As you may know, I play Battlefield 2 occasionally and I like flying the helicopters and jets in that game (though I seldom get many kills on them - I’m better as a gunner.) Anyway, I figured I should look into a more involved flight simulator, so I downloaded the Microsoft Flight Simulator X demo and really loved it. So I bought the full game, deluxe edition, installed it today, and have been playing it for the past few hours.
Man this is so much fun! First of all, it looks amazing. All the reviews talked about how most people’s computers wouldn’t be good enough to enjoy the game’s graphics, but I only have a Geforce 7600GT and I think it looks great. I’ve got the weather effects ultra-high and everything else high, and it all looks good and runs smoothly. I can see the shimmering on the water and the shiny reflections off of the planes, and everything. I’m sure it would look even better if I had the latest in graphics cards and processors and whatnot, but it looks good enough for me.
I love the huge selection of areas to fly in. I haven’t even done any of the missions yet, just free-flight, and am just getting the hang of using the flaps, banking, turning, and landing (barely.) I’m still kind of stuck on lining up with the runways and landing on them properly, though I’ve done it a few times. I haven’t done any of the missions so I suspect I’ll catch on pretty quick if I just do the easy tutorial missions and learn the basics in a more structured way.
And I love that there a bunch of expansion packs with even more planes and stuff available for this game even with all the stuff it already has. So it’s like I have unlimited potential for enjoying it.
Does anyone else have MSFSX? How have you liked playing it?
I’ve been playing FS for many, many years. (I started on the one before Flight Sim 98 came out… So at least 10 years now)
I’ve basically stopped since I started flying real airplanes (“HEY! I have an idea, I’m going to simulate work during my free time!”)
It’s a whole lot of fun, though I only have FS2004, not FSX.
I used to have a huge (250+) selection of aircraft Flightsim.com was my best friend (and going back now I see the site design hasn’t changed in many years)
If you want more aircraft I recommend heading there and seeing what they’ve got.
I want this game more than I want anything else in the world! I’m just a bit concerned about the recommended specs. According to this site my system meets the minimum (and most of the recommended) requirements to run it. However, I only have 36MB of video RAM (the minimum is 32MB, recommended is 256MB).
Being one of those people who’s quite happy to use a computer but has only the vaguest idea of how it works, can anyone set my mind at rest? What are people’s thoughts on what the *real * minimum requirements for this game are?
There aren’t many planes from Flightsim that are for FSX only - most are 2004 models that have been retooled to run in FSX. A lot of them have bad glitches and/or shitty graphics, but some are really excellent. The Turbo Beaver, for instance, and the Beechcraft Twin Bonanza are two planes that I downloaded that I use regularly. My standby aircraft is the Cessna Skyhawk (the yellow and red one.) I’m more of a fan of low-flying sightseeing than of cross-country jet flights. Also, I suck at landing the big jets. I always seem to get almost level with the runway, but skid off of it while landing and crash into buildings or something. Practice practice practice, I guess.
Since I fly real airplanes I’ve lost most interest in flight sims.
Don’t get discouraged about the landings. It’s harder to land on a simulator like MS-FSX than in real life. I’ve done over a thousand landings in real airplanes without breaking anything (although one time I did have to remove a lot of soybeans from the airframe) but only successfully landed once or twice on the sim.
I have a few gripes with the game, though. There’s one annoying issue where when switching from cockpit view to exterior view, the plane’s texture takes a second to load, so you just see a gray, unpainted model of the plane and then the texture appears. It’s only a tiny bit of time, but it takes me out of the moment. I really wish there was some patch I could download to get rid of that.
The other thing is realism issues with the ATC. I don’t think the air traffic controller in Argentina or Nepal or the Palestinian Authority is going to speak with an American accent. And I was really frustrated when I flew into Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, and the controller at the tower told me I was approaching “Salt Airport” (everyone knows it’s pronounced “SOO.”