Hasse Wind

Haha! A sith pilot. I bet the Force is useful in a dogfight.

Well, P4 has cows, so why not ladies? And partridges and pear trees...

Yes, the awards system will be completely new in P4. What little I've seen and heard of it (thanks to Paarma), it seems to be developing into one of the most realistic awards systems in any sim, ever.

Hmm, I'd better contact your Youtube-Polizei and inform them that you are trying to avoid their friendly censorship.

And that's why my two-seater pilots have no medals at all, but get promoted to high ranks in a matter of weeks. Now of course the best way to impress ladies would be to get quick promotions and a lot of medals.

A great series, yes. It's also available on DVD. Much more enjoyable to watch like that than to have to struggle with Youtube. Besides, I bet the friendly German censors have already blocked poor Olham's access to that material.

If you do everything by the book, you get promoted much quicker.

So does that mean we are now able to manually adjust the radiator shutters? That would add another dimension to engine temperature management. Nice.

The rest of the European powers didn't have that problem, as every able-bodied man was already conscripted for military service. In 1914-1915 Britain had a really small volunteer army compared to the massive conscript armies of the continental powers. Before the war the men in France, Germany and Russia had to spend two or three years in armed service, which made it possible to quickly mobilize huge armies from the reservists in 1914. Quite soon it became obvious that volunteers were not enough to supply the British armies with adequate numbers of men. The casualties were simply too heavy for that.

I'd LOVE to fly one of those Rumplers in P4. With proper improvements made to the recon mission types, of course.

Crazy is normal here among the OFFers. It's just a matter of perspective, after all.

Yes, it did. And I imagine they also equipped other similar planes with them later in the war. Quite a few of the German two-seaters were able to fly at really high altitudes, so their crews would have appreciated it.

No kidding. Fortunately it's easy to mod the CM series, so it didn't take long before we had the swastikas. But that was the last time I bought any WW2 game by a German publisher. We have no such censorship here, fortunately, even though Finland fought with Germany in the war. I understand perfectly well that it's forbidden to form a new Nazi party or something like that in Germany, but I can't accept the censorship of historical products, such as computer games, when they are not promoting Nazi ideology but merely showing the uniforms and emblems as they were back then. *** Olham, you need to kick out your silly politicians and replace them with normal, decent people like you.

I would be surprised if they didn't have a new one under development. The Battle of the Bulge, and the fight for Bastogne in particular, is waiting for those airborne guys.

P4, obviously. But there aren't really that many must-have games for me, usually. If you wait a few months after release, you can get all the new games considerably cheaper and also updated with bug fixes and stuff. But this is only true of the mainstream games. Niche products like OFF are always more expensive, and they sell less than the biggest hits, but do so steadily over a very long period of time. I'd never pay full price for a game that gives me only a few hours of enjoyment with no replayability (like Call of Duty). I wonder if the new Total War game is Steam only? Their prices are terrible when there's no sale going on. Damn, I sound like a cheapskate...

Yes. I'm something of a Tolkien fan, so I've read a lot about the man and his works. I think it's pretty obvious that what he saw in the trenches had an impact on his writing. No normal person, least of all somebody as intelligent and romantic as Tolkien, could live through such a horrible war and not be influenced by it.

The Quirk was a pretty good two-seater for its time... that time being 1914-1916. After that it was criminal of the RFC to keep using it. The Bloody April showed quite clearly just how helpless the Quirks were against the new German fighters.

That would be great. And hopefully he's now independent enough (read: rich enough) to ignore any 'brilliant' ideas Hollywood likes to promote in war films in the hopes of getting more viewers. He did take some liberties with LotR that I thought were unnecessary changes from the books, but overall they were great movies. I hope The Hobbit and the second Tolkien film they are making will be equally good. A movie about the first air war would be nice. Now they have the computers to make realistic effects and stuff. Combine that with a good script and a realistic depiction of events, and we have a winner.

No matter how much they suffered, it must be said that the pilots and observers of the Great War had it much easier than the poor bloody infantry. Even if there was hard fighting during the day, at least they could get back to base for the night and sleep in a real bed, they didn't have to fear snipers or sudden artillery strikes, no gas attacks, no nerve-wracking guard duty at night in a muddy trench, no work duty in the same filthy trench - the list goes on and on. Early flying was really dangerous and particularly so under war-time conditions, but you had a better chance to live through the war in some flying squadron than in a rifle company.

They are not that fragile, Olham. Easy to fly and surprisingly tough. As you know, I'm currently flying one in my marathon career. A great video.

I imagine it also depended on the general supply situation, ie. were there any extra planes available. If it was a busy time and all aircraft were constantly needed, it makes sense that some pilots had to stay on ground when their planes were under repair.

And it should be the Royal Air Force, not the British Air Force. The person who wrote that press release didn't know what he or she was doing. But that renegade pilots part puzzles me. Renegade British pilots? And no German campaign? What were they thinking?

I thought her name was spelled Ursula Undress. Haven't seen Passchendaele yet.

The big music corporations have a pretty tight grip on your country, it seems. But I understand they are afraid of piracy and fear the loss of money, so everything must be censored. It makes more sense than the complete ban on anything related to Nazis in historical computer games in Germany. I remember when I bought Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin (a wargame about the battles of the eastern front in WW2) - it was distributed by a German publisher here. Everything with swastikas or SS was completely removed. They had gone so far as to also remove the Finnish swastika symbols, which historically had nothing to do with Nazism. And it was a wargame that tried to be as historically accurate as possible, not some neo-Nazi action game. Are the censors trying to make people forget the Third Reich existed? Such censorship has always seemed stupid, even dangerous, to me. *** Anyway, they don't make music like that anymore.

I think I'll wait a year or two before taking a serious look at that sim. It took years before IL-2 became truly great. Besides, I'm more interested in WW1 sims. Hopefully it won't be using the awful Ubisoft DRM. What I really love about OFF is that there's no restrictive DRM that presumes every customer is a criminal that must be observed with Internet activations and crap like that.