Hasse Wind

No, I didn't know that. Fascinating. Thanks for enlightening me.

This is an important point. A great FM and DM is not enough to make a great single player experience. You need much more than that for a career mode to feel truly realistic and immersive. If there's no decent campaign system, the sim is really suitable mostly for MP, or the occasional quick battle.

Maybe they had a singing fat lady accompanying the orchestra that played when silent films were shown? Anyway, some great silent films were made during the Weimar years. Two of my favourites are Murnau's Nosferatu and Lang's Metropolis.

Hey, that profile makes the Fee look almost beautiful! Definitely great work.

Reminds me of Wagner and the singing fat lady.

I think the main problem in the US is the huge size of the country. It's a lot easier to build networks in most European countries, even in more remote areas, because the distances are usually shorter. That being said, at least in Finland some areas are so utterly remote that they have no access to almost any kind of web.

And puts some handcuffs on you.

Bullethead, while you were lying in a drunken stupor in the corner of the mess hall, I remember Winder mentioned something about considerable improvements for two-seater careers that were being planned for P4. I trust those plans haven't changed.

Lesson learned: one must never be a humourless grumpy sod.

I understood Winder to mean something like HitR with the plane packs for P4. Obviously adding new aircraft is not enough, they also need to have the squadrons, aces, skins etc. to make the whole package. And I'm definitely willing to pay for such expansions.

Colditz was based mostly on true stories, if I'm not mistaken. It didn't portray all Germans as evil incarnates. The best films and series are those that try to be as realistic as possible in their depiction of characters. This means that even the most nasty of villains usually have more than one side to them. Life is not totally black and white, most of the time.

A fine series. It's been a long time since I saw it last, but I still remember well some of the characters and plots. Edit: BBC made some excellent series in the 1970s. Colditz, Secret Army, World at War, Wings etc.

I've heard it works just fine. But use it at your own risk.

Mandarin Chinese has more speakers.

Nothing has been able to top the immersion in RB3D and OFF P3 for me yet. However, the other sim certainly does some things very well. But it looks like P4 will set the standards for WW1 sims (and others) for years to come with its attention to historical details and general immersion.

I'm sure you won't regret it, Widowmaker. I hated living in a big city. Too many people (and too many criminals and other idiots among them), too many cars, pollution, noise, long distances to get to anywhere, ugh! Unnatural and unpleasant. When I had the opportunity years ago, I moved to a smaller town and haven't regretted the decision for a second. Life is infinitely better here than what it used to be for me in the city. Just make sure you have a decent Internet connection (they are becoming better even in the countryside) and you won't lack anything.

Yes, it's extremely difficult to find the DVD version. I spent years tracking it down, until finally I saw a couple of brand new DVD copies of CFS3 beind sold at Amazon.co.uk. It was about a year ago. I bought one and have preserved it for future use, if my CFS3 CDs happen to break down one day. I haven't seen them being offered since then, and I've been keeping an eye on the situation. Now I worry I should have bought two, just to be sure.

I know it's a cultural thing and you'll get used to it if you hear it all the time, but I can't stand dubbing. Some of the DVDs I've bought have dubbing for the biggest European languages, and sometimes I've tried to watch them using dubbed dialogue. It's awful. I just can't imagine watching classic English-language films with famous actors playing the roles and hear them talking with another person's voice! You can't dub James Stewart, Marlon Brando or Steve McQueen! It's just wrong. Films should be enjoyed as they were made. It's not hard to read subtitles, if one doesn't understand the spoken language.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's a shame when somebody who enjoys flight sims misses a gem like OFF because of language, especially when you don't need to be fluent in English to enjoy it. There's no dialogue to follow or anything, after all. If people just gave it a chance, I'm sure they could play and enjoy the sim perfectly well, even if they can't speak English like a native.

Maybe localized versions are important to have in many countries? Every major game title that gets released in Europe is always localized for the biggest language groups. I'm fortunate to not belong to any such groups, so we always get the original language versions here. But maybe flight sims would also require such localization to better penetrate the French, Spanish, Italian, and German markets? Obviously small developer groups don't have the resources to do that.

I prefer the phrase "Discretion is the better part of valour." It sounds better than "running away".

HPW, I've been using your damage mods for a long time, and I think it they produce quite satisfactory results. But then I tend to fly more two-seaters than fighters, and I probably get shot to pieces less than our most aggressive fighter jockeys.

I wonder how many people have died in burial accidents? Crematoria are safer. But if you do happen to fall inside one when it's operating, you'd better get out quickly.

I have the book. Didn't have to pay that much for it! Anybody interested in buying it? I can offer it at a special price, only $19,999! I'll even pay the postage and packaging for you.

The British army that went to war in 1914 was excellent. They were all long-serving professional soldiers, after all. There was only one problem - the army was much too small for a major European war that lasted for years. Britain was the only European great power without conscription when the war began. While the other great powers could quickly mobilize millions of men from their vast reserves and were capable of suffering extremely heavy casualties and still keep on fighting, the British had no such reserves of trained soldiers. It took time for them to create, train and organize a big army. The battle of the Somme was the bloody proving ground of that new army. By 1918, the British had a well-trained and powerful army, capable of withstanding the last big German offensives and then taking the initiative and counterattacking. In 1918, the British (and the French too) perfected their skills at combined arms warfare, and were able to push the Germans back with brilliant use of infantry, artillery, tanks and aircraft. Unfortunately these lessons were forgotten, or wrongly applied, by the French and the British in the years following WW1. The Germans didn't forget, and worked hard to perfect the use of tanks and aircraft in creating breakthroughs in enemy lines. These Blitzkrieg tactics worked almost perfectly in Poland in 1939, and both the French and British armies collapsed quickly when Hitler's Panzers attacked in the West in 1940. The Entente powers pioneered the use of tanks in WW1, and were then beaten by their own creations in 1940.