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Microsoft Flight Simulator X Deluxe DVD
From Microsoft
List Price: $39.99
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Average customer review:

Customer Reviews

serious simulator
I am taking flying lessons in a Cessna 172, and this simulator is on spot to practice procedures—aka fly by the numbers (which I learned is very important). However, using a joystick and keyboard is not the same as the real cockpit of course, and the details are not nearly as breathtaking in a real plane.

Good stuff. My preferred Flight Sim over all others.
I’ve been flying Microsoft for several years now, since FS2000 Pro. This version is a huge improvement over FS2000, Large improvement over FS2002, good improvement over FS2004.

One thing I REALLY like is being able to see the small hills the highways follow, and they’re where they are in real life. Nice. The terrain is similar to 2000 and 2004 but the trees and water are dramatically better. I think the flight dynamics are far, far better than any previous version. I also bought X-Plane based on the blade-element theory that the flight dynamics are as accurate as possible. Yech. I would hastily disagree. FSX is far more like what I experienced in real life vs Xplane. I don’t play the XPlane sim much. It’s too twitchy. When I fly, I FSX. It’s just better.
I’m running an HP quad core 2.2, Vista home premium-yum, 3 gigs of RAM and an 8500 video card w/ 256 megs of ram. Not state of the art, not overclocked at all, and I can run the sim on high, ultra high, with quite a bit of traffic, and some weather, and see FPS in the high 20’s low 30’s. If I turn the display up to 1600×1050 I start getting the jitters, so I keep it 1200x 768. I’ll bet it would run even better under XP though, as Vista sucks up 1/3 of my memory at idle.

Microsoft is very misleading… Unless you have a blazing fast powerful system save your money
Although the interior cockpits of this game have been greatly improved to look and perform much like the real thing, this game is a complete waste of money unless you have a PC with at least 3.5 Ghz and around 3 GB of RAM. I was completely disappointed after paying $50 for the deluxe edition and finding out that the graphical quality didn’t even work with the system specs written on the box. I will never buy another one of Microsofts products again. However as negative as this review might sound, for those that have an awesome state of the art system, this game can’t be beat. There is a lot more eye candy apparently than the 2004 version and if you get the deluxe edition you can even play online as an ATC controller or use a headset as a virtual pilot so it’s not all bad. If you have a pre-2007 system I recommend FS 2004 but if you will be buying a new computer soon I’d get MSFS X.