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I'd try this: http://www.hitechcreations.com/frindex.html

It's an online air combat game where you can use more wrist motion with a joystick, and less motion with your fingers and a controller. There are thousands of subscribers from throughout the world, and it's free for the 1st 2 weeks so you can see how you like it.

Good luck with your search and don't let the bastards here get you down.

From someone much older than you with a set of bad hands, too...

Ok, there are lots of titles like this out already (I'm looking at you LucasArts & EA). Whatever happend to good flight sims with real physics and realistic combat problems (i.e. can't engauge enemy because if you do you won't have enough fuel to make it home).

It's out there, and it's called Aces High. It is "massively" multiplayer though, I don't know of any single player games like that.

Wouldn't it be more fun to learn how a real WWII plane handled and what all the instruments did and get closer to the real experience?

No.

Longer answer: Most of us just want to blow stuff up. Simulated gun jamming is not all that fun when you're trying to make the bad guys erupt into fireballs. If there were a substantial market for the game you describe, it would exist (and for multiplayer, it does.)

Real world training can transfer to gaming to a certain extent, but there are considerations required for gaming that can't be gotten from real life experience. The user interface, small/distorted viewport looking through the monitor, and network transmission lag time all require game-specific reflexes and skills. For that reason, gaming skills don't transfer too well to real life either. The reflexes and priorities are simply tuned wrong.

I will say that a flight-sim gamer would do a lot better in a real aircraft than someone with no experience at all. But a real life fighter pilot is going to romp all over a gaming "ace" simply due to the depth of real life considerations that he's learned to deal with, such as the demanding physical environment. As with anything, some people are "naturals" and for these few people, flightsims are just another dynamic experience that will transfer to anything they do, from flying to playing golf. But for most people, there is no substitute for actual flight time.

The best book I can think of for a gaming simmer is Robert Shaw's "Figher Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering". I think it's still in limited print, otherwise you should be able to easily find a used copy on Amazon or wherever. It's a bit dated where it comes to modern jet combat, but if you can handle the level of detail it's probably the best introduction to aerial combat you'll find anywhere outside of a secure military location. The list of sources is worth just as much as the book itself, and if I recall correctly (I read Shaw's book at around age 14 in high school) you could probably find enough reading material referenced in this one book to keep you busy for a couple of years.

If you want to get really "good at flight sims", check out Aces High 2 at http://www.hitechcreations.com/ You won't find a better place to improve flightsim skills against real opponents than in the AH arenas. Yea there's a monthly fee to use the full arenas, but their head 2 head arenas and software are free if you just want to check it out without subscribing.

For those of you who didn't read the article, here's some of the interesting points:

A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project.
First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online, or even the science-fiction combat game planetside, while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.

Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?

Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,

To me the question is really one of first sale. Many EULAs used to say that you could transfer ownership of the software provided that you transferred or destroyed the manual and all copies of the software. My understanding is that this is the same way that any copyrighted media is transferred? Isn't that therefore a reasonable expectation for any software? Thus you should have the right to use the software transferred.

Personally, I wouldn't buy into any MMORPG that requires that I actually pay for the client to begin with. I played the beta of Shattered Galaxies and was doing quite well when it ended and they decided to charge for the client. I haven't ever looked back. Some games do have a free client; For instance, Aces High. Games cost about $50, and subscriptions are usually $15. At the very least, you should get a free three-month subscription when you buy the game.

Aces High

I also spend a few hours a week flying WWII combat sims, specifically Aces High. In addition, I spend a little time flying FS2K2 simply because it's different. Rather than focus on fighting, with FS I enjoy other challenges, navigation, route-finding, etc.

The newer versions of FS all have a very nice GPS simulator, but I really try not to use it. Navigation via VOR and/or NDB is much more challenging.

Believe it or not, there is a game out there that charges more: up to $24.95!

I love MMO flight sims like the next guy (eg., Aces High, WWIIOL), but uhh - that is going a bit too far.

I base this on the fact that NTSC television runs at only 30 fps, and nobody complains that NTSC video is too "jerky." I suspect you get fast-diminishing returns when you raise the frame rate above 30.

A quite realistic WWII flightsimulator called Aces High could suite you. It is free to download from the internet and allows free 8 player head to head ( the last I checked it out anyway ). The only downside I can think is that it requires a joystick to fly and is Microsoft Windows only.

// ville

Shit... didn't close the link. It's Aces High.

Don't forget the Atari 2600. You have to be really really old to not remember that.

When older geeks do go gaming, it seems to me that they (self included) spend more time with military simulations than any other genre. If you're looking for the "over 30" set, look to combat flight sims like Aces High or WarBirds.

FPS are fun, but after a while, they all seem to be the same. Sure, there are different guns and different maps but the objective is almost always simply one thing, kill the enemy and collect frags. CTF and UT Assault are the obvious exceptions.