hehe, yup. fun stuff. i dont know half thsoe abbreviations you're using, but the spirit and descriptions come thru just fine :)

air warrior was an amazing game at the time, and if you can believe it, we played this thing over the Genie network at 1200 baud, sometimes 2400, if you paid extra for it. lol.

i was so hooked on that game that once when i had some free vacation time, i went and visited their offices. i'd known john and kelton, the owners/lead programmers from earlier games they'd done, and it was great fun meeting them and watching kelton program and test the new land based vehicles, jeeps and tanks. at the time, those jeeps were pretty rickety. he'd go about 50 feet and crash ;)

the graphics were fair. it was 1989 after all, so mostly low to medium res stuff. but, you could skin your own planes in high res if you wanted to. but, only you could see it. some managed to do a bit of creative skinning and removed parts of the plane to see better. lol. this got found out and some anti-cheats were put in soon after that :)

but the graphics werent important. the game play was incredible. you get 40 guys up in the air with an assortment of wwii fighters and bombers and the furballs were amazing. i tended to fly a spitfire because of the incredible maneuverability, but occaisionally i'd take a japanese zero or an american p-51 mustang....very fast! those furballs would be something like a massive tornado, guys going around in tight circles chasing other guys and slowly losing altitude all the while. many a dogfight was flown inches off the ground. it took a LOT of skill to get good in that game. i was never the top ace in that game, but i did manage to work up into the top 10% at my height.

oh, and another thing i just remembered; they had ratings for both your fighter skills and your bomber skills. and yes, getting those b-17's to 20,000 feet or more took a while, just like in your account. we'd circle in a slow spiral upward in our rear area and then head off to try to sneak in past the radar. or, we'd send dive bombers out first to take out the radar. great fun :)

this war never ended. the game was divided up into three countries, A, B, and C. and each had equal resources to start. you could conquer enemy bases, blow up airfields and fuel resources and maintenance sheds and these things would also affect how many planes and what types were available to the users. play would go on endlessly for days, with each side taking and losing bases, back and forth. eventually, they'd switch theatres and we'd start all over again.

sadly, when the internet took over, the independent networks all but died because they were all pay networks... by the hour. so, when this new cheap/free internet thing came along, games on those networks suddenly found themselves on a desert with no water. a few made the transition to the net, but not many. you might actually still find air warrior around. i'm not sure. i did play it for a while years later on the net, but it just never was the same. i'd lost my edge and the effort to get it back just wasnt worth it any more.

it will always be one of my all time favorites though. long live country C! :)

K.