I picked up FSX late last year, after a long hiatus from MS FS. I've always been into flightsims in general, although I focused on more combat-related sims. The golden standard in that regard, for me, was always Falcon 4.0 with its various community-made add-ons, like OpenFalcon and now Falcon BMS 4.33. I work in the armed forces and have a couple of real-life F-16 pilot friends, both confirming BMS 4.xx being VERY close to the real thing, so I was a happy camper.
I did have a couple of stints with both FS9 and FS2004, but for some reason it never did hook me completely.
Until last year, when I got FSX-SE and started spending some time with it. Although I'm currently limited to an Asus RoG gaming laptop, I do manage to run FSX fairly well. I get the odd OOM crashes at times, and I'm still tweaking settings and config from time to time.
Apart from that, I've invested in both freeware and payware scenery and aircraft, got pretty much all of the larger ORBX packages installed, as well as a healthy amount of different aircraft to fly.
So far there's very little with FSX that is not interesting. I love spending time flying around, I do it almost every day. I still have a load of bluray movies and tv-series that I've bought, that have been put on the backburner since I'm spending my evenings and weekends flying instead, and that is practically unheard of in my case.
What I tend to find interesting is sightseeing, flying around and enjoying the scenery. Often enough places I've been over the last 10 years, as well as places that I've always wanted to visit, but haven't gotten around to yet. Just last weekend I flew a Bell 212 down through Grand Canyon, as well as Yosemite and Monument Valley. Awesome trips really. But I also do local stuff from Norway, like reliving the summer trips to northern Norway that me and my girlfriend have done over the last 3 years. Lots of nice scenery, with mountains starting down in the ocean and going straight up.
Only limit for now is that my laptop, while still fairly powerful, grinds to a slideshow around major cities, especially in the USA. Sometimes other places too, often I need to pause the game to let all the nicer textures load, before I fly a bit more again. Not perfect, and a non-starter in the long run, but for now I make do. A big cruncher of a desktop will find its way into my apartment withing the close foreseeable future...
Also, like probably everybody else, it's an easy fix to get a new airplane to fly, and keep things interesting that way. At this point I have more planes than I've got time to focus on, so I won't get bored anytime soon, if ever.
I have this weird fetish for Cold War bombers/newer bombers, it was actually the main reason for getting FSX in the first place; I wanted to fly the B-1B Lancer, and got the Virtavia B-1B at the same time as I installed FSX. Been spending a fair amount of time with that. Once the bug bit, I got many of the other cold war bombers as well. The Virtavia F-111 (I go for the FB-111 version almost exclusively), Captain Sims B-52 Driver, IRIS Avro Vulcan, the Area51 B-2A and just yesterday the Virtavia B-47.
So far I'm enjoying the B-1B and the F-111 the most, although the B-52 is awesome.
Just as with the scenery, and flying in areas that I have visited, I tend to do the same with many aircraft. With the exception of my bombers, I often get aircraft that I have traveled with at some point. The PDMG Boeing 737-800/900 is one of my latest, and I'll probably be spending a lot of time with that. Being a military guy, it's a safe bet I'll be flying the P-8 version... :rolleyes:
I've flown with a lot of different military aircraft, and most of these currently sits in my virtual hangar. Captain Sims C-130, had quite a few trips with that over the years. Jumped from one back in my airborne days, flew up north on a NATO exercise in 2012, with the exact same aircraft that ended up crashing in the Kebnekaise mountain range in Sweden just a few days later.
Flew with the C-17 in Afghanistan, so I got the Virtavia C-17 yesterday.
And I've enjoyed more than the usual amount of helicopter flights for a ground pounder, so I am more than just a latent rotorhead :)
Our main transport helicopter here is the Bell 412 SP; the closest I got to that was Cerasims Bell 412 EP. Very nice model. Since I enjoy the good old Huey blade-slap so much, I immediately ended up getting the Cerasim 212 as well, and finally the Cerasim Bell 222. I love them all. Over the last 2 weeks, they're probably the aircraft I've spent the most time with.
Having flown with the UH-60 Blackhawk as well, I got Cerasims version of that. Once again, a very nice model. I also loved riding along with the Chinook (jumped from that one as well, over Kosovo), so I've got both Virtavia and Milviz CH-47.
The only helicopter that I have ridden, once, on a NATO exercise in 1999, and haven't actually got yet, is the CH-46 (sorry Rupert....). Will probably end up getting that as well...
I was taking part in an exercise with our own troops in the UK just a couple of weeks ago, and we had brought 2 Bell 412s over, ferrying them across in a C-17. Just to show how much I enjoy being around helicopters, whenever they started up, you'd find me standing next to the groundcrew, just feeling the noise, the blade slap and the sweet whiff of jetfuel. Loved every second of it :o
At the end of the day, I gotta echo Rupert here....I like it low and slow, and sometimes low and fast, with my bombers. But there's just so much that I can do with this simulator, I don't think I'll ever run out of options, or become bored. Just yesterday, with my brand new Captain Sim C-130, I just decided to go low and reasonably fast. Was surprisingly enjoyable!
