A flip-book Aeroplane dogfighting game that was a ton of fun. Originally published by Alfred Leonardi (taken from their website, aceofaces.com), this game has an mystifyingly interesting algorithm. In the simple version of the game (there are actually graduated levels of difficulty) you and your opponent (most oftentimes my brother) each had a book with a picture of what you could see as the pilot, and a list of moves, each corresponding to a page number. Your opponent and you would each choose a move, and then you would tell your opponent the corresponding page number. You would go to that page number, lookup your move, flip to the corresponding number, and that's the next "frame" of the dogfight. Weird, and disturbingly accurate.

The moves that you could do are all very realistic. There were slow, normal, and fast manuevers that you could complete. Every type of manuever that you could think of would be in there, even an Immelmann turn! (that being where you do a loop around your opponent.. that always used to get my brother). Moves such as barrel rolls, stalls, and wingovers were all described in the instruction book that came along with the game, and thus really helped you get into the whole feel of it. You could even "become" a personality, with certain bonuses and such. I always thought the Red Baron was cool, once i figured out what his real name was.

The purpose of the game was to get the opponent in your sight. You know this was the case when in the picture your little aeroplane was shooting at the opponent (or the opponent was shooting at you. All in all the game required a lot of in-your-head 3d perception and anticipation. It was $20 dollars when i bought it a long time ago from the back shelf of my hobby store. We eventually stopped playing because we wore the books out, and I kept getting beaten severely. To this day i wonder if there was a trick to it, that i never knew about. My suggestion is to definately try it if you get the chance...