Sunday, January 7, 2018

How I got started with Flight Sim Games

I wanted to tell you about my history with Flight Simulation Games for PC. When I was 15 I played a lot of Computer games, but the first time a saw a flight simulator was at a friends house. That was around 7 years ago, my friend was very excited about his new game called Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight. So I went over to check it out.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 A century of flightI was really impressed, however in the beginning it was not so easy to really fly an airplane. There were lots of controls and things you had to watch. But the game included a flying school, so you could learn how to fly in an easy step by step way.

Back then the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, also known as FS9 was one of the best Flight Simulation Games on the market. There was almost no real competition.

The game had a bit more than 20 different airplanes you could fly. As the theme of this flight simulator was “A Century of Flight”, there were several historic aircrafts, for example the Douglas DC-3, the “The Tin Goose” or even the Wright Flyer.



The best thing was, that for the first time, this flight simulator software had real weather with true three-dimensional clouds, that were forming and dissolving. You could even synchronize the weather with the real world by downloading weather data from real world weather stations.

It was also possible to generate different weather patterns like snow and thunderstorm conditions. The 3D graphics were pretty awesome, lots of small details in the landscape and there was lot’s of traffic at the big airports, just like in the real world.

I was hooked very quickly and wanted the game for myself. Unfortunately but my PC at the time was a bit too old for that game, so I needed to save money for a new computer.

But for this game it was totally worth it to get a brand new fast computer to be able to play it smoothly. Well, and just a few weeks later I got my new PC, and started diving into the world of Flight Sims.

I went through the flying school pretty fast and started playing with my friends on LAN. Playing Flight Simulator Games pretty soon became my biggest hobbie. Sound kind of geeky, but who cares. It’s fun, and it sure helps me a lot now, when I’m going to start  flight school to get my real life pilot license.

Looking back to this game today, I can say it’s still a great game, and I know many people who still play this version, although there are newer versions of this and many other better Flight Games today.

That’s it for today, until next time.

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