funny you say that Malibu, as I was all about F-19 Stealth Fighter, then Stealth Fighter 2.0 (F-117), F-18 Hornet (like you) back in the early 90s, read about them in then quite new on the market here computer games magazines, playing the F-19 on Commodore C-64 (there was such version released! highly unstable though), then on my friends's 486, then my own Pentium with brand new Windows 95 and whole 8 MB of ram Dad bought me... it was all pirates back in those early days, my first PC sims I bought were Tornado with Desert operations addon on CD and Aces Over Pacific with 1946. It was 1996. Then came early 1997 and I bought Janes' ATF. That title was dream come true. All those planes! Those screens, the INTRO! Library, mission editor. Manual in blue jeans soft cover. Later, custom libraries adding cluster munitions downloaded via modem @ 2 kilbytes/s at school...
Then around 1998, 1999 during the "simulators flood" from modern military I switched to WW2 and Luftwaffe sucked me in.
Funny as some 12, 10 years ago I knew ins-and-outs of all Bf-109, Fw-190 variants and could draw all Junkers prototypes from memory, often drawing my own creations during boring lecture. Now I hardly recollect some data or designations. EAW was the title I choosed as my object of eternal love. Especially when I discovered Sandbagger's sites and other ones in early 2000s... If only I knew back then that name of the creator will come to my simming life again in several years with different titles and era...
I remember reading Strike Fighters preview on Sim HQ, at that time I was like "Jets? Blah!"
Then I had some time break from flight sims and gaming in general, when I came back Il2 was still in it's full glory but I still played modded EAW over and over.
Then in March of 2005 a friend of mine, and mostly choppers junkie gave me his Wings Over Vietnam. I searched some info about it back home, installed... played for few hours bitching about EVERYTHING except the planes. Some time later, during summer break on studies, one evening out of boredom I started searching for mods for it. First that came as a result was
F-111 with nice dedicated cockpit (I think it was Varks' Den...) then some infos and screens on Sim HQ, finally Combat Ace. That night I created my account here.
Rest is history.
Thank you TK&Combat Ace