Flight Simulator X demo

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Flight Simulator X demo

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Publisher's description of Flight Simulator X demo


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From Microsoft Games:
From award winning game developer ACES comes Flight Simulator X. The latest installment will include the usual genre leading realism that continues to awe real pilots and will serve as the graphical benchmark for games on Windows Vista. Additionally, Flight Simulator X will deliver for the first time structured game play with more than 55 missions to choose from which will test the skills of players of all levels.

Editor's review of Flight Simulator X demo

Fly the Microsoft skies
The tenth release in Microsoft's esteemed flight-sim series makes a major break from tradition with the inclusion missions to complete all over the world. The prerelease demo for Flight Simulator X offers you three of those missions, one of which is a tutorial that introduces the basics of flying. Although the demo for the in-progress game includes minor graphical errors that can make aircraft and scenery look slightly askew, there's more than enough fun to have with the four provided planes. The 625MB download is a bear, and the installation process is considerable, but once it's on your machine you'll be up in the air in no time.
The provided planes in the demo are the Air Creation Trike Ultralight, Beechcraft Baron 58, Bombardier CRJ700, and the deHaviland Beaver DHC2. The areas available to explore are in the Caribbean, including the Netherlands Antilles and surrounding islands. Most notable, perhaps, is the inclusion of the famed Princess Juliana International Airport, with its tiny landing strip and low approach over the beach. Aside from an introductory tutorial, the demo includes two other missions that let you drop flour bombs and fly to (and land at) various airports. We experienced minor frame lag even on the lowest graphical settings on a machine with plenty of processing power, good memory, and a reasonable video card, and graphical glitches are evident at the highest settings. However, the excellent interface, user-friendly missions, and free-flight options make this demo a can't-miss for flight-sim fans.
A few reviews below by people who have already downloaded this game
ready for takeoff
by: Pablo V. on 27-Oct-2006 04:58:00 AM
Pros: the best flight sim ever! i have never seen something like this before.
Cons: requires a lot of computer power and a very good graphic card
Pros: cant get any better
Was this review helpful? Yes | No (11 of 12 users said yes)

WOULD BE GOOD IF THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS WERE TRUE!
by: Random2 on 09-Sep-2007 12:48:49 PM
Cons: Ok, my system isn't the greatest in the world but at least it exceeded the minimum requirements (1.3GHz,256mb,ati radeon 9550) but these were not good enough. For some reason the min resoulution is 1024x768 when many games offer 800x600 or even 640x480. GT legends offer 300x240 resoulutions too!
I turned everything down to minimum, during this I found the interface very slow. It took 20 minutes to load the mission first time round and at best I got 4 FPS.
The controls didn't seem to work and the plane kept crashing!

I think people with a similar spec to mine would be better off with the 2004 version, its graphics may be out of date but it will look better than this with this quite of PC spec! Alternativly, if you like flying planes, helicopters etc: BUY GTA SAN ANDREAS!
Pros: There's a noticable graphical improvment, and it's realism is far more well, er realistic then its predecessors. It's very fun, and it's only a pre-release demo to begin with!
Cons: The graphics somewhat disappoint me. There nice, of course, but not what I was expecting. Right now, the problem is:What is so great about this game that seperates ir from FS 2004 or X_Plane or any other flight sim? The Flight Simulator is my favorite flight sim though, because of the accuracy of realism and physics put into the planes. X, unlike 2000 was geared towards graphics and fun gaming.

raptorman

Alternatively try FlightGear which is completely free.

http://www.flightgear.org/

Features

• Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
• Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
• Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
• Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
• Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
• World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
• Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
• Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
• Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
• Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.