the best dogfighting this generation?

[Anton Yudintsev]

Originally Posted by Lexandro

By not having the full range of controls available it precludes any full simulation game. Your forgetting that the vast majority of xbox players do not own flight sticks, and frankly actually getting one retail can be a next to impossible task. That means that the flight model simply must be simplified to some extent to allow a joypad to work. Your also forgetting that consoles themselves do not have the same computing power as a PC does. That means that there also has to be some simplfication of the game engine to accomodate console hardware. The visuals themselves take a lot out of the sytems, theres not much left for heavy physics calculations that are required of a full sim game.

While you partially right about controls, you are completely wrong about computing power.
Mainstream PCs are still worse than next-gen consoles.
X360 has 4 PowerPC cores.
PS3 has 6 SPUs - powerfull computing units.
Most of video is done on videochip.

BoP is using exactly the same flightmodel for Sim mode as the original Il-2 (1946), and still allows hundreds of planes in the air.

As for controls - gamepad has a lot of analogue axis and analogue(!) buttons.
You can count by yourself, but it is more than most of flightsticks (of course, button count is less than 101 keyboard). And we can use key-combos to allow enormous combinations.

However, the concept of key-combos is very hardcore and unfriendly to most of the players, both arcade and simmers.
That's why we are actually limited with controls. And of course we can't rely that player will have keyboard/mouse/flightstick. Most of gamers have, but won't use it.
Console gaming is '10-feet gaming'. You are sitting on a sofa with a gamepad, in 10 feets from TV.
For keyboard/mouse/stick - you'd better use table/armchair. That's the main difference.