Wonderful Rio

By Phil Colvin (6 July 2005)

his was the first scenery I ever wanted to buy - in fact the first payware for FS of any kind. It's been around forever. The first version of this World Sceneries product I saw advertised on the web was for Flight Simulator 2000, over four years ago. The screenshots enthralled me with their romance and realsim - but I never bought it. Although already a user of the MSFS series a couple of years, I had only just discovered all the freeware at the simming sites, and that gave me plenty to do. But I kept coming back to those screenshots. I even saved them and just looked at them sometimes, thinking, "you know you have to get it eventually".

When I got Flight Simulator 2002 one of the first things I did was to look at the default version of Rio de Janeiro, and then look for an updated version of Wonderful Rio. Sure enough, it wasn't long before one came out - but I never bought it. I just saved those screenshots and looked at them sometimes. Fast forward to last year, and I was asked to review that same company's sceneries for Conhongas and Guarulhos airports - not that far from Rio. And sure enough, by then I was looking at screenshots I had saved from their Wonderful Rio 2004! Well consarn it, that was finally the motivator I needed! By then I had bought 6 or 8 payware aircraft but still never had paid for scenery, and the waiting was over. I saw they had an expansion pack to increase the area and number of airports covered, so I bought that too.

And wow. In these first two shots you see the default FS2004 rendition (left) of the world-famous Impanema Beach area, and then the exact same shot in Wonderful Rio (right). And the difference is wonderful indeed! It's completely transformed from a generic-looking beach that you might have to think awhile to identify. Now it's unmistakenly recognizable, like a picture postcard from a five-star hotel. And not just the beach. Sugarloaf, the cable car, the world-famous Christ the Redeemer statue, and myriad other details are included in this download. It covers 3200 square miles around the city, including of course Santos-Dumont and Galeao International airports in considerable detail and a few smaller strips and helipads as well. The expansion pack covers an equal area from Guanbara Bay to Marambaia, and adds another six airports with more-than-default detail, though not as much as the two biggies in Rio. (Although they're still pretty cool - including a huge old military hangar at Santa Cruz Air Base, with a wide-open hangar door at one end and a mostly-closed door at the other that just begs to be flown through by a fighter plane.) If you download both packages you can approach Rio from quite a few miles away and enjoy very superior scenery all through your flight.

And it really is very superior in appearance, almost equal (in the daytime, though not at night) in color and detail to the Megascenery packages (several of which I have and enjoy), and even superior to them in one regard - their three-dimensional appearance from distance and altitude. It's easy to achieve suspension of disbelief and immerse yourself in this region. But it is also superior in one important regard other than appearance: performance. You see, not only do I admire the quality of the scenery, made all the more appealing by its world-class location, but I get frame rates little if any different from those when using the default scenery! That's right, I'm not kidding. No advised limitations here on your altitude or airspeed - don't need 'em! Consequently I fly here pretty often.

And in addition to the superb mountains, beaches, peninsulas, etc. the number of buildings you see is multiplied manyfold, some of them quite obviously modeled after real-world architecture, being quite unique in appearance. One of these days I'm going to have to do the research and find out what some of those buildings are! But I enjoy flying around them in any case.

Incidentally, the jet in the screenshots is Bjorn Buchner's Atlas Impala Mk 2 in the "gannet" texture, available right here at FlightSim.Com.

Since long before my birth, movies and travelogues have romanticized this magically beautful city, and I've paid attention to them my whole life. I don't know if I'll ever get to visit; I hope so. But with this download, a good PC and FS2004, one can feel the magic a little anyway.

Phil Colvin
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com

Buy Wonderful Rio here

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