Flight Simulator X

Do you absolutely hate a relative that games? Do you feel like sending that little ?Nintendo is the BEST company ever? fanboy something to ruin his Christmas? I have a game for you. Something that will take every kind of fun he ever had and suck it out like a hose, trashing over a virtual Pacific ocean like gallons of dumped oil. That game is Microsoft Flight Simulator X for the PC.

Flight Simulator X is obviously the tenth rendition of what essentially used to be a benchmarking utility. Way back in the land of the DOS operating system, Flight Simulator was something of a kind of experimental game, nothing realistic- just something made with wireframe graphics to give gamers the kind of ?ooh look at that? rush we were all over back then. Flight Simulator 1.0, with that being said, was just something to test PCs with to see if they could run MSDOS appropriately. Big deal, right?

Well, it is now. You see, right up until Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0, the game was still something of a ?cool? kind of game- nothing special, just almost a testing system for PCs. However, when Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 hit, things changed: 3D graphics were made much better, the game featured many more planes, and the whole ideal of the engine was changed: it went from something of a toy to a simulation to experiment with.



Too many games later, we have Flight Simulator X for the PC. Designed with Direct X 10 and Windows Vista in mind, Flight Simulator X is purportedly the most graphically upgraded in the series, with the most amount of polish and sheen of any flight sim game, Microsoft or not. And to some degree, this is true- Flight Simulator is by far impressive with a library of planes, areas, maps, and even cargo load outs, all to stimulate the inner pilot within you.

So, obviously, anyone who understood all of that above can figure out what Microsoft Flight Simulator X is. It contains flying. With planes. Lots and lots of planes. Over a geographically correct modeled map of the entire world (Well, just the US and Europe). And that is literally it. Using the latest(?) in GPS technology, Microsoft Flight Simulator X allows you to fly any given plane over the game world and land it in one of thousands of airports modeled after their real life counterparts.

Except, that's what they SAY, not exactly what is TRUE. You see, Microsoft Flight Simulator X is impressive to the point where it almost is pointless. Even though the game is ripped directly from realistic GPS maps, it still completely fails to recreate anything other than a pretty bland cityscape map. A good example of this is when you get down into the very details of this purported realism.

Let me explain. The second I turned on Flight Simulator X, I had one idea- to crash a 747 into my house. So, firing up my 747 out of the local airport, I quickly hit the air (Though it took me twenty minutes to figure out the F keys controlled the throttle). Turning around, I began looking for my house.

It wasn't there.



In fact, the surrounding area didn't look ANYTHING like where it was. To be quite honest, even with the graphics cranked perfectly up, it still looked like one big pile of random houses over a pretty gray terrain. Sure, it had mountain regions and obvious things- but nothing specific. Even worse, I made a specific attempt to fly into New York and land in Kennedy International. No dice. No view. Sure, Kennedy International was there (It's kinda hard to miss a three billion mile long landing strip), but there wasn't a skyscraper in sight.

Yeah, right.

What this means is that Flight Simulator is a little bit of a cop out. Sure, you can fly planes- and hey, let's be honest, they got it damn perfect. The planes behave realistically, even to the point to make it blatantly obvious that Airbuses cannot do barrel rolls. No doubt someone in the basement of some Microsoft building spent thousands of hours perfecting the movement and style of control for the planes, making everything act as if it really should.

But hey, let's not gloss it over. The game is boring. Normal gamers will quickly discover that to play the game CORRECTLY, one must purchase a $50+ joystick. Then, with the $40+ game, you end up spending around $100 just to enjoy some fake flight. And, when you do get everything set up (Something like 14 gigabytes of map terrain and planes), you will quickly discover all you are expected to do is sit and stare at the scenery as you fly in a perfectly straight fashion. No guns, no explosions, no quick maneuvers- not even a hijack or two. Everything is down right boring as hell.

And one further warning before I give my verdict- this game doesn't work ?right? just yet. On my powerful testing computer, I still was forced to what can best be described as 10 fps chugging. The game was drawing NOTHING, yet it still continued to chug away like it was drawing the frames by hand. This may have something to do with the fact that it is generally made to run on Vista or XP with Direct X 10- but nothing is excusable about bad graphics that lag. Absolutely nothing.

So, when all is said and done, this game is a flop, at least from my perspective. If you are really into flying, this may be the game for you. However, average gamers will no doubt find this the most boring, uninteresting, unimaginative game on the market with nothing to do but float around poorly generated 3D maps. Microsoft needs to learn that no matter how hard they gloss over this concept, unless they make ultra realism FUN (See: Gran Tursimo), they will continue to only attract a small fan base of hardcore people who really should be flying real planes. Two stars.

2 star(s) out of 5

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