While all this sounds great on paper, the real test is how this frankly astonishing level of detail transfers into the gameplay. How the plane reacts is actually based on which way the pilot slumps in the cockpit and how he moves the stick. You may be lucky enough to shoot at somebody and hit the pilot directly, killing him, says Pinero. Enemy planes calculate damage in exactly the same way yours does -more so in certain cases. Once again, the damage model plays a significant part here too. Says Pinero: We model the enemy planes by calculating their flight stick positions at all times, which means they can't pull any weird manoeuvre that you can't do. Here, Microsoft have gone to pains to ensure fairness across the board. In Red Baron II, for instance, it was almost impossible to keep up with your seemingly turbo-charged wingmen as you took off on a mission, rendering flight formations useless. Often in sims, the balance between the player's flight model and that of the computer's is somewhat disproportionate. Play on either side, flying Spitfires, P-51s, Thunderbolts, Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs.all of which have hyper-accurate flight models. The thrust of the game is that you can fly any of eight planes across two of the war's most important campaigns - the Battle of Britain and the Battle over Europe. There's even a mission where somebody shoots up a V-l and you have to intercept it, which is pretty cool. rockets? We have the German V-l, and for that we created a brand new flight model that takes into account atmospheric pressure, wind, temperature - just like a plane. We are doing other things that really are rocket science though. This is just basic physics, it's not rocket science. Bullets from a P-51 travel in a different way to bullets from a Spitfire because of mass and weight and shape. Bullets are being modelled all the way up to a fraction of an ounce, and each different type of bullet has a physics model, laughs Pinero. Each bullet has its own flight model, and damage is calculated by measuring the path a bullet takes into your plane and what systems it affects. Air particles! They're simulating air particles, for God's sake!ДЄnd bullets. A typical sample: We're taking into account the way the Earth's atmosphere behaves and the number of air panicles per square inch at different altitudes. Listening to Pinero talk about the various damage models and flight dynamics contained in the game is enough to make a layman's head spin and a physics professor's skin-flute become sexually swollen. The TheoryДЄccuracy has always been the key to Microsoft's flight sims, and MCFS is no different. I think that's where the experience of having built flight models for 16 years is going to be an incredible advantage. But there's also a strong market for people who want to have the closest experience of being a WWII combat pilot. Some people will just want to get the joystick and basically aim around and shoot at whatever. I think there's a market for everything, says Pinero. Most people are just surprised that it took them this long, and that they waited until the market was packed with like-minded titles. MCFS is the answer to the question that everyone's been asking for 16 years: Where are the guns? No one can sit behind a civilian flight sim for the first time without instantly doing the Cguns'joke, and it seemed inevitable that Microsoft would eventually give in to the pressure. We knew about one or two of them, but not about the other seven or eight.

Aren't they just a little bit anxious that their super-realistic World War II, flight sim may get lost in the crowd? Jose Pinero, product manager for Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, is aware of it though: It's like the year of the World War II air combat game. Just when Microsoft finally get round to ' putting guns into their best-selling flight simulator, it seems as though the whole world and their grandmas are developing a similar game.

Microsoft combat flight simulator