I would recommend looking into the game Xenonauts. it captures some of that flavour.

Xenonauts is good, but Firaxis' Xcom 2 is better. The original atmosphere is very well reproduced, with more recent graphics and a decent storyline.

Maybe it was just an adventurous mouse?

Danger mouse

Yes. GrapheneOS is pursuing/accomplishing this.

AOSP is one of the most secure consumer OS around right now, surprisingly.

simulators might be good enough to train for most situations, maybe not to the same degree as if the pilot had been flying the whole time.

The situations that call for a pilot rather than an AI can only be trained for in a simulator.

The (few) hours in a simulator are probably far more valuable in an emergency than the thousands of hours of real flight.

(sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.

You can't induce emergencies in actual passenger aircraft for the purpose of training. So your only option is a good simulator.