I've given in looking. All I want is a good combat flight sim' but all I can find are the usual arcade style ones and they're rubbish. The last decent one I played was Eurofighter Typhoon - Operation Ice Breaker and I loved it. Unfortunately between moving, changing jobs and getting married I've lost the disc. Can anyone recommend a good game that'll fill the gap created by the loss of one of my favorite games?

If you're looking for a combat sim', you cant go wrong with Lock-on Flaming Cliffs 2. It has 8 aircraft to choose from F-15c, A-10c, Mig-29(German and Russian variants), Su-25, SU-25T, Su27, and Su33. You can do carrier ops on the SU-33, and there's in-flight refuelling. Also a full mission editor. It's multi player, and compatible on-line with the DCS series (DCS Black Shark which is solid, but awesome when you get to grips with the flight model. Some bloke managed to land on a moving train.).

There's also loads of mods, upgraded models, and weapons. It's got quite a big community. Have a look for it on youtube, and see what you think.

Despite being quite old, Falcon 4.0 Allied Force is still a great combat flight sim. It'll only allow you to fly different versions of the F-16 but the flight characteristics are still among the best ever made.
Try running a few searches on Google and I'm sure you'll see what I'm talking about.

Bjarne

Absolutely loads to choose from! What do you want? Modern jets? Cold War? WW2? WW1? Helicopters?

A good start would be Free Falcon 5 (Google it...). It's based on the old but great Falcon 4, and it's free, the cost of admission is just the 1GB download for the installer. Plenty of depth to the avionics and systems, and the Korean campaign (very topical more than 10 years after the original Falcon 4 release) will keep you busy.

Do you need Falcon 4 to get it? I can't find any info (or a download mirror, for that matter)

If you are looking for the most hard-core, most realistic, closest to the real thing combat flight sim you will find nothing that touches Falcon 4 with the Open Falcon mods. If you are after a pretty close combat flight sim with some additional DirectX 9 spqrkle and effects, then Falcon 4 with the Free Falcon mod, after which Falcon 4 Allied Force. As said above though, these sims are 90% F-16 simms, with some other aircraft added in. In Falcon 4 OF (Open Falcon mod) you will also find F15's, F-18's F-4's and a few others, but it is pretty much geared up for the F-16 only.

Open Falcon and Free Falcon stem from leaked source code for Falcon 4 when the developer company was shut down, and many of the original developers and a lot of others along the way have been working on them for years to bring them to the level they are at now. Allied Force comes from the source code for Falcon 4 that was purchased by Lead Persuit, and was backed by Atari IIRC.

F4 OF is one HECK of a sim, and is awesome to fly once you learn all the weapons systems, flight dynamics, onboard flight and weapons computers, mud-moving and air-to-air combat techniques, and military- and civilian-type navigation systems. I've been flying it for many years now, and am even more blown away by it as time goes by. If however you are not a hard-core realism sim nut you may find the learning curve very steep, and may become frustrated. There are still a number of online gaming communities that have regular (read daily) online flights, and there is HEAPS of help available to learn the sim. Check out Global Falcon over at Frugals World for a great community to get you started.

You do need the original Falcon 4 CD to install from, then mod and patch it up to the latest OF/FF, but it can be found in a lot of places on the 'net.

Give me a shout if you want more info.

Wayne

Nope, just the files from the FF website.

One word of warning about Free Falcon though - if you are running Windows 7 64 bit with an Nvidia graphics cards you will have problems, but there is a simple workaround to get everything working ok, let me know if you need more info.