recently.
Never ever played that as far as i remember anyway
Another fantastic video BastichB, I wish I had time to watch them all
Thanks for watching 😀👍👍
Hmm, good list including some I didn't know about. The Dam Busters team made another one where you bomb the Bismarck?! Heck yeah, gotta check that out!! I spent a lot of time with Gunship, F-15 Strike Eagle, The Dam Busters and (trailing pretty distantly) Chuck Yeager's AFT. Also spent a good bit of time playing with/against friends in Mig Alley Ace and A.C.E. 1 and 2.
Yeah lots of great games , I didn't include Ace & Mig Alley in the main list because they were just too arcady and just had a sim look but I did play them quite a lot as well especially Ace 2 against friends
loved solo flight and chuck yeager - fantastic video again and great memories
Cheers thx for watching
Man, my friend Chris had Chuck Yeager. The "That's a sorry way to land an airplane" screen would wear out its welcome after a while, but I always loved seeing the digitized picture of Chuck. I picked up F-16 Combat Pilot around the time Desert Storm happened. I still have it, but it's doing a weird thing now where the copy protection is asking to look up a page in the manual that doesn't exist. The game I have the best memories of is Project Stealth Fighter. My cousin Allen and I worked in the warehouse of a company run by our dads. I was actually too young to legally be working. Anyway, at the end of our shift, my cousin and I would go to his house all tired from a day's work, and he'd pop in Project Stealth Fighter. I was in charge of copy protection lookup. Good times!
That was the summer I was saving up to get my own 1541-II so I could finally play disk games. One of the first two games I picked up was Skyfox. I loved Skyfox, but it wasn't a flight sim. I'd say it was more like a proto-Wing Commander. Maybe you could do a top ten on those types of games? Skyfox, Rescue on Fractalus, Infiltrator, Koronis Rift... these weren't sims but great games that really gave you the feeling of piloting some kind of craft. Dunno what you'd call 'em, but they might make for a good top ten.
Yeah not even sure what you'd call em , probably do rapid fire reviews for most those as ive already done Infiltrator
I played F-15 a lot, in part because it was one of the few games I had at the time. As a flight sim, it's pretty bad, but there is a lot in there and the manual takes it very seriously. Play the game, read the manual, and you got a solid foundation for other flight sims. It did have some strange "features", like being able to shoot a missile, it would fly straight off, do a 180, come back and hit an enemy plane behind you. Also, the manual mentions 3 enemy planes, but in the game the all look the same... and nothing like any of those 3 shown in the manual!
If you are bored, you can go to the max altitude, if you run out of fuel you can stay airborne by pulling the joystick up and keep hitting the afterburner key. When you only have a few games to play, you tend to discover these things.
The TH-cam-Legend delivered once more!
😂👍 cheers
I've been trying to figure out what flight sim I used to play on my C64 or Amiga 500. It had a keyboard overlay and you would take off and land on air craft carriers. You even had to worry about wing flaps when landing. Used to play that game hours at a time.
Sounds like FA 18 Interceptor on the Amiga
Aaaand again thanks BastichB. Back in the days I used to love Super Huey 1 & 2. As you said, not really realistic, but the feeling when ya got the engines to run and lift off was fantastic. The Bermuda Triangle with the UFOs scared me off as hell 🤣 Solo Flight was included in a games collection with Ushi Mata, Exploding Fist 2 and so on. For my taste it was way too slow. It felt like playing in slow-motion replay.
Yeah the Huey games were still quite fun , thx for watching
I had almost all of them and my main desire for the 64 was SubLogic Flight Simulator. Started taking flying lessons shortly thereafter after and went on to earn my Commercial CFI etc….My first flight instructor used to call me Captain Commodore lol
Thats pretty cool 😂👍
Now this is right up my alley 👍👍✈✈
Flight Simulator 2 should've been that list IMO - I spent so many hours in that sim.
Enjoy 🕹️👍
F-15 Strike Eagle - I used to play this quite a bit and I discovered an interesting bug. You could fly off the map displayed in the lower-left of the panel and your plane marker would continue moving over the various parts of the panel. If you flew over the text at the bottom of the screen, it would show up in the 3D view as ground targets that you could bomb. They didn't actually look like the text, they were all just triangles, and bombing them wouldn't remove the text from the screen, but hitting them would give you an explosion sound effect, just like any other target. Or maybe that was just in the cracked copy that I had. I haven't had the ambition to tst it with the copies now available.
Project Stealth Fighter - As I recall, word had recently leaked out that the U.S. had created a stealth fighter plane, but nobody knew what it looked like. Someone created a hypothetical design and that became the defacto depiction of what the new plane was supposed to look like. There were model kits, toys, and this game. Of course when the real stealth "fighter" was revealed, it looked nothing like the fantasy design. Ironically, despite the name, the real stealth "fighter" is actually a bomber and had absolutely no air-to-air weapons of any type.
Yeah people have mentioned a couple bugs in that game not sure if it had anything to do with copy's or ntsc pal conversion or is in the original as i never experienced them
Spot on top ten . Forgot how long it took to play these games back in the day . Ahh youth was bliss
Thx , yeah thats why i been delaying this video for years i needed a chunk of time just to replay them nevermind make the video 😂😂
@@BastichB64K faultless presentation again . Now to watch another 30 minutes of the arcade episode 🕹️🤭
@@rusty8ucket thx dude 😎👍
14:36 BastichB throwing shade?! Unprecedented but well deserved in this case :)
😂 if you go back and read old Zzap reviews theres a ton of dodgyness going on there
First C-64 game I ever bought for myself was Jet Combat Simulator. Lot of fun.
226 Likes! Man, I remember when your videos were stuck at 64 Likes. :D Awesome! :D ... I didn't know most of these flightsims. Back then, as a kid, flight sims on the c64 were too slow for me. Great to see what was available back then! Thank you! I think I remember player Super Huey, at least the weird cockpit looks familiar. What I'm missing here is SkyFox 2, but I guess that one doesn't really count as flight sim anyway. :D
Cheers for watching , yeah the skyfox games are more shooters than flight sim and i was sticking with real aircraft here
13:06 Impressive when i didn't even know the meaning of fps frames per second 😂 in 1987.
What music is playing during the honorable mentions part? I can remember this from a c64 game but can't quite put my finger on it.
To be honest I dont even remember , i did that video a while ago , i mostly use C64 tracks I know but sometimes i use ones like that which I'd never heard before
What an awesome video!!! Thank you bashb
Cheers thx for watching
The Grumman avenger didn’t come into service until 1942 well after the Bismarck sunk. It was actually sunk by outdated swordfish biplanes
I was surprised by a couple of the entries at the bottom of the chart there, although I haven't played much Night Raider (by Gremlin Graphics). For me, I would put Gunship on top as I enjoyed it more than Stealth Fighter. One of my proudest moments in Gunship was managing to land a heavily damaged helicopter by performing the risky autorotation (disengaging the engines, diving towards the ground and then raising the collective pitch rapidly). Done right, you can generate enough lift to make a (safer) landing. I was awarded the Purple Heart!
Nice ! Those Microprose sims were really something else , so much depth if you were willing to spend the time
You got the top two right for sure, but I would flip the order. If you're looking at how Flight Simmy a game is, I think you have to give the edge to the game that simulated an actual aircraft (AH-64) instead of one made up by the game designers (F-19.) If you are looking at which one is the best *game*, I think it's neck and neck, but best *sim* has to go to Gunship (best intro music hands down goes to F-19 though, maybe my favorite on the system.) I think Gunship and F-19 were head and shoulders above the rest of the games on this list. They contained the basic building blocks on which flight sims were built. They have all the elements, the graphics seem crude today but by the standard of the time they were pretty amazing, and they represented a full 360 degree environment with terrain, features, and threats. More importantly they both worked. They gave some semblance of flying the aircraft they represented, and the combat systems were well balanced. Neither are particularly realistic. The damage models were laughably forgiving for instance, but they provided a very rough simulation that gave you a sense of flying. The fact that Gunship restricted you to a realistic combat loadout for an AH-64, was a pretty important innovation in sims. It allowed computer flight sims to move away from arcade style games, and towards accurately depicting aircraft. Honestly, it's a wonder those two games were ever made, or were able to run on the C-64 at all. Both games also had really excellent sequels for later systems in Gunship 2000, and F-117 Stealth Fighter. Like the originals, the sequels shared a graphics engine. A bit of unusual continuity in the early flight sim world.
The order is almost irrelevant, these are just my fav 10 . Thanks for watching and info in your comment 👍👍
great video as always never got into Flight Simulator Games but they look good.
Its a specific genre but well worth the investment if you have the time🕹️
what was the f19 shape from? gi joe, this and theres some model kit etc - where did they pull the similar shape from? as it's not like a real airplane, so someone had to just make up the shape, but who/when?
Not sure the real stealth bomber wasn't out when the game launched so they just had to guess ... It does look like the Firefox plane from the Clint Eastwood movie
It's from the massively popular 1986 Testor F-19 model airplane, which inspired a lot of F-19 or F-19-alikes (such as G.I. Joe's X-19 Phantom).
But even before that, there were a lot of artists impressions of stealth fighters. You could see a lot of them in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines and such, from the time.
Generally, these artists impressions were loosely based on the SR-71, the only publicly known stealth aircraft. Note that the Lockheed YF-12 was revealed to the public before the SR-71, giving the false impression that this stealth fighter version came first. (In reality, the top secret reconnaissance version was developed first, and the YF-12 based on it.)
You can see the SR-71 inspiration in the Testor F-19 - from the curved outline to the inward canted rudders. Canards were trendy at the time, especially because of the HiMAT experimental vehicle. The elimination of the SR-71's cylindrical engine pods in favor of something melded into the body was commonly speculated in stealth fighter artists impressions, as an obvious idea to try and improve radar stealth.
You can always insert some disagreement into a top 10 list, but this #1 spot is SOLID.
Yeah its simple my fav nothing more nothing less 😀👍
MICROPROSE!!!! Loved those guys!
They were kings of the genre
Syndey also developed the classic BC Quest for Tires
Yeah , i loved that 👍
Sublogic Flight Simulator II??
My two favorite flying games were Skyfox and Descent. Skyfox for C64 and Descent for MS-DOS.
Skyfox was quite good , Decent used to get me so confused and disoriented but it was an impressive game for the time .
I had F-16 Combat Pilot on the Amstrad 6128...It was a very good Flight Sim in its day..
Yeah i played that a lot on my C64 , flight sims were so big back then
Excellent video
Cheers thank you
Solo flight had my jaw growing to the floor when i first saw it.
Yeah us too ... Do much time spent on it
I mostly played Solo Flight I had the game original on tape.
Didn't have many original games honestly but found fun game at the time now not so much.
Don't have it anymore but a few years ago I tried it but now I can play it even less :-)
Nostalgic reason to start it once though and yes i love the box.
Yeah i also got the cassette version , had it on disk in the 80's
Can you do a top ten graphical adventure games or top 10 text adventure games?
I've addressed this question many times in my Vlog series , a top 10 graphic text adventure video will be made at some point a plain text adventure one wont .
@BastichB64K too bad I haven't figured out how to build an agi engine into the c64 yet. One day...
Come on @@BastichB64K! I know you really want to make a series on the top adventure games for the c64
@@Willz2006jw if this was my real job it would have happened already
@@BastichB64K thanks for all you have done so far. You rock!
Some claim that the original "survival horror" game was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81.
Any game where you escape from a monster could technically be considered survival horror the difference is Project Firestarter literally has all the tropes that are still seen in the genre to this day
@@BastichB64K So it wasn't the original survival horror game as per your claim?
@@shaunbebbington6411 what ?! Thats not what i just said 😑😑 read it again
@@BastichB64K I think that Aliens: The Computer Game, by Electric Dreams, is an earlier example of survival horror on the Commodore C64, but this is just semantics now.
We need some of these in GOG.
What flight sims have uk map?
Flight Simulator II , I believe had an expansion disk for european locations including England
In April 2023 - which is last month -
I bought SOLO FLIGHT (the 1983 Edition) for my Commodore 64 as a tape version (loose) from a local flea market in Koivukylä, Vantaa (Finland 🇫🇮).
And it only cost 2€ 😹👍🕹️.
Now thats a deal , excellent game
I like the cut of this man's jib.
No idea what that means 🤣
I loved all of these games
There were some great flight sims on the old C64
Had them all. flightsims were my fav games
They were awesome 👍👍
Bismarck definitely was not the biggest or most powerful warship ever.
Remember it was dubbed the 'pocket battleship.'
Meaning it was a deadly combo of big guns in a moderate package for a battleship.
Its mission was to wage terror on British merchant shipping and any escorts it faced would be severely outgunned.
Only one or two dedicated British battleships would be a match against the Bismarck.
But it was intended as a convoy raider, not to fight the big British battleships.
Sure
Hellcat Ace. No Jet?
Nope , not a fan . Its simply my favs
I enjoyed Project Stealth Fighter on the C64 more than F-19 Stealth Fighter that I later played on the Amiga. The upgrade was really a downgrade in realism when it came to stealth. In the C64 version, the aircraft could fly a high profile and remain stealthy just like the real jet. In the later versions, the radar signature increased with altitude. Every mission had to be flown down on the deck. I agree with the 1 and 2 in this video completely. I spent a ton of time on both games.
Cheers thanks for watching , I also enjoyed these C64 versions over the Amiga ones ... They just felt more realistic
F-19 Stealth Fighter and Gunship CMOH Pilot, Salute ;)
😀👍👍
What? No Rescue on Fractalus?
Well, sure, that's a "space game", and quite more "arcade" than many of the more serious games mentioned, but I'd argue it's still a "flight simulator", since all actual player controllable flight happens on a planet, rather than in open space.
Not really a flight sim , sticking to real aircraft here not sci-fi and Ive already got a full video dedicated to it 👍
Your accent is strange to me, where you from mate? Anyway as a fan of modern flight sims (XPlane, MSFS) this was enjoyable. I had a flight sim (some jet thing) for Amiga but I was too young to wrap my head around it.
(Your channel page says you're in Canada, but you know what I mean. 😀)
Hah.... in modern flight sims I like to use a internet thing called FS Economy, you fly passengers and cargo and stuff for money, it's like being an actual commercial pilot. Sounds like Solo Flight.
I think the flight sim I had on Amiga was F-15 Strike Eagle II.
Probably got the idea from that
Originally from South Africa
Gunship my favourite - still play it
Solo Flight biggest disappointment for me.
Loved the look of the graphics on the back of the box, but when it loaded up to play, the dashboard was the alternative version - way worse. So never really played it. Still got it in the box in mint condition cos I never used it.
Gunship is top notch , Solo flight was pretty cool its not for everyone like most these games 👍
With a friend I played Ace 2. As a 2 player game that was a lot of fun. As a Single player game it was mediocre
I agree 👍
Super Huey!
I was going to ask where the hell is Silent Service, then I remembered that was a naval combat sim, not a flight sim....
*facepalm
😂 check out my Naval Simulations Top 10 for thar gem 🕹️👍
Very well made Video. I decided to check this out because I have an old Commodore 64C Test Pilot that I was never able to opened as a child. 🦨Grounded often. By the time I saw the light of day Sega was being released. I just had to see what I was missing. Now I know. I was always drawn to simulators. I loved Sega's F-22 Interceptor, and M1 Abrams Battle Tank, while my friends all wanted to take a sledgehammer to both, so I would have loved these nightmares even if permanently scarred by them .🤟😹 Seeing this makes me appreciate even older war games like Playstation 1, Warhawk, and P.C./P.S.4 Planetside 2.
Forget your friends , F-22 on the Mega Drive rocked ! What a cool game 😀👍
@@BastichB64K Right? That was pretty much what I had to say and do. I still have it too. Eeeevery blue moon I will pull it out and play it on my Nomad... Which should REALLY be behind glass somewhere. I owe my skill in advance simulators to Christ and that game. Remember how your plane used to tell you to "Breaaak..." in order to evade something, as if it were a polite suggestion while sipping tea, instead of a life or death decision? Where did priceless quirks like that go?😹
@@Anthropomorph 🤣 i got a massive documentary coming out in a few months that features that game so look out for it 🕹️👍
@@BastichB64K I am looking forward to it!🤘😸