Learning To Like FSX

By Phil Colvin (3 May 2007)

Though he wasn't allowed to sell it, the young man in the Best Buy shirt brought it out for me to see. Reverently and with trembling hands, I reached for the shiny box as a Templar might have done in finally beholding The Grail. Already the impending date of deliverance, October 17, was burned indelibly on my cortex by the branding iron of desire. The Genie of Marketing had done his magic well, with first a trickle and later a barrage of screen shots and mpegs on the web, and not one but two versions of a free demo, not to mention the greatest magnitude of written hyperbole that's ever rained upon me in all my years of site-surfing. The coup-de-gras was the televison ad on those aviation-related History Channel shows; mildly insulting to a hard-core simmer like me in the way they dumbed down the ad, attempting to appeal to a broader audience - but tantalizing nonetheless. As the Great Day drew near I found myself boring everyone around me with the details of my obsession, telling them how after staring at all those demo screens my FS2004 didn't look so hot anymore. FS2004 had become like that proverbial girl in high school, who suddenly seemed unattractive when you met her sister. Let's face it: Ralphie's passion for the Red Ryder bb-gun was a childish infatuation compared to the naked lust I felt for FSX.

And then I bought the bloody thing, and a short time later began wondering whether to uninstall it. And thanking my lucky stars for the wisdom and foresight to have left my FS2004 intact. It wasn't the slower frame rates, I was prepared for that. And it certainly ran faster on my current system than FS2000 did when I upgraded from FS98 many moons ago. No, it was all the bugs!! Never before had I purchased any kind of flight sim (and I've got over twenty of 'em) equipped with demonically possessed flight models. The airplanes bucked from turbulence that didn't exist, and made unwanted turns of their own volition, fighting my control inputs to bring them back to straight and level. This happened about half the time (lately it's been happening more) with whatever aircraft I chose, about five minutes into the flight. I couldn't help thinking of Linda Blair on her bucking bed, screaming, "make it stop, make it stop!" Or Craig T. Nelson, discovering his poltergeist-infested house was built over Indian burial grounds. Did that same real estate developer sell property to the Aces studio? Maybe if I shouted into my Voice Buddy, "The power of Gates compels you!!" Well, at least the engine wasn't vomiting pea-soup...yet (isn't glycol about the same color, though?). Dutifully, I went to a troubleshooting site that Microsoft had put up with an absurdly long list of problems, and looked that one up. It said it was a fuel management problem. Five minutes into the flight?? But that "fix" applied only to FS2004, which had never had the problem. Another suggested the joystick was at fault, but that wasn't it (Microsoft joystick, by the way). The last one suggested reinstalling the game. I couldn't believe that one...the internet forums were already ablaze with Orwellian horror stories about installation problems, re-installation problems, activation problems et cetera, all for supposed anti-piracy reasons. Paid customers were spending hours and days on the phone, sometimes with no resolution except an eventual suggestion to try to get their money back...and they wanted me to risk the same fate by re-installing the game so maybe this time it would work as advertised? Still another movie came to mind...this time it was little Macaulay Culkin, walking bewildered and alone through the deserted house, and calling out to no one there..."Is this a joke?"

Ahh, but when it worked! The brightness! The sharpness! the clarity and the depth of color! Whichever of my old aircraft worked in the new sim were gorgeous, looking better than ever before. And the fantastic new detail in the big cities! Well, some of em, anyway. L.A., New York, my all-time fave Chicago, and several others looked much worse than either FS2002 or FS2004, even with the new sim's sliders maxed out...but Seattle looked utterly fantastic (guess you can't blame 'em for giving their home area priority), as did Las Vegas, Vancouver, Rio and others. Where they got it right, they got it right big-time! And the remarkable new water! And the stunning new ground textures! Well, some of 'em, anyway. What's with all the deserts, guys? You know, in all those areas that aren't supposed to have 'em? And speaking of sand, how come there's no sand on Daytona Beach, or Miami Beach, or Pensacola Beach, or Chicago's little beach, or...Wait! I have it! You used up all the virtual sand making those deserts, didn't ya? Nothin' left for the beaches! At least you're making the payware developers happy...more than one of 'em is selling DVD sets advertising "de-desertification"! As for me, I hope one of 'em sells the Grand Canyon or the Colorado River Gorge, 'cause I'd buy it. In FSIX (no, that's not a misprint, I'm just being backwards-compatible with the Roman numerals) the landclass in those areas resembled leopard skin. In FSX, it's megatons of that ubiquitous sand, as though some galactic garbage man had a planet-sized dumptruck he was looking to unload, and he was near Earth that day...although in the case of the Grand Canyon, it actually looks more like broken-up coffee cake with waaay too much butter-cream icing. The leopard skin was superior. And what's with the complete absence of appropriate dawn and dusk textures, with city and road lights coming on well before the sun sets, like real life (not to mention previous versions of the game)? Jeeez, guys, this was my favorite time of day to fly, and now the lights don't come on till it's almost totally dark! Well, that's okay, I can limit my flights to daytime, and summer (fewer deserts in the summertime), and those areas where the textures look good, and on about one of every four attempts I might even be able to fly for more than five minutes...

Am I nuts, or what?

But after all, in the final analysis, where else could you possibly spend a mere $69.95 for countless hours of enjoyment? Well, $69.95 plus tax, plus that DX10 compatible video card I'll eventually have to get... So $69.95, plus tax, plus $600.00 for a video card... wait, all the new cards are going to be PCI Express and I've got an AGP motherboard... alright then, so $1200.00 for a video card, motherbo.... wait, that's right, DX10 only works with Vista. Heck, I might as well just start saving for a whole new sys...

Am I nuts, or what?

But wait! I can still use it in the meantime, and have my countless hours of enjoyment! ...Well, after all the hours daily searching the forums for tweaks and fixes for the unprecedented volume of bugs and performance issues, many of which still have not been addressed... Oh yeah, and all the time scouring the payware sites for product upgrades, so I could continue to use things I've already paid good money for, in some cases very darned recently... But then, yes then would begin the countless hours of enj..... wait, oh yeah, and the hours and days and weeks of all my #%&**!! free time attempting to transfer my precious add-ons from my forty gigabyte FS2004 folder, trying, often in vain, to find things that will work in the new version, writing down endless lists of gauges I've got to delete, making those stupid little thumbnail screen shots for the texture folders just to get rid of those idiotic new "unknown aircraft" icons you see when you try to choose a plane, figuring that someday, somehow, if I can get used to its lackluster performance on my current system (during those rare occasions when the planes fly the way they're supposed to) while I meanwhile sacrifice my lifestyle to save money for hardware and OS upgrades, why then! Land O' Goshen, then at last, I would finally benefit from countless hours of enjoy...

Am I nuts, or what?

Ahh, but now many moons have passed (well six anyway), and, after countless hours of labor (far more than any amount spent flying as yet) I finally have a sufficient number of my old (and a couple of new) aircraft, sceneries and miscellaneous installed to consider the game well-rounded. And some of my most important payware has indeed been updated to work in FSX. And, yes, into every texture folder on every one of them I have inserted one of those dopey little thumbnail screen shots so that I can see which one I'm choosing from that unforgivably ill-conceived FSX aircraft selection window. What was it, guys?? Did you have a pet theory that flightsimmers are so anal-retentive that you can force them into wasting insane amounts of time doing something that you should have made automatic, as in previous versions? Well, you sure as heck proved that I am! Every time I do it, though, I feel like Julia Roberts straightening the towels for Patrick Bergen. Perhaps, like Julia, I'll fake my own death in one of the many FSX crashes, put on a disguise, and covertly take a bus to the small town of X-Plane. Anyway, the work is done, and in addition to the countless hours and months of labor and the many hours of system crashes, locked screens and demon-possessed flights, I've had maybe five or six hours of actual enjoy...

Am I nuts, or what?

Ahh, but now, looming on the horizon, raising hopes of a trouble-free FSX, is the much vaunted SP1! Running towards us like a young John Cleese, clad in his medieval armour, sword raised, running up the hill to engage the enemy...over and over again. but eventually he does run up that same hill one last time, and hopefully so will SP1 finally appear on the continually deferred MS horizon. And I have high hopes for it. Because right now, on my system anyway, this game is about as stable and predictable as Crispin Glover on the David Letterman show.

Phil Colvin
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com

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