IL-2 Sturmovik™: 1946

If you have patience to install some mods it's still a great game to play, worth the price and the headache of installing addons

Il-2 will run on pretty much anything with a vaguely functional 3D accelerator, and this potentially includes low-end integrated devices from the Pentium 4/Pentium M era. So if you're looking for something semi-impressive to make good use of a 20-year-old laptop or even older desktop, this is a good candidate. Has some issues on recent versions of Windows; some fiddling with compatibility settings may be needed (e.g. "XP SP2"). Sim is good, particularly the damage model. Much "fun" to be had trying to snag one last kill before hitting the silk (or dirt) or trying to limp back to base with rather important parts missing. Flight models are also very decent, no weird physics glitches near 90 degrees pitch up, you can fall backwards and tumble, break into flat spins, etc., and these unfortunate conditions feel more dynamic than many older sims where their behaviors were often hard-coded. Graphics are decent for the day, especially when you can max out all the settings on a modern GPU. 3D cockpits are fairly low poly count, but textured decently... force anti-aliasing on through your GPU driver and you might occasionally forget that you're playing a 20 year old game. Arbitrary window sizes can be set through the config file (otherwise the window size selections are a bit limited, though the full screen experience is generally better. While the settings interface is a little awkward, it does have decent support for joystick tuning (which can help a lot for precision gunnery by allowing a small deadzone/low sensitivity near the center of the axes; unfortunately doesn't have any automatic exponential tuning settings, but rather done by user-defined curves). Supports multiple joysticks and allows fairly arbitrary reassignment of axes/buttons (though IIRC there are some limitations so additional virtual joystick software might be needed to make that process easier)

Absolutely the best flight sim ever created. A flight sim that spawned Il-2 Cliffs of Dover/Blits and Il-2 Great Battles. The mods for this game are simply astonishing as you can add new theaters and campaigns as well as modding the aircraft with custom historical paint schemes. You can even fly 4 engine heavies such as the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 LIberator bombers. I would highly recomend this game to any flight enthusiast.

First the game did not launch. By chance I came across a post on the forums about getting it to run. However no matter what I do, all the environment is just black, with just the planes rendering. Im so sick of issues every time I purchase a game from this site.

It took me a while to find IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 that works with windows 8. Luckly this one works with it like a charm. Its a great game, a rediculus amount of planes to use and missions to fly in and great replayability due to the fact you can just srew around with all the planes. Also to add to the epic value you can get mods for this can make it even greater! For the price I bought it at 10 dollars, thats the best ten bucks I have ever spent.