Microsoft Flight Simulator 98

Flight Sims Tend To Come In One Of three main varieties: modern military jobs with big, butch names like "F-37 Thruster", featuring loads of missiles, 14 different radar modes and MiGs galore; historical efforts with lots of planes from one of the two World Wars, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The reason why MS Flight Sim deserves to be put in its own category is that it's just about the only one where you don't get to shoot anything (apart from Flight Unlimited, that is), and that while other sims aspire to realism, Microsoft have managed to take it a stage further than most.

MS Flight Sim was the first game to appear on the PC (probably) and it was certainly the first flight sim. Since they ran on PCs with an 086 CPU, it's not really surprising that the graphics were a bit poor by today's standards. Graphical loveliness was replaced by simple shaded polygons running in 16 colours, and the only sounds were bleeps and squawks from the PC speaker. Despite this, there was plenty of realism, and the way the planes handled, as well as all the controls and dials were all good representations of the real thing.

Flight Sim 5 was the first version to use texture maps and Gouraud shading and all those other things that we now take for granted. And Microsoft were one of the first companies to do this in a flight sim. There's been Flight Sim 95 in the meantime, but with the first 3D accelerated sims now on the market, the release of FS98 has brought the game bang up to date. As well as support for 3D hardware, this version has loads more airports and scenery. Internet play and, even better, some new planes to fly.