Kumori's biography

Ahh, curious, are we? Well, here's my "official" biography then:

Kumori was born under the red sun of SVGA AirWarrior version 1.13, when a friend suggested I might like a WWII flight sim combat game. Well, I'd always been interested in WWII air combat, and it took no time at all to convince me that someone had sat down to design a game just for me. Under the red sun I learned to fly the planes, fight drones, set up my own little scenarios to practice manuevers and strategy. I turned on all the realism options from the very start.

It inspired me to install a modem and duel against my friend one on one. Again, I was convinced that someone made this game just for me. A human opponent is so much more challenging than any computer generated foe.

I began searching online for information about the game, discovering the online AW community and resources. I found version 1.20 and downloaded it, discovering now the yellow sun, and the N1K2. The flight model became just a smidge tougher. The duels a bit more intense. I began to think about going out into the fabled arenas.

On the alt.games.air-warrior newsgroup I learned that AOL was now carrying a new version of AW to be played in Windows. I downloaded that and began to practice flying in that version. There were no drones, but I discovered that I could work on gunnery and bombing against flak or enter films to get into furballs. I was almost ready.

On Halloween, 1996, as the kids went to bed for the night full of fresh air and candy, I took out the AOL coasterware that I'd gotten recently. It promised fifty hours of free time online. I'd learned about using the TCP/IP connection to get around the long-distance problem. I was practically trembling with anticipation as I logged on for the first time, and waited patiently while the AW software was downloaded and installed (two hours via my 14.4 modem). I watched TV with the wife for a while to keep my mind off it.

When it was finally ready, I entered the arena for the first time. The Convention was in progress, where all the names I'd read about would be found. That's where I wanted to go. Kumori entered the Con arena with a frame rate of about 4.5 fps and attempted to fight Me262 jets with a mustang. The results were not surprising, and despite Darpa's brave attempts to save my tail, I was shot down repeatedly. BUT, I was being shot down by real people in the ARENA! It was all I could do to log off and go to sleep that night.

I attempted to get the hang of things by going into the New Users arena after the Con arena shut down, but two days there got my ammo cut off. Even with my flip-book frame rate, my dueling time had prepared me too well for the newbies. It was disappointing after the Con when I found no one in the FR arenas, but I found some good fights in the RR ones for a bit, and whenever I logged on I checked FR for action. Once in a while I got lucky and found some. Slug had the dubious honor of being my first - and second - kill in FR Pac. I had an awful warpy connection, and he simply suddenly appeared in front of me a few times. I did what came naturally, and he went boom.

An upgrade to a Pentium cpu got me much better frames, and before long I was starting to find FR Pac guarded against me by such nefarious types as Egger, Judo, VX, and HW. I would take an F6f up over a pile of enemies and drop down into them to see how many I could get before my luck, ammo, or gas ran out. Some great fights they were, and some good friendships with my 'enemies' developed.

It seemed I found myself tooling around the skies with some really fun allies regularly too. They were the Musketeers, a name that was something of a legend to me. Hebee, Hawk, Dragon, Vap, Rap, and the others made for some good hops into deep piles of enemies. Fun was the objective, and we got it good. Then one night, January 2, 1997 to be exact, I was invited to join the Musketeers, and felt as though I'd made it to Carnegie Hall or something.

Then the sun changed again, moving into a new quadrant of the sky. I was no longer on AOL, but on the Gamestorm host, mostly flying around in AWII, then AWIII's Full Realism arena. This of course meant further upgrades for my hardware. By the time I was back to having usable frame rates, it was time for yet another change, as EA took over AirWarrior and along came AW Millenium Version. EA promised a lot, but didn't deliver much. There was an abortive attempt at an Ultra Real flight model, with its own arena, but it was becoming obvious to most that EA wasn't really serious about AW.

Some of the Musketeers began drifting away to other sims, like Fighter Ace, Combat Flight Simulator, Warbirds (the Muskies have always had a presence there) or just taking a sabatical from online flight sims altogether. A pretty strong Muskie presence grew in Dawn of Aces, "flying the fabric" of the Great War.

Finally, EA managed to do the impossible. They let the AW sun set. On December 6th, 2001, I joined a good many other FR AW pilots for a final fly-in over the big island. On December 7th, 2001, the online flight sim community lost the AW sun, possibly forever.

Now I fly under a different sun altogether, in HiTech's Aces High. HiTech was one of the legendary names of AirWarrior, who designed Vfilm for AW, and then went on to develop Confirmed Kill, WarBirds, and now Aces High. He and his cohorts have maintained a sense of community that they have built into their products. Although the new sun is moving, and sometimes I'm flying under the moon, I still carry my Musketeer sword. You can find me and some of my Musketeer squadmates now in Aces High, flying as Knights (what else would a guy with a sword be?).

Regardless of where I fly, I'll always be an AirWarrior, and a proud member of The Musketeers of AirWarrior.

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