So Pie-in-the-Sky Software's MS-DOS flight sim "Corncob 3D" has an interesting feature that you rarely see in games...
Lemme explain. So, first, before you go on a mission in this game, you create a pilot, who has a rank. As you complete missions, you'll be promoted.

And you can end missions in multiple ways. The game doesn't ever game-over you for not completing your objective, you can always make it back to base and try again later. Well, almost always. You might die... but the game will let you resurrect pilots.

but along with "you did it, yay! have a promotion" and "You made it back in one piece, that's good enough" and "You're dead, sad", the game also keeps track of exactly what you do on the missions.

And yes, you're SUPPOSED to go fly off and take out that alien saucer in the distance... but there's a big HQ tower over there. and a radar dish. What if you crash into those? what if you bomb them?

Heck, there's a guy hanging out near the end of the runway, who'll give you the finger if you get too close.
and this is the rare flight sim which lets you walk around on the ground. You've got a pistol, you could just shoot him...

Oops.

But the game does something you might not expect when you fuck up like that.
It doesn't just fail the mission, or say "YOU'RE DEAD, GAME OVER", or even just ignore it.

Nah, the game says "YOU GO TO JAIL, SINCE YOU BROKE ALL THE RULES"

and plenty of games have done that.
like, in Opposing Force, the Half Life expansion, you can shoot your drill sergeant in the face during basic training.
And it goes "YOU'RE SENT TO THE BRIG!" but that really just means "game over"

Corncob 3D instead calculates a sentence for you.
You're put in jail, for some amount of time.

And the next time you try to play that character, it just tells you "NOPE! THEY'RE IN JAIL. COME BACK LATER"

And it's in real time. it uses your computer's clock.

I can't play 2nd Lieutenant Foone until 8pm tomorrow.

And being clock based means it's not like you have to leave the game running. you can go off and do other stuff and then come back.

It's just yet another weird touch in this whole game of weird things.
None of the rest of the game has real-time stuff, it's only the pilots thing.

Other examples of weirdness in this game, besides the previously mentioned "you can walk around in this flight sim" and "you stay in the brig in real time":

The game takes place in an alt-history where hitler died as a teenager, but it's about aliens.

it's about defending earth using a bunch of WW2 planes in a world where WW2 didn't happen, because Hitler got killed by a thrown beer bottle when he was a teenager. No hitler, no nazis, no WW2, instead: aliens.

The game has the menus and the 3D parts, and they were actually written by different people. They're separate executables written in different languages, and they communicate by writing out data files the other one reads

The game has a scenario with a stealth bomber, and it's the only location you can load up that doesn't start you in your plane. You instead are on foot, and have to walk over to it.
Once you get inside it, you find out... you're locked out. The game won't let you fly it.

the game also has this interesting idea of missions where they're all just laid out in different parts of the world map.
You can hit F2 for a text file to select one, or you can just fly over there if you know where they are.

One of the missions even mentions that fact.
It's like "hey... you can just fly there, dude. it's right in front of you"

Despite being a COMBAT FLIGHT SIM, REMEMBER? there's a mission where you have to go land on an airstrip in the sky and walk over to a guy who will give you a thumbs up, then you just fly home.

It's also a flight sim with a dedicated "van" button.
You press it while on foot, and your base will send a rescue van to come pick you up

there's also an interesting thing that's not obvious when you select a theater of operation.
see how it says "there are 7 planes remaining in storage"?
Well, every time you play a mission, if you crash your plane, it removes one. Eventually you run out... but you can still play.

So when you've run out of planes, it gives you the option to pull one from storage.

this gives you these brown planes, instead of the usual blue ones.
They have worse specs than the blue ones. So you can run out of good planes, and be left with only the crappy ones.

BTW, you know how it says "press CR to play anyway?"
well, if you do that, it doesn't mean you get a regular plane instead of one pulled from storage.
it means it just spawns you on the ground, as a human.

so you can go try to beat the mission by walking over to the enemy base and shooting them with your pistol, I guess.

The game also has hypnosis buggies.
I'm pressing no keys in this video, the alien car is drawing me towards it.

The game just treats "captured" as "dead", and lets you resurrect the pilot.

And yeah, once you run out of regular planes at a theatre, you can then run out of storage planes, and it just tells you "you have no planes. press CR to play anyway"
and it sticks you on foot.

it also implements this thing where your vision gets warped by being too near alien generators.
that's a neat effect for a simple software 3D engine!

the game also tracks g-forces the player is feeling.
You can black out by pulling up too hard, and you counter that by going into a dive, to shove the blood back into your brain.

I can't easily take a video of it because of how my keyboard is set up, but the game also has a neat feature: you can parachute out of your plane and then enable a remote control feature.

There's at least one mission which requires you to remote-pilot your plane in a suicide mission against an enemy generator

it's also one of the first games to use JPEG, way back in 1992. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/899352965122633728

The other neat thing: The source for it was published in 2001, but apparently no one noticed and it wasn't archived.
However, after a long search... it was found. https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/984236075945222146

unfortunately that was incomplete. That contained all the assembly code for the game itself, but to build a valid binary, we needed a 3rd party library. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/984336790914871296

I got a copy and got it archived, but I haven't gotten back into trying to see if it works, and we can get a valid binary out of it. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/988632658186985474