Flight Simulator X demo

By Tom Bramwell Published 10 August, 2006

Five hour queue though.

Microsoft has released a playable demo of Flight Simulator X, giving you the chance to get to grips with a fraction of the full game's 24,000 airports and countless planes. Good day for it too.

That fraction is two airports, and three missions on (or presumably above) the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean. The demo weighs in at 636MB.

The full game is due out in Christmas 2006, and will work on both Windows XP and Windows Vista, although the latter obviously won't be out by then. Those of you of a simulatory bent will enjoy the inclusion of dozens of new aircraft including the AirCreation 582SL Ultralight. We're particularly looking forward to the Maule M7-260C Orion with wheels and skis.

For more on the game, see our previous coverage and screenshots.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (14) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • ChrisOTR #1 6 years ago

    "Good day for it too."

    arf.

  • Dizzy #2 6 years ago

    5 hour queue.. makes sense since they have the search your HDD first for explosives.

  • ChrisOTR #3 6 years ago

    It's coming in fine off the Aussie FTP server if that helps :)

  • fergal_oc #4 6 years ago

    microsoft have it on their servers too, took less than 25 minutes.

  • moggsy #5 6 years ago

    How about an Xbox 360 version? That would be nice...

  • ChrisOTR #6 6 years ago

    Too many controls really moggsy, it would be a very different game. Although I would've thought they could make a fantastic Pilotwings type game for the 360 using the engine...

  • PearOfAnguish #7 6 years ago

    That five hour wait is actually part of the experience, it's an accurate simulation of what it's like trying to get on a plane.

  • KraftWerk #8 6 years ago

    ^_^ @ PearOfAnguish

  • UncleLou #9 6 years ago

    Too many controls really moggsy, it would be a very different game.

    The pad buttons would hardly be enough to control the planes' lights. :)

  • coojam #10 6 years ago

    Ooh a 360 translation would be lovely though. I'd really enjoy the Flight Simulator games more if, dare I say it, they were more "arcadey". There's too many games around with lovely engines but you're required to go around killing each other (GTA Liberty City Stories I'm looking at you)

  • NegativeZero #11 6 years ago

    Are you allowed to take any carry-on luggage on board?

  • DrRat #12 6 years ago

    Requires 15GB disk space - ouch!!

  • TheBigK #13 6 years ago

    Anyone played the demo yet? Would be nice to hear how it's looking/playing? :)

  • DrRat #14 6 years ago

    It is quite amazingly bad - especially in terms of graphics (settings set to the highest). Trees floating way up in the air, huge terrain texture seams visible, artifacts in the sky, missing geometry on ground models, missing lod models + popping (just because it's mentioned in the readme doesn't mean it's not bad!). The water quality slider kills the framerate completely when it's high - at "medium" setting the framerate recovers (still not good given what you actually see), but the water looks awful. There's no real detail on the terrain (I'd expect some small scale procedural textures), no grass, trees stay as simple billboards (well, crossed textured quads - I forget the details now). Overall the only nice thing was the clouds and the aircraft itself.

    The flight behaviour - well I guess it's probably OK. However, one of the 4 aircraft is a powered hang-glider, and I suspect sustained inverted flight is _not_ realistic behaviour! Also, even if it was capable of such flight, I would expect the controls to repond differently (given that it doesn't use control surfaces, but is controlled through shifting the weight balance). So, this doesn't give me much confidence that it's really that sophisticated.

    I didn't try the missions.

    I've played some unpolished demos before, but this is in a league of its own.