Shaikoten
Senior Member
Posts: 1044
Registered: 05-04 |
I think one really needs to make the distinction between a flight stick and an arcade pad. The third joystick variant would be one of the crummy Atari joysticks, but by the late 80s to 90s those were pretty much useless. Those were much closer to flight sticks, but also much more primitive than what was around once Dos flight games came around.
Anywho, it's still possible to get either, and I would say overall the arcade pad is a bigger staple for hardcore fighting game fans. I'm sure there are still sales of flight sticks for simulation games such as IL2 Sturmovik, but the popularity of the genre has definitely waned, especially with little to no activity from the once powerhouse brands of Wing Commander and X-Wing.
I think the indie game Dogfighter didn't even ship with support for flight sticks. A flying game... that disallows flight sticks. Generally there's been a move away from complex space sims, with the only major releases in the genre being the X series and Eve Online, and Eve Online doesn't support Joysticks at all.
I think the success of flight sims, and space flight sims in particular, are largely a product of their era and the technology at the time. Remember, these were full 3D games at a time when that was far from the norm, and there were even trashy ports of Wing Commander to the very low spec'd SNES. The use of a simple star field allowed for the illusion of high end graphics, when really very little had to be rendered. 3D space games allowed for lower resource usage when video cards weren't the norm and ram was still in the single and double digits in MB.
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12-13-11 18:45 
