SKBaine's Story
It was during a really busy week at work when I got the phone call. "Congratulations, you've won the drawing for the free computer. Pick something out and have the receipt on my desk within two weeks and we'll pay for it."
I didn't know anything about computers at the time. I just knew that the publisher of the newspaper I work for thought everyone should learn as much as possible about them. So he started a monthly drawing giving each employee selected $1,500 to buy a new machine.
At first I couldn't be bothered. What was I going to do with a computer at home? I spent enough time on them at work. But my wife convinced me to take advantage of it, and I was soon putting together a Pentium 200 with 32 megs of RAM. It cost me every cent of that $1,500. The computer gathered dust on a shelf until my wife stepped in again. She'd seen an ad for a naval strategy game in a military history magazine I read. At the time I was about 1 year into building a plank-on-frame wooden model ship. "Why don't you try this," she said. "It looks like something you might like." I bought it and soon the ship model was gathering dust (it's still waiting for the masts and rigging to be installed.)
For about 3 months I played almost every night. Trafalger, The Glorious First of June and the Constitution vs. the Java. I loved it. Then somebody at work lent me a copy of Red Baron. I'd always loved planes. As a kid I once took apart my Electro-shot shooting gallery and put in a model of a Neiuport so I could take pot shots at it. It was a lot of fun, until the electric BB machine gun sucked up some of the broken plastic pieces. Red Baron was so cool. Busting balloons, battling zeppelins and dogfighting triplanes. I was hooked! I played that game for about six months _ constantly. My wife began to get worried. I started reading every book in the library on air combat. Then my boss asked me to do a story about online gaming. What, I thought? You can play games online? Cool. I went to the one machine in the office hooked up to the Internet and started doing some research. Of course I started looking for airplane games that I could write about. I found Warbirds, but balked at paying to play by the hour (even then I knew it could get VERY expensive.)
Then I found Air Warrior III. I got a comp account and tried flying. I researched that story for about three weeks. I got shot down every night. I wrote the story and briefly thought about keeping the comp account. But I signed up and tried about 15 different handles until I was able to sign up as Baine. I flew for about six months, was recruited for several squads that seemed to break up quicker than they were formed. I started flying in full realism, augered the first time I tried to attack somebody (I still remember laughing at how sweaty my palms had gotten and how my pulse had started to race as I dove to attack). I got my first kill on my second hop up _ a Betty that was trying to torpedo the carrier I'd just launched from.
I went through favorite planes at an alarming rate _ F6F, P-38, Me-109 and finally the Ki-84. One day I was flying a Mosquito and I came to the aid of B-17 under attack. We both made it to target and I spent the rest of the night flying escort for a guy named DMac. At the end of the evening he asked if I wanted to join his squad. It was called the SkyKnights. I said sure. I figured I had two weeks to kill. What an eye-opener. Here was a squad that really flew missions. I was flying fighter escort, just like those guys I'd read about when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd join on as a gunner on a deathstar. Every gun manned. It was great. Names I remember include Falc4, Luke, Hawk (welcome back), Bluii (he didn't have vox, so it took me about a year to learn that he pronounced it Blue-eyes) and Blogs.
One of the highlights of flying was Axe4U's weekly after-action reports. That guy could not only fly, he could also write! I flew with the Skyknights for about three years until all the improvements to Air Warrior finally killed it. In that time I filled my spare closet with several old video and sound cards and boosted the RAM in my machine to a whopping 64 megs. The rest of the Skyknights moved over to Aces High. I spent the summer playing Falcon 4.0 and trying to figure out some way to justify spending $30 a month on a game that ran like a slideshow on my old pentium. Then I heard the Aces High was cutting the price, which was incentive enough to do something. I built a new machine, signed up and began looking for the SkyKnights. It's been two and a half years in AH for me. Now, instead of Axe's AAR I look forward to Zooty's films. The more things change...
