That means that in this simulation of air combat over Europe from 1943 to 1945, you'll never see a Flying Fortress or a Liberator. However, if you don't see any of your other favorite planes in the above list, they're not in the game. Many of the aircraft have variants, which brings the absolute total to more than 30. German pilots can fly the Me-109, the FW-190, the Ju-88, the Me-262 jet fighter, and the distinctly odd Go-229 and Do-335. The Americans get the P-47 Thunderbolt, the P-51 Mustang, the B-26 Marauder, the P-38 Lightning, the P-80 Shooting Star jet, and the experimental Curtiss P-55 Ascender. For the British, this includes the Spitfire, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Mosquito, the (US-designed) B-25 Mitchell, and the Vampire jet. The game ships with 18 different aircraft, all of which are flyable. But once you actually get in the air, it's a somewhat different experience. On paper, the game has almost everything you'd want. In addition, the game has cooperative multiplayer (albeit only for single missions) in which you can fly both bombers and fighters. Combat Flight Simulator 3 has an interesting campaign in which you can affect the progress of the ground war (both directly, through successful missions, and indirectly, through launching ground offensives by spending points earned in combat). On the surface, Combat Flight Simulator 3 seems to have addressed the biggest outstanding issues of its predecessor: the lack of both a dynamic campaign and a decent multiplayer component. So at the time, it was easy to forgive some omissions, like the fact that even though the game simulated the conflict in the Pacific theater, there were no flyable dive- or torpedo-bombers. More importantly, it gave players a chance to revisit the Pacific theater of World War II, which had been conspicuously missing from flight simulators for years. While the first Combat Flight Simulator was a spin-off of the Flight Simulator franchise and made many compromises, the first game did a good job of putting a good graphics engine together with accurate flight physics in a consistent manner.
Is Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3: Battle for Europe this game? The terrain graphics are a focal point of the game. Ten years ago, the idea of a flight simulator with photo-realistic graphics was a fantasy, but now it seems possible for developers to create an all-encompassing flight simulator that's both realistic and fantastic looking. Developers expended lots of effort on making planes look like more than just a pile of moving squares and triangles, and the physics engines they created pushed the limits of computers without really approaching the realistic behavior of a plane in flight. Games back then weren't always groundbreaking, and they were sometimes redundant, but in the case of flight simulators, they were developed in order to come as close as possible to the real thing.
That's not to say that they had no real impact at the time, because the best classic games aspired to new heights with what now seems like limited technology, and the gameplay of classic series evolved based on the idea that new games should offer more than last year's game with better graphics. You may fondly remember games from 10 or even 20 years ago, but the fact is, by today's higher standards, most of those classic games aren't much fun.