So, I've been away from the flight simming universe for a few years, mainly boredom and thinking it was just the same code re-worked with different textures and lighting effects. The last Sim I truly used in anger was X-Plane 10. Better than FSX or P3D physics wise, but not quite graphics wise, but X-Plane 10 lacked the content, and the content that you could get was little better than freeware and that the Earth looked, well, barren. There was also the fact that developers on all 3 sims were just churning out the same aircraft again and again. "A new C172," "Our brand new C172N," "Come check out the highly anticipated C172S." Or WHen I did manage to find an interesting aircraft it was usually well modelled with a crappy cockpit, or a great cockpit with a crappy aircraft model. Either that or it was an unashamedly money grab. I became very apathetic towards flight sims in general.

Then about a year ago I came across a Youtuber you may have heard about, Frooglesim. His video was about Microsoft revealing their first proper new flight sim since FSX. (We'll skip the disaster that was, Flight.) It looked interesting, the texturing looked good, the models accurate, but what grabbed my attention was the fact it was using high detail terrain AND actual photo scenery. It all looked pretty good, maybe on the side of, too good to be true. So I kept an eye on it and found other videos and articles on it. When the pre orders were being offered I took a chance and bought the full fat Deluxe Premium. I was not disappointed in the least.

The day came when my new shiny box of discs came, all 10 of them and duly started the installation. What a palaver that was. I don't know what everyone else experienced during their install, but mine failed twice as "we couldn't connect to your X-Box account, please check you internet connection and try again." The problem was I hadn't signed into my X-Box account on the stupid X-Box thing on my PC. What dope programmed that instead of a prompt to sign in? This was but the first of a mountain of installation headaches. It wouldn't install on my nice new SSD bought specially for it, it had to be in the main Windows folder, but I coerced it to do so. Then came to actual installation. I kid you not, 8 hours later the disc installation was done. And it still wasn't finished. I fired it up the next day and I needed to download the additional content that made it the Premium Deluxe version as the version on the discs was just the basic version. Three hours later I am finally sat looking at the cockpit of, yeah, a C172S, but something didn't look right. It was all blocky and blurred and the lovely ground textures I had seen in articles missing, replaced with what can only be described as, kids finger painting gone wild.

I just turned it off and left it till the next time I had a chance to look at it. When I did, the auto graphics setting had made everything low, litterally, 640x480 and 16 colours with all the bells and whistles turned off as according to some dumb MS employee, my computer was a potato. It wasn't, it was at that point in time, late 2020, a not to shabby gaming PC (specs below,) able to run most titles at ultra, minus the frame rate. (I'm not a frame rate snob, I prefer eye candy, and if it looks good at 40-50, but crappy at 60+, I'll take the frame rate hit.) So I tinkered and got the graphics all set to make it look good and there it was in all its glory, I could even make out my own house. I had a lot of fun exploring various parts of the World. The next day, I loaded up the sim up and, back to potato graphics. I finally managed to make the settings I chose stick, don't how and was having fun. Right up until the mandatory updates came along. Now that is a story for another time. Of head banging, hair pulling, constant crashes, hardware issues, and nearly uninstalling it permanently. Also downright frustration at both Asobo and MS not letting you skip it and forcing you to stare at a download screen for an hour or two. That is for later.

Toodle-oo!

For the PC geeks here is the specs I installed it on and my current specs.

Install,

i7 7700K, GTX 1080ti, 16Gb ram, 2Tb M.2 SATA SSD.

Current,

AMD R9 5900X, RX 6900XT, 32Gb Ram. Same SSD.