There was a time when realism in a sim was all that mattered to me. Now I'm simply at the point where that's not good enough. I want to have my fun with my realism too. Yes, there are those who are totally into nothing but the realism, but the number of those kinds of pilots are fewer and fewer. The genre is not being sufficiently reinfused with enough replacement pilots while crotchety old bastards such as myself give up on them.

The result is a smaller target market wants made the most expensive game type of game known. Not gonna happen (The best we can hope for are some sims coming out in very few numbers over longer periods of time, sort of like where we're at now).

Anyway, my point was sims were more popular when they were more fun (and easier) to fly. In their quest to become more realistic, less and less people stuck with it. Why did this happen? Because the loud and vocal minority was heard over the roar of silence from the casual gamer.

(Oh, the flight model in IL-2 is pretty easy to fly...it's just damn hard to shoot stuff down once you've lined them up <g>. At least that's how it was with the Beta I flew)

Gordon Berg