Well, here's an introduction to flight simulations: these are games that simulate aircraft. Many, many people (including myself - Tiago) enjoy sitting in front of a screen with a piece of plastic in one hand (or, if one has enough money, a piece of plastic in every hand & foot), pretending to be flying something that can range from a few pieces of wood, wire and fabric to 50 tons of winged metal! Now that I'm done with this pointless rumbling, lets put this matter clearly: there are only 2 kinds of flight sim, the In-Yer-Face-Game survey sims and the Hard-To-Get-To-Grips-Unless-You're-A-Propeller-Head(tm) hardcore sims. Actually it's a bit more complex, but not by much.

Survey sims are games first and simulations second. The goal here is to have the player having fun while pretending to be flying an aircraft. Recent games that come to mind are, well, every Novalogic flight sim.

Hardcore sims are a different breed. They aim at making the player feel he is inside the real thing, and therefore forcing him to do all the little tasks needed to make something far, far heavier than air soar up there in the skies.

However, in the old days, you didn't really have this distinction, as the processing power was too limited to have accurate physics and avionics modelling. Long time aficionados may remember that Falcon 3.0 required a math coprocessor (something really expensive and rare back in the early 90s) to run with the advanced flight model.