Blue Max put you in a WW1 biplane over a diagonally scrolling countryside and gave you one job: destroy everything. Bomb the buildings, strafe the convoys, shoot down the enemy planes, then find a landing strip when the fuel ran low and do it all again. The diagonal scroll made it stand out from every other shooter on the machine.
The landings were the part that got me. You could survive a whole bombing run and then wreck the plane on your own airstrip because you came in a touch too steep. Very educational for a future pilot, which I never became ;)
