I've never seen the early screens for Fleet Defender



The second demo looks more like the final version though.

God I loved that game. It's on Steam at the moment, but the years have not been kind.

I just remember the Bermuda Triangle mission when you get called out to a mystery radar contact. Sometimes it's a flight of WW2 Wildcats, other times it's a UFO

Yes I remember this mission fondly, but they weren't Wildcats - it was flight of Avengers

Another classic

It's still surprising to see how many cool flight sims were created by Microprose.


Wheels

Yes, but they also published titles by other developers, like:

I never had ATAC, but I remember looking at the box several times in Egghead software. I think each time I was about to get it, I bought something else.

Microprose F15 III, was a great one! That was the first flight sim I saw that had clouds that didn't look like white blocks or puff balls.

Rob

Definitely the graphics engine in F-15 Strike Eagle III was cutting edge at the time. While there were only flight sims that used vectored flat shaded graphics, MPS Labs releases a game with pseudo-textured ground (hills and 3D models were not textured still) amazing cloud layers which are part transparent if you go above them.

I remember seeing the screenshots in some game magazine beck in early '90. I had Amiga 500 back then, and simple shaded horizon would impress me at the time (Amiga flight sims had single coloured sky, drawing shaded horizon which could roll around your cockpit as you flew was too much for ~7MHz Motorola 68000 CPU ). F-15 SEIII blew me away. I think it was the first impulse to switch to PC.

Some older titles from Microprose (late '80).

and some of my favorites

And few more from Dynamix Great War Planes series.

A-10 Tank Killer 1.5



Red Baron



Aces of the Pacific



Aces over Europe

I too had never heard of a Microprose published flight sim called ATAC. I downloaded it from an abandonware site (1.7MB), cool!

Lots of cool sims in those oldies.


Wheels

I remember ATAC. I just got some money for my birthday and had an urge for shopping. ATAC was the only sim at the local retailer. I bought i but it sucked. 2 weeks later Lucasarts released Secret weapons over Normandy-collection, and I couldn´t afford it. Traumatic childhood... (a bit ironic is that now I have the money but almost no sims thats worth spending it on)

So much coolness!

If I remember well back in the day someone made a mod for Aces over Europe called "Aces over Russia". The i-16 looked pretty cool on that style.

Indeed! A 1943 Eastern Front campaign. I still host some mods for Aces Over Europe here:

http://argonv.tripod.com/AoE_Page.html

WOW thanks for the link, didn't knew there were any mods for AOE.

Cool of you to still host them.


Wheels

Wow. That's a lot more than I thought! Great stuff