Il-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, a flight game for the Xbox 360 that can be arcade style, realistic with concessions for the limitations of being a console game, and unforgiving simulation that is damn near impossible to do without a joystick.
For a campaign that has no story, it's surprisingly effective. The relative realism of the gameplay, combined with the journal excerpts, provide a nice perspective as to what it meant to be a pilot in those times. However, realistic mode might be a bit hard for people who don't already know how to fly, and the game was definitely designed with realistic mode instead of arcade or simulator in mind. The missions - especially the single missions - are nice and varied; not all are dogfighting and tank plinking.
Every aircraft has its own little quirks that take time to get used to, which is nice, and some have outright flaws, which is sometimes kind of annoying. Something that's not so much annoying and more outright bad design is how the sensitivity is at maximum when you start, making controlling anything a challenge until you turn it down.
The sound design is good, but the music and chatter can get repetitive.
Online dogfights are an interesting challenge. It's not quite a ghost town yet, but it's getting that way, so everyone that's left is going to be good. You sometimes have to wait fifteen minutes for anyone to show up, but it's usually worth it. However, online games suffer from one major issue: credit for kills. I don't know how many times I've sent an opponent hurtling down to the ground in flames, but not get credit for the kill. The inverse is true too, I've gotten credit for kills I wasn't actually responsible for, though this is a lot rarer. This is the direct result of the damage system, which does not work by HP, but by whether you can keep the plane in the air or not. I've kept smoking, perforated, totally wasted planes flying long past the point where in other games, I'd have been a burning wreck on the ground. The upshot of that is the game has difficulty telling when you've just crashed because of pilot error, or when you've just crashed because you have a couple of foot wide holes in your wing.
Anyway, you can pick it up at Gamestop (in the US) for twenty dollars or so. If you're interested in trying something different and challenging, sure, go ahead. Maybe I'll see you in the skies sometime.
Oh yeah, and if you're flying the Bf-109 G6, you have to make a "like a G6" joke at least once per game. It's the rules.
