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