Microsoft Flight Simulator is out tomorrow, and hopefully I should have my 10-disc packaged copy in my hands if it makes it here from Germany in time. (I've also bought a new SSD, because the damn thing takes up 150GB and I need my existing two for system stuff, ROM collections and video editing!)
One thing I've seen from a few videos I've been watching is that this is pretty much the first iteration of Flight Simulator where you can literally go and find your actual house. In past installments, you might have been able to fly somewhere near it — or if you were proficient with scenery editors, perhaps even plonk your own custom house down somewhere — but in this one, you can actually go and find your real house and buzz it in the aircraft of your choice. Or, as most people seem to be doing, making use of the excellent "Drone Camera" in order to check things out in a bit more detail without the risk of crashing. Rather delightfully, you can pause the sim in the air, fling your drone out of the window and go look at things while your plane just hangs around up in the sky.
One of the first things I think I'm going to try in the sim is to take off from Southampton airport, find my house here in Southampton, then see if I can "VFR" it to my parents' house back in East Anglia. I'm interested to see if stuff like the road network is modelled in enough detail for me to be able to follow the route I would drive to go visit them — and conveniently, the village in which my parents live has an airstrip, so I can even go and land before buzzing their house with the drone camera. I just probably won't be taking an airliner on this trip, since I'm not sure the owners of aforementioned airstrip would appreciate a 747's presence.
But then that's the beauty of a simulation like this; if I wanted to do something ridiculous like attempt to land a 747 in the village where I grew up, I can do just that.
Hmm, now I'm tempted. Airliners look complicated, though; might just stick to the good ol' reliable Cessna to begin with!
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