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Flight Simulators have come a long way since the days of the ones offered on 8-bit computers.   I once owned the first version of what would become a series of versions of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator - it was created by a company named Sublogic, that Microsoft purchased.  Back in 1985, the graphics were 3D lines for runways, but everything else was 2 dimensional - when you flew by the Statue of Liberty, it looked like you were flying by a cardboard cut out of her!

 Now Microsoft’s flight simulator X is packed with detail, with the help of Naveteq maps (also used with Google satellite maps and Google Earth, if I’m not mistaken).  The detail offered is amazingly realistic as you fly over cities and see actual houses and buildings in 3D, where as in previous versions, such objects would just be textured objects, especially in rural areas. 

Another improvement for MS Flight Simulator X is the number of aircraft you can fly and the wide variety.  In previous versions, you would have had to purchase an expansion pack to fly some of these planes, but now they’re all included - almost 30 different aircraft, including a glider.  There are also over 20,000 airports available around the world.  I haven’t seen this yet, but I read in the instructions that you can even see details of Moscow and the Pyramids of Egypt.  I wonder if they have the city of Shanghai, China.

Installing Microsoft Flight Simulator X was simple, but lengthy.  It was worth installing the two DVD’s of programming - that way the DVD’s could be put on the shelf and there’s no switching of DVD’s required to load scenes or aircraft.  I remember my version version of this simulator requiring me to swap out my 5 1/4 inch floppy disks whenever I reached the end of the scenery stored in memory.

I have only spent about 5 to 6 hours with this new version, but from what I havce seen, I was very impressed.  As expected, this program requires alot of memory and resources.  I recommend having 2 gigs of ram and a fast hard drive (serial ata’s in a raid 0 configuration might do the trick).  I ran it on a laptop with 1.8 GHz and 1 gig of ram, with all graphic details set on high, and the program still performed well, but I wonder if it responded accurately to all of my keyboard commands, all the time - there seemed to be a lag.  Nonetheless, Microsoft Flight Simulator X is alot of fun, and well worth playing.