When I was a kid, around 10 maybe(?), we had an old Apple system and some kind of an A320 sim. Really good actually. The graphics were poor, but the sim included IFR maps for all of Europe. Very many airports and pretty much all the nav-aids were included. Back then I didn't really cope with all the requirenments behind it. But at least the IFR nav part was already ok for me to do. That was my intro into flight Sims.
Then years later I had a win PC game called "Enemy Engaged", I believe. You could either fly an Apache or a Havock attack helo in three different scenarios. The fighting part was fun, but really not that much behind it aviation wise.
There were a few smaller games likewise in between. And eventually, already almost 10 years ago I'm afraid, I found "Lock On: Modern Air Combat". Pretty nicely detailed. Allowing me to fly F-15s, A-10s, Flankers, Fulcrums and Frogfoots. To include carrier landings and takeoffs on the Kuznetsov. That's were I spent most my time really going into the details.
The game would allow you to fly down an ILS to the runway as well. Since a glideslope will bring you down about 1.000ft after the threshhold, plus round out and flare, for shorter RWYs I tried to stay a little below and fly it down. If I knew there were no obstacles.
I sometimes tried FS with bigger jets on a friends PC. Even though a single monitor isn't that great for visual approaches, some rules of thumb helped out pretty well.
Like I think line up really early, 10+ nm out, with the centerline. Do so with shallow banking for a clean setup, and not with those ugly rudder snaps. For a 3° glideslope start decend at 3x the altitude? And then set a descend rate of 5 times your ground speed. Actually worked out pretty well. Maybe a little more in between to go to 3 red 1 white approaching the overrun. And slowly break the decent with pitch.
Anyhow, I'm sometimes looking for the game when in a store, but I'm not sure if I'd actually play it that often to justify the expense.
I have an i5 @ 2,5GHz I think, an GT560Ti and 8GB of RAM. I'd have to check on the required specs.
