It’s here in my ol’ stomping grounds where I can’t resist the urge to pause the game (literally by hitting the Pause key on my keyboard) to freeze my plane in midair.
Saskatoon, SK, Canada’s Parkridge community, in mixed clouds. While I continually joke that any point in Saskatoon is about a fifteen-minute drive to any other, a bird’s eye view really helps me to appreciate its size. From the air, I realise just how close my home was to a local park, with two elementary schools (one public, one Catholic) nestled within it.
When I last visited, the area around the two new schools was pretty barren, but now it’s full of new homes new families starting out on the edge of Saskatoon’s boundaries in a community called Blairmore. Now, there’s two - a public one and a Catholic one - each about a five minute walk from where my parents still live. In the twenty or so years I’ve been away from Saskatoon, it’s changed in leaps and bounds my closest high school was about twenty-five minutes towards the downtown area. Diefenbaker International Airport (love you, CYXE), heading down runaway 27 before turning west and buzzing my childhood home in Parkridge. It’s likely no surprise that most of my flight plans revolve around Saskatchewan. If you can handle the wait times in-between, then your reward is an absolutely breathtaking journey. Before all that, you’ll need to enter into a state of zen just to get past the game’s inital loading sequence. Primarily it’s an exercise in patience, from having to go through tutorial missions so you’re not constantly fighting the stick to waiting for a long-haul journey to complete, seemingly in real-time. (Photo: Steve Wright/Microsoft)įlight Simulator can be a struggle at times, but it’s all very worth the effort you put in. Paris’ Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro in overcast conditions. Um, what? It was too late by that point and I plumetted straight into the Pacific Ocean.
After letting my autopilot manage a three hour flight the one time, I took back controls to see an on-screen tooltip informing me I needed to turn my plane’s engine on. There’s an Achievement for starting up an Airbus A320neo without any assistance, yet no matter how hard I try, the pre-flight checklist mysteriously appears half-done when I load in. If you can fully turn off the HUD and get rid of giant blue signs telling you that the famous building you’re flying in front of is the Sydney Opera House, I couldn’t tell you how. Menus are hidden behind menus, and behind those are even more I still struggle to get things going the exact way I want even with 15 recorded hours of experience in hand. No joke: before you do anything else, go through those tutorials.Įven with that wealth of information secured in your toolbelt, I cannot stress that Flight Simulator is heavy on “simulator”. The tutorials are packed full of information on flying, doing so without the need to manipulate controls every second of your journey, engine management, landing, travel planning and much more. Airspeed and altitude are tied together by that pesky little thing called gravity pull back on the yoke too much and you’re going to slow down (or worse). Abandoning the idea of “pull back on the stick and then don’t crash,” I quickly learned the basics. (Photo: Microsoft)Ī total of eight tutorial missions are surprisingly informative, acting as much as physics lessons as a flight how-to.
Alternatively, I guess you could just let your AI co-pilot do all the flying, but where’s the fun in that? Microsoft Flight Simulator’s eight tutorials. For any modicum of success or enjoyment, you’ll need to go through some tutorials and master the basics before you succumb to the temptation to treat Flight Simulator as a postcard generator. I’m getting ahead of myself though before all that happened, I was stalling planes on the runway or flipping them over and into rivers because I had no idea what I was doing. Nevertheless, I took advantage of the situation and went sightseeing, the occasional tear welling in my eye in the process. For Saskatoon - Saskatchewan’s largest city at around 250,000 people - that level of detail isn’t quite there. After all, I won’t be getting there in person any time soon.įlight Simulator is a technological marvel, one that pulls data from Bing Maps, streaming imagery and real-time weather as you fly.įor a large city like Melbourne, Toronto or New York, Bing’s photogrammetry is detailed down to a 5-centimeter resolution. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic though, I couldn’t resist the urge to treat it like a personal transporter device, virtually beaming over to my hometown of Saskatoon, SK, Canada for a good ol’ sticky beak. I am very well aware that Microsoft Flight Simulatoris meant to be just that: a flight simulator.