WELL I mean, the Hun should've known better shouldn't they? For a start they hopelessly outnumbered the brave Few, a situation which has not failed to give a result for the Brits in a good few centuries.
Secondly, the venue chosen was the corner of some foreign field, which was very convenient for the RAF lads. They could be very British having a spot of high tea or a game of bowls, pop off for an afternoon's war and then back home for bridge and cocktails in the evening.
Lastly, and most unfortunate of all for the Bosche, was the time penciled in for the big bash to take place - their finest hour. I mean anyone else would've seen it was a complete non-starter, but there you go.

The first thing to do when you get hold of TFH is install the bally thing on your hard drive. Saves all the nasty messing about changing disks, don't you know..

Clamber into the cockpit of your Spitfire or Hurricane and give the foe a jolly good battering. Or, alternatively, you can go and work for Jerry, flying Stukas, Heinkels, Dorniers and the like. God knows they need you, no backbone don't you see - can't even play cricket would you believe.

You'll find the cockpit layouts are fairly accurate, everything in its familiar place. Controls are all on the keyboard but you can use the stick or this new fangled mouse thingy for flight control. No foot pedals or rudder controls. Probably had old Dougie Bader on the design team.

Keep a record of a few of the few on the roster. Sorry, no chalk option. Names and planes is all, but it keeps a running total of missions flown and confirmed kills.

Fly a few training flights to get the hang of things, then move on to proper combat or a full war scenario. Your overall battle strategy will have to be pretty damn cunning what with the Luftwaffe outnumbering you and everything. Plan your campaign on the big map, deciding where and how to scramble.

Eyesight's not what it was old boy, can't quite make out the call sign on a passing Hurricane but I can still distinguish them from a Me109 at about two miles. Something to do with filled polygons and stuff so the technical johnnies tell me.

The wonderful noises of lead ripping through enemy canopy seem different. Rather unimpressive. They tell me you need to have at least one Meg to hear them as well, whatever that means. Pish!

Activating the in-flight camera will give you a permanent record of your best kills. When you come to replay the film due to some devilishly fiendish technical whatnot you can position the camera anywhere you like. Chasing behind your plane, following bombs, from the ground and all that sort of rot, don't you know.

If you decide to go and work for the foe you'll be on double time. They must be short of decent crew, because in the bombers you have to fly the whole thing yourself - cockpit, gunnery, bomb bay - it's a bit of a tall order.

If you go down over the green and pleasant land of the old Dads Army will soon have a pitchfork in your back. No more sauerkraut for you.

The past is a foreign country and all that, so I think we should leave petty jingoism aside. However morally bankrupt the idea is, there is nothing like a good dogfight, and the golden age of dog-fighting was 1940.
Mr Churchill also once said: "Jaw-jaw is better than war-war".
He obviously never played this game.

You can keep your Retaliators and keep your supersonic high altitude bombers. What you really want are good of Spitfires and Messerschmitts to go dogfighting in - or so Lucasfilm will have us believe in their follow up to the great Battlehawks 1942.

Anyone with even a basic knowledge of recent British history will recognise the immortal words used in the title, so it is no shock to find out that this game is a combat flight sim based on aircraft that were around in the first half of the Second World War.

First of all, you can decide which side to fight for, but remember the decision here limits which craft are available to fly - no Spitfires in the Luftwaffe! The Brits have got Hurricanes and Spits to fight in while the German have not only fighters, but medium and long range bombers and dive bombers. Each plane has several missions set aside for it that can be played in any order. The missions are varied and range from straight dogfights to scramble and intercept missions.

Once a mission is completed the combat records are updated (unless you altered some of the options before the battle to make life esier) and stored to disk. This way you can get together a list of pilots to select to fly with you on future missions, i.e. doe particularly well on one mission and the computer can fly that pilot on another mission and will attempt to keep up the pilot's usual standard while you fly another plane and (hopefully) do just as well.

Then there are the campaign games if you feel like playing for a long while, where you take charge of your side's airforce and try to either bomb the blazes out of blighty or not, depending which side you are on.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

The sound effects are superb. The droning engines, bullets and explosions are very atmospheric. The graphics are also good, but slow and there is a severe lack of ground detail (that does not detract from the action though).

LASTING INTEREST

There are heaps of missions, loads of planes and plenty to keep you busy. If you get bored flying a fighter try being a whole crew and not flying a bomber, but acting as rear, side, forward, underneath, on top, inside-out, back-to-front, behind the bikesheds funner and the man that presses the buttons and shouts 'bombs gone'. Once you have flown all the possible permutations there is even a mission builder to design your own - what more do you need?

JUDGEMENT

TFM is a great game, it captures the real dag-a-dag-dag-a flavour of WWII dogfighting (How would you know - Ed). The 3D graphics may not be state-of-the-art but it is the gameplay that counts and there is plenty of that. If you want a combat flight sim and you do not want missiles but like to see the whites of the enemy's eyes, then this is what you are after.

When the Battle of Brittain was finaly over the RAF had suffered losses totalling over three hundred, nothing compared with the twelve hundred plus German fighters and bombers which fell prey to Britain's Hurricanes and Spitfires. Though it looks slightly similar to Lucasfilm's other flight sim Battle Hawks, Their Finest Hour possess a far superior depth in both gameplay and design.

The first thing you will want to check out are the planes. These range from single seat fighters such as the Spitfire through to medium bombers such as the German HE 111 and the JU 88. Each handles differently, with some of the larger planes coming equipped with tail guns, 20mm cannons and bombs.

After browsing through the manual, you choose your mission. Fly a simple combat mission against dummy fighters, or re-enact an actual battle. The nice thing here is the total versatility. All the way through the game you can set different game options, making things as easy or as hard as you want. It is great being able to go on a bombing run with an infinite payload.

As for the flight simulation itself, SubLogic fans, stay away. This is not intended to be a simulator, the onus is on arcade action. As far as sim fanatics go, this is not such a bad thing. Their Finest Hour is a hell of a lot of fun to play.

On board your plane you have all the basic instruments, plus a map with regular radio reports of enemy positions. TFH is pre-radar so you need to rely on visual identification. The cockpits are nicely drawn, but it is the exterior views which are outstanding.

All planes are sprite based, so they are more detailed than the now popular vector animations. When there are a lot of bogies around the screen update does slow and that detracts slightly from the action - but only slightly.

The dogfighting in this game has got to be the most exciting I have seen. And then ther are the explosions. The planes break up realistically, which is probably the best thing about the game. Clip the tail, and bits will start flying off. Get a good shot in, and the engine and fuel tank will explode, causing a glorious smoke-filled mess in the sky, before the wreckage plummets to the ground below. If you are lucky, you might even see the pilot bail out and drift earthward.

What more can I say, apart from it is amazing. The style of the game means instant appeal, and the sheer adaptability means you will be playing for weeks. I would not miss out on this even if you paid me.

As far as Raymond Baxter and I are concerned, you can keep your Stealth Fighters and your A-17 Marmosets. For real exhilaration, you can't top a 'Spit' dating from the golden age of flying when pilots were real men with names like 'Biffo' and 'Spunky', eggs came in powder form and ladies wore gravy browning on their legs. Ah me. Anyway, the thrills and spills of Battle of Britain aerial combat came to the PC first in Lucasfilm's brilliant Their Finest Hour.
16-bit owners had already had a taster of this in the prequel Battlehawks 1942 (aerial combat in the Pacific), but Their Finest Hour (TFH) is much improved in size, graphics and sound (and landing too) over that April '89 hit!

TFH (I know that sounds like a hotel group, but you know what I'm talking about) can be joystick, keyboard or mouse-controlled. However, though back-peddling frantically on a mouse doesn't quite feel right as opposed to pulling back a joystick, the game played much more responsive with the mouse!

Like the PC version, the camera reply facility, all the missions including 'training' and 'campaign' and all eight planes from the humbles Hurricane to the hefty Heinkel are in there. There has to be a catch for the stunning graphical detail and this of course materialises in jerky graphics.

Still, unlike the PC version the sound is excellent as your engine labours in a climb or races in a dive! Furthermore, while I used to steer clear of bombing missions on the PC - because moving from pilot to gunners entailed mood-spoiling disk accessing breaks - the Amiga performs this function in just two seconds.
Add this to the fact that you get it on two disks with minimal swopping, as opposed to four or more disks and TFH comes up trumps! My sole quirk is that it seems a tad easier than the PC version. Okay, it's not as slick as F-29 or Falcon, but it's the best WWII aerial combat game around. It's got tons of atmosphere and excitement and I like it lots.

It's 50 years ago this summer that the classic aerial conflict of World War 2 was fought out over the skies of Old Blighty. Lucasfilm takes us back to when almost all of Europe was under the German jackboot and Hitler planned to invade Britain...

The first stage of the invasion is the destruction of the RAF. This crucial conflict will last all summer, pitting 530 RAF fighters against 2000 German fighters and bombers.

As in Battlehawks 1942 you're not restricted to one air force: besides flying the RAF's Hurricanes or Spitfires, you can strap into such Luftwaffe aircraft as the Me-109 and Me-110 fighters, as well as four German bombers. Each aircraft has its own unique cockpit display, flight characteristics, weapon payload and demands. On bombers you can assume control of any of the gun turrets, or be the bombardier.

TRAINING FLIGHT gets you into the game gently with missions such as fighting off a few drone Messerschmitts, or on the German side practising your low/high level bombing and fighter escort.
COMBAT FLIGHT offers a choice of eight historically authentic missions - now the baddies shoot back. A pilot roster can be kept on disk so succesful pilots can be uses as wingmen in future missions.
CUSTOM MISSION allows you to create your own conflicts, pitting a user-definable number of squadrons against one another over definable flight paths with definable targets for the Germans to bomb (including ship convoys out in the Channel). Missions can be saved to disk.
PLAY CAMPAIGN lets you take command of either the RAF or the Luftwaffe and recreate/rewrite aerial history. For the Brits it's a small matter of defending the country from four times as many aerial forces, for the Germans all that's required is to pummel the RAF into the ground. Pilots stored on the Pilot Roster can be brought in and there's medals to be won.

Like the Custom Mission option Play Campaign allows you to create different formations for the planes and different aircraft roles and targets for the forthcoming mission. A campaign is exactly what it says, a very intensive series of conflicts which are definitely NOT for the faint-hearted (or the novice!).

At any time during the mission a replay camera can be switched on to record a set number of seconds of combat. The actual replay of the film is a pretty advanced form of VCR with the usual STOP/PLAY and FAST REWIND/FORWARD options along with the ability to move around the mission world viewing the battles from any angle including Chase Plane view, ground view and even a novel view from a bomb as it hurtles towards a target. Particularly impressive combat films can be saved to disk for posterity and shown to fellow pilots back at base via the REVIEW COMBAT FILM option.

Other features which are a significant improvement over Battlehawks 1942 include a handy map facility for planning missions during the campaign and general navigation when lost. On the map screen there's also a radio for locating the enemy.