A SimHQ "Second Look" Series Feature
January 22, 2007

Out of the Mothballs: Jane’s USAF Revisited

by Guest Writer Panagiotis "No Fear" Fokas
Based on an Idea by Jim "Jimmy" Gilbert
Moderator for the Gulf Knight Forum

Introduction

It is often said that the worst enemy of good is better. However, I feel that this is not the case here as it seems to me that an ‘old timer’ like Jane’s USAF falls like a rock (or better like a meteor) into the stagnant waters of the flight sim genre!

The Glorious Past

I am sure you all remember Jane’s USAF, a flight sim that was released back in 1999.  I am also quite certain that most of you played and loved it, since it was one of the best (if not the best) of its time and kind.  It goes without saying that its features were hard to resist: a variety of planes, terrain, campaigns, missions, weapons and online flying. But despite all of that, the game had its flaws; the flight models weren’t good enough, you couldn’t fly straight and steady (the notorious USAF "bobbing effect") and the game didn’t run on Windows XP.  Well, all these problems have been ironed out.

The Amazing Present

Over the past years, a number of people managed to modify and improve the game tremendously but I feel that nobody has done it better than Slikk (David Taylor) and COWAR (Rainer Echternach) who have ‘produced’ Super Pro 9.2 / 9.4 and Pure the former and MiniPro the latter.

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