Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
Okay, so I just got Flight Sim last night and have been fucking around with it.
Of course I was trying to first find my house, and in the process of trying to locate it, I crashed into.... my house. Fitting.
Fortunately, I live in a neighborhood which borders a large area of nature, so it's not too difficult to find. What's interesting is that everything looks fairly accurate from above, but once you crash, it all looks like a blocky mess.
I flew the Cessna. I haven't used a flight sim since the '80s, so I had a lot of learning to do. My dad was a recreational small plane pilot, so I flew as a passenger in real Cessnas in the past, but we're talking about almost 30 years since I last did so.
The tutorial blows. The concept is pretty cool -- an unseen female co-pilot with a pleasant voice, who directs you to do different things. However, I found it confusing and mostly unhelpful. It tried to have me fly around Sedona, but I was having a very difficult time controlling it, and kept going around in circles, and eventually slamming into the ground.
I decided to ditch the tutorial after learning the basics (but not doing very well at them), and took off on my own at an airport near my house. Suddenly I did a lot better without the co-pilot bugging me, and eventually I got sort of the hang of the Cessna.
I'm still having trouble recovering once the plane starts losing control. Like, it will start pitching left, I'll push it back right, and then it will pitch right too far, and I'll just never be able to get it under control until I ultimately crash. Any tips how to stop this?
I'm finding the land is a bit too green -- at least in southern California. It looks like we just had 3 weeks of heavy rain in February. That's nicer to see than everything looking brown and dead (as it tends to for about 9 months of the year), but I actually found it to be overly green, to where it starts to detract from the realism.
The terrain and cityscapes in general are hit-and-miss. Sometimes it looks very accurate, sometimes you're thinking "wtf" when you're flying over an area you know well, and it looks different. I did laugh at a big rocky hill nearby which kinda resembles Yosemite's Half Dome, which in reality doesn't exist here.
My system seems to handle it fairly well. I had it on the "high" setting at 60fps, and it was smooth, though the detail of the stuff on the ground would kind of draw itself as I got closer to it, which of course subtracted from the realism. I decided to give it a shot on "Ultra", also at 60fps, and it was far better than I expected. However, it wasn't quite as smooth anymore. Not noticeably bad, just not as smooth.
I do like the active pause feature, where you can halt everything and take a look around. I did that when I was over my house.
I flew to Mammoth Mountain, and it was interesting how it handled the detail. The mountain was shaped correctly, but there was snow only at the upper elevations. You could see the ski runs clearly. However, the chairlifts were all missing, aside from the little "house" at the top which protects the end of Chair 23. So it looks kinda weird, but still cool to visit.
Haven't tried the Vegas area yet.
The game itself was a 128GB download, which was the biggest download I've ever done, by a wide margin.
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