After convincing my wife it'd be a sure-fire way to keep the grandkids wanting to come over to see us
I spent some fairly serious $$$ to get it up and running. WOW! This game/simulator has photo-realistic terrain and aircraft from Cessnas and Piper Cubs to the largest most modern commercial passenger liners and lots of military jet aircraft.
I have a pilot's license but so far I have been crashing more than I have been landing lol. I was flying a Cessna Citation twin-engine business jet and tried to land at Catalina Island (off the SoCal coast) and it did not go well lol. I have it set (at this point) so the aircraft will survive a crash so what happened was pretty funny. I came in from too high of an altitude so I dove at the runway hoping to pull up/flare just before touchdown but nope. I ended up going off the runway and into the bushes, the windshield was showing nothing but big bushes. As an experiment I gave it more power and it started plowing through the bushes until I got to an open area with a dirt road (that actually exists) and tried to follow it in the Citation biz-jet no less lol. I ended up rolling the jet completely upside down on a side-hill and noticed my landing gear was unextended so flipped the lever and sure enough, while watching with the external view mode, the landing gear extended so they were pointing up. I had to laugh.
I used our old 55" TV for the monitor but had to buy a new computer ($$$$$$$) and the flight controls which weren't cheap either. But for an old guy with no more rock crawling expected in his future this isn't such a bad way to go. MSFS is a BIG game/simulator, size-wise, and it took nearly 5 hours to download over my cable modem. It has the entire world (think like Google Earth) so you can literally land at any airport in the world. Its main airports are accurate down to the movement of luggage trucks, other aircraft moving/taking off & landing, and the locations of everything.
It even provides real-time weather so the weather where you're at or land at will have the real weather that is happening there at that time. I made a flight to near Moscow and it was dark there so I saw Moscow at night, it was frigging amazing. Complete with cars driving around below me and boats moving up the rivers.
It's a pretty amazing game so if you have any interest in flying and have a little $$$ to burn, it's a great fun way to waste some time. My wife even likes it because she knows the grandkids will love flying it. Only one is big enough now but it won't be long before the others will get it.
This is a Cessna 172, you should see some of the other cockpits. By the way everything is SO real you can even see the texture in the seating, carpeting, and dashboard cover. You can even get up and "walk" into the rear of the aircraft if it's a bigger airplane like a passenger carrier. All the seats are there and even the magazine racks have magazines in them. They put a lot of work into this to make it as real as possible. Some even install "seat shakers" on their chairs so they can fell the vibration of the runway or the engine(s). Frigging amazing game/simulator.
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