Thursday, September 07, 2006

New review up on GamingNexus

Well, to be completely accurate, this one is a preview rather than a review. It's a subtle distinction in that there more than likely won't be a host of changes to the program between the 'Preview Build' and the 'Release Build,' but it's important to note nonetheless. (Is nonetheless one word or three??)

This one is a preview of the soon-to-be-released update to Microsoft Flight Simulator. I believe this will the the 10th version, so as you can imagine, it's a very polished piece of work. Frankly, to this day it boggles the mind to consider the incredible functionality you get for around $60. Technological miracles on a beer budget!

Here's the link, and pay particular attention to the italicized comments my editor always throws in:

http://www.gamingnexus.com/Default.aspx?Section=Article&I=1189

As a bonus for my loyal readers, here's a tidbit not reported in the review (because I forgot, to be honest):

One of the missions included in the new version is Red Bull Air Racing! I had really been looking forward to that, but I've found that I can't do it without crashing. That would probably be the case in real life, so it points to the accuracy of the sim, I suppose. That said, having watched Red Bull Air Racing on TV, it seems that the sim plane has a higher rolling intertia than the real planes. On TV, you see these guys throwing the plane into knife edge in less than a second, and pretty routinely stopping the roll at exactly 90 degrees before quickly snapping it back to level flight. In the sim, it is very hard to get the roll to stop that quickly, and I invariably over-roll to an attitude well past knife edge. Could be me, could be the sim, but in order to maintain some degree of self-esteem, I'm blaming the sim.

No comments:

Post a Comment