Sometimes when you're a kid, you're either unaware or unable to accept games that you are unable to figure out. This was the case with me and 1989's Flight Simulator 4.0, by Microsoft for MSDOS. I crashed a lot of damn planes in this game, let me tell you. It's an immensely complicated game, and while I eventually learned to take off using the manual, I never learned how to land. Pity my poor passengers. 

Microsoft is still making this game, 30 years later, and you can buy all sort of peripherals to play it - fancy joysticks, foot pedals, and even head tracking devices. What impressed me is that the 1989 version I played was the fourth in the series - there had been three other before that. 

Obviously, there's a market for flight simulators that are dreadfully realistic. Not all of us can learn to fly real planes, so games like this scratch that itch. Even when I was a kid I thought it supercool, and the complexity and difficulty was definitely part of the allure. 

These days, I still enjoy flight sims, especially WW2 ones, but the ones I play tend to lean a little more to the arcade side. Still, as bad as I was at this game, I do have fond memories of it.