Chris "BeachAV8R" Frishmuth tell why FSX is a better "game" than Microsoft Flight.

http://www.simhq.com/_air14/air_527a.html

Chris' 25 minute video on the topic:

http://youtu.be/iAWWCGano7g

No offense Beach, but you're preaching to the choir.

Unless someone from MS Flight's design/development team drops by here to up to ante. Then it will be "Game On!"

Couldn't agree more with you, but like was already said you are definitely preaching to the choir.

I think the day will come that MS realizes that only the "hardcore" crowd can possibly keep Flight afloat, after all to probably 95% of the population, civilian sims are BORING!

excellent article

Great article Beach, I will have to revisit those missions which I admit I never paid much attention to, especially knowing now that I can swap out the default planes.

As for Flight I think it is like Zune, a flawed MS thing that could have some great promise if they admit their mistakes and listened to the customer base, but most likely they will continue to listen to the marketing and product managers on how great it's doing until it dies... I just hope it creates some new flight sim fans by accident.

Zombies...

Great reading.

Great article, I must agree with you. The same disappointment I experienced with Aerofly FS.

Spot on.

I also agree the missions in FSX were great and I spent many hours completing (nearly) all of them. Yet they were derided by elements of the hardcore sim community.

Yeah - I was actually one of the few that were jazzed about them right from the start:

http://www.simhq.com/_air7/air_261b.html

"It became difficult for me to gloss over and shrug off as a gimmick however when I started to become fully engrossed in the gameplay. With 50-some missions ranging from beginner to advanced there is some serious longevity in this sim if you only approached it as a game (which I doubt any of us do actually)."

LOL..who knew that "the game" part would actually (de)volve into the target of the follow on product..

"And it is the attention to detail that really starts to push you to realize that FSX is a great product. The mission briefings are well written and the supplemental information included in the tabs is useful. If your mission is to shoot a difficult instrument approach in lousy weather the briefing tab will contain the Jeppesen approach plates appropriate for the mission. Throughout the documentation for the sim, both in the missions and elsewhere, it is apparent that the design was well thought out and implemented and the “help” portions are actually very helpful. Almost all of the reference material can be printed out right from within the sim. Fantastic implementation is all I can say.

The scope of FSX is such that a veteran flight simmer will find as much value in the software as a neophyte who has never picked up a flight sim. And speaking of beginners, the FSX Learning Center is an incredible resource for veterans that want to learn more about FSX or flying in general, and beginners that need to be led by the hand for their first steps. As I looked through the volume of information located in the Learning Center is just confirmed my growing suspicion that FSX was more than just FS9 + some new graphics; it is so much more than that." - Also from our review on FSX 5 years ago..

Hahaha! That HAS to be the quote of the year. Great article as always Beach.

Damn well thought out article Beach. Well done

I agree. As a private pilot FSX always impressed me with the quality of the missions. Many of them are quite challenging, in fact, too challenging for me to complete on the first effort.

FSX really does offer an incredible value for the price.

Indeed. I think there was one mission where you are flying the Baron (I think it is in the video) and you lose an engine. Well, I got a little slow when trying to cross the high mountains to get home and almost got down to Vmca and had to dive away into a valley to pick up speed. Reminded me of some of the high density altitude missions in DCS Black Shark.

I think the Amazon Trek mission was one of my favorite too.. Another one with a lot of fun stuff happening..

FS2002 is better than Flight :p

Excelent article and I agree with it at 100%!

Yes, the missions in FSX are really fun and much better (gameplay wise) than anything that Flight can or would or will offer! BTW, my favourite mission in FSX was an "Indiana Jones" style mission (sorry I forgot the name of this mission) where the player flew with a Grumman amphibious plane.

That was the Amazon Trek mission - also my favorite. It had such an "adventurous" feel to it..great scripting and some fun challenges to it..

BeachAV8R

What a coincidence.
I just ordered standard Edition FSX (15€ new) for gaming purposes yesterday, and now I see this here article.

Fantastic article Beach, always love the stuff you write. Did a few emails go back and forth between you and the person who gave a gushing review of flight in PC pilot?

Yes, that's the one! That mission really have some BIG surprises, some of them quite nasty but I won't develop on it in order to not spoil them.

Or the mission where you fly a secret agent to a remote island and then follow the plane you're tailing to land on a secret airstrip. Love that one. And I didn't even know about the secret agent twist until well into the mission!

Oh yeah..that one was a good one. In doing the review I reflew (after 5 years) the drug interdiction mission too.. Where you follow the DC-3 with the helicopter. That one is pretty fun too..

This has inspired me to re-install FSX. It should run pretty well on my new rig.

Follow the F/A-18 through the scud and land on the boat...

that's a challenge!

Also enjoyed the Vomit Comet quite a bit, great sound and visuals out over Edwards.

Even the soaring adventures are pretty cool.

I tell ya'..the first soaring adventure really got my blood pumping. After releasing from the tow plane I managed to circle up a few thousand feet.. Then I got the directions to head (west?) toward some fields. Well, in transit I lost lots of altitude searching to get back in the thermal. For a few minutes I was really, really low and starting to wonder where I could land. Suddenly I reached the proper point over the fields and started rising and was totally stoked because it took me high enough to reach that gate that you see me go through in the video. Then I headed over to do the ridge lift gates. Very fun mission that I had not fully experienced 5 years ago..but really enjoyed when doing the "research" for this article..



BeachAV8R

Good article, made me go and buy the digital downlaod Gold version. I was playing MS Flight after its release but later on lost interest as I was waiting for Alaska DLC (didn't bother with the cockpitless warbirds, although the RV-6 and Maule were fun to fly).

I have the FSX Gold but it's been off my hard drive for awhile. Did the community ever make a lot of downloadable new missions?

Excellent and totally accurate article, Beach. But I must say, I even enjoyed the FS2004 missions. FS2004 is also vastly superior as a "game" to Flight. And it is a sim, too, unlike Flight.

Bullseye, dead centre! A great review. FSX is still my favourite civil flightsim, for me it's the Falcon 4.0 of civil aviation (and the second best is FS2004). It was a sad day when MS pulled the plug. Perhaps if Flight falls on its face, they will think again about FSXI. I could never get on with X-plane, but I haven't looked at it for a while

For those interested - there are some after market mission add-ons for FSX that will also extend your entertainment value. I can't vouch for the quality of these packs. The only one I've played was the Rescue pack one..and it was pretty entertaining, but the price tag seems too steep still. Caveat emptor..

Missions!

Lots more!

More!

More!

Anyway..you get the idea..

BeachAV8R

Flight is the brain-child of bean counters who are delusional about their knowledge of the genre.

I got booted from the Avsim forums by Tom Allensworth himself for making the direct comparison of Flight to IL2 Birds of Prey... another meager attempt at making combat flight simulation palatable to the masses. If flight simulators were appealing to the masses, you would see them in numbers on the X-Box and PS3, but you don't. Those you do see have never been critical successes.

Flight was poorly conceived, developed (pared out of FSX to be quite honest), and delivered.

I hope it (Flight) is a miserable failure so that if there is to be a future for Flight Simulator, MS will realize that it must be made by people with the requisite knowledge, skills and passion for the genre necessary for its success.

Excellent article and on the mark opinion. Watched the whole video and the memories flooded back in ... time to fire up FSX again, methinks! Well done, Beech!

I haven't watched the whole video. I wonder how it ends..??



BeachAV8R

I do recall the soaring missions worked well, and were far more interesting and fun than I could ever have predicted! I also did a floatplane mission in the Beaver, and a 737 shuttle run up to Alien Land from Vegas!

I also remember that back in the FS2004 days, "Hovercontrol.com" used to have multiplayer missions where they could pre-position events, like a crash site or rescue, or add a landing pad somewhere abnormal. And that was with FS2004. I'm gonna guess they might have something like that for FSX today?

I also remember an African mission, flying an ultralight over the trees, searching for some animals among the hundreds of animals roaming about...

So I bought the FSX Gold pack.

After running that web optimisation thing, downloading the latest Nvidia drivers and then doing some sort of CPU affinity tweak I've got FSX running locked at a constant 30fps, silky smooth, on max settings, autogen the lot. Its actually quite cool. I exected the usual runaround that I've had with MSFS in the past. 2 weeks of tweaking followed by an uninstal as it never worked or looked quite how I wanted it. But this time no, my new rig and FS seem to have come together in some sort of flightsim nirvana.

The only thing is that I've found it so cool that I've bought some very expensive Orbx US Pacific NW scenery and the REX weather texture program ......

Thanks Beach for the excellent feature and the video.

Being increasingly bored with the shallow, uninspired and repetitive gaming content of Flight your article made me reinstall FSX again on a not so suitable machine just to check out the missions. Boy, what a difference.

Actually I would even consider me part of Flight's target audience. Don't have that much time anymore for really serious simming but would sometimes still like to do some flying. Flight with a well implemented mission system and some more suitable aircraft could do fine catering for that wish...

...if it just wouldn't be for all this unrealistic and boringly repetitive stuff they put in there as content. Aerocaches and hoop challenges are plainly ridiculous and the landing challenges and passenger/cargo missions wear out pretty quickly as there's almost no variety at all.

Now they are announcing more of the same content for the upcoming Alaska release along with one more of their ridiculous contraptions called the "cockpitless" aircraft. Yawn!

Sure, Flight is a beauty at first sight. But a very, very shallow and sterile one that starts to bore soon.

Tom