Well...would Battle of Britain count? Or any of the Microsoft Flight Simulator games? I'm afraid those are the only two that come to mind at the moment. Unless you consider Brittania from Ultima or Albion from Dark Age of Camelot appropriate, that is.
Sadly, you're going to be fairly locked in on one side if you're looking for a "jet fighter ww2" sim. You're going to need to have the ability to play as the Axis, and even then you're going to have to play with prop planes until you get the Me163 at the very earliest (and preferably the Me262).
Let's see...probably the most recent space-sims that are out there are:
Darkstar One StarShatter: The Gathering Storm the X series (X2 and X3)...though technically they are empire building games but from the perspective of a space-sim
Older games: Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos Freelancer (no joystick support, the entire game is played via the mouse)
If you can stand the slower pace of the X games, give them a shot. They both should have demos available (I know that there's a demo for X3), and you can get them both from Steam.
I know it's not exactly in the city-builder genre, but I personally consider Black and White 2 to be a city-builder with a pet and miracles. I mean, come on! You get points for building buildings...and in order to win as being a good god is to earn enough points to convert enemy villages. If that's not a city-building game, I don't what is (well, city-building with a twist).
But, I suppose if you want more traditional city-builders:
Simcity 4 + Rush Hour Caesar 3 (haven't played 4 yet) Zeus Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
To Ein: I did not condemn the game I just said I had played way to many RTS games lately leaving me with almost no desire for another one. SC is no doubt a very well done RTS that a lot of people will enjoy even if it’s not very original.basersx
Okay, it just sounded like you were blasting it because of the reasons you quoted.
But like a lot of games it has received way too much hype ahead of its launch and I think you are seeing that a lot of people are finding its not living up to its hype. Add to it people crying because they don’t think an 8.7 is high enough and that is just absurd!
Yes, this happens to every game that gets developed. People are always going to complain that a game got scored 9.3 when it should have been 9.5...I just think of it this way, I have fun playing games that score a 5.7...a score on any website does not always mean that the game will not be fun.
Also the fact that it looks like its going to be a system hog like MSFS-X, Splinter Cell Double agent, GRAW, etc and I think you can agree that this game deserves some real criticism for a lot of reasons. An 8.7 already seems like it was generous and the fact that people are complaining that it’s not higher makes the game an immediate target for criticism.
Toss up Neverwinter Nights 2 to that list...but still people really enjoy the game. I will admit that having steep hardware reqs is going to negatively impact a game...but really, CoH pushes my desktop to it's limits too. And if GS is measuring a game against its peers, SupCom's system reqs are no steeper than CoH's were when it was released. Is it playable on older computers? Absolutely (shoot, just look at my specs). Just don't expect the game to look its best. I fully expected to take the hit in graphical detail the moment I downloaded the demo. So I don't really think that people's opinion of the game should be based off of the system reqs as much as it seems to be. Granted, SupCom won't even run on my laptop (Pentium M 2.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, and GeForce Go 6600) and all I get is a BSoD, but I'm still going to say that an 8.7 is fair...maybe a tad lower than what I'd give it (I'd go as high as 8.9...but that's about it), but that's just my PoV.
I kept getting hosed by Lobstermen before I got sonic weapons...kinda makes it a wee bit harder to bring one of them down. I remember using a full clip worth of gauss rifle rounds on a single lobsterman (full clip total...had to go through 3 guys to fire that many times, though)...and it still didn't kill the bloody thing!
Played and loved TA when I bought it off eBay in '99, so I suppose you could call me a bit of a TA fan. From my perspective with the demo, I absolutely love Supreme Commander. As somebody mentioned, it is TA updated for modern systems. And while my computer can barely run it on mostly medium settings (shadows turned completely off, mind you), it is still a graphically beautiful game. Granted, it's not going to have the same graphical detail as, say, C&C3...but do you really think that C&C3 can render two armies of 250-500 units on each side battling it out? The thing with Supreme Commander (and Total Annihilation before it) is that it sacrifices graphical detail in order to have massive battles on a massive theater of war. I'll be honest and say that the kind of gameplay that SC and TA has, there's going to be quite a few RTS gamers who aren't going to happy with a deviation from what we've been given these past 10 years. (and just to specify, my computer specs: 1st generation Pentium4 2.54GHz, 1GB RDRAM, 6800GT w/ 256MB RAM...late game becomes a slide show even on the demo map...but the game runs pretty well in the early game)
And speaking of gameplay, if you are going to condemn SC for the reasons basersx raises, you need to really stop playing RTS games all together. Because the RTS formula hasn't changed much since Dune 2. And while DoW brought the whole control point thing to the fore-ground (which is nothing more than a renewable kind of spice field), the whole point of any RTS game is to build up an army (either a massive army of basic units, or a smaller army of advanced units) and destroy the opposing base.
Really, what sold me on SupCom was that it recaptures the feel of Total Annihilation and just updates the engine and adds a new faction. And the whole dual-monitor support thing is pretty nifty too. Maybe I'm just showing my age here, but sometimes taking a minimalist approach is a good thing...refines what makes a game fun.
Oh, one last thing: the whole concept of having the sounds fade out the further you zoom out is an actual complaint?! You are actually pulling away from the action...of course the sound is going to be diminished when you leave the immediate area of battle. However, from what I've played of the demo, when a long-range artillery piece fires, you're going to hear it no matter how far you're zoomed out.
Would the entirety of Ultima Underworld 2: The Stygian Abyss count as one huge dungeon? If not, I'll probably say the final Vault from Fallout 1...man, I loved storming into that place clad in power armor and plasma rifles blasting!
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