Crystal clear water and blue skies

Wet tarmac does actually look wet (sort of, anyway)

The folks at Microsoft have done a good job in marketing the graphical improvements of the game. The eager Flight Simulator enthusiast community was all stirred up about the early screenshots that showed an amazing level of detail and effects. Later on, this little storm in the teacup calmed down very quickly, as actual in-game shots came out. While the game indeed introduced some new and shiny Pixel Shader effects, unfortunately the improvements were much more down-to-earth than expected. If you have a Pixel Shader 2.0 capable graphics adapter in your system, you'll be treated to gleaming wet tarmac while on the ground and better looking, shiny and bumpy aluminum texture on the sides of your aircraft. The game's new and improved water effects are visible from the air and quite impressive too, especially when combined with a picturesque burning red sunset and a couple of friendly cumulus clouds as your wingmen. The dynamic weather system has also undergone a fairly thorough overhaul - a welcome improvement to previous versions of the game. Where in earlier Flight Simulators the pilot could casually peek down through even the most impenetrable foggy and wet cloud, in FSX you can't actually see down when you're within a cloud layer. Seeing the ground is very, very helpful for most Sunday pilots, but having realistic weather in a simulated environment is a big step up for the Flight Simulator series.

"I want to fly!" No, son, let's just follow procedure

The Flight Simulator can satisfy your flying urges in a multitude of ways. You can go ahead and pick an aircraft and just take it for a spin (hopefully one that is horizontal as well as vertical -Ed), or you can choose to fly an airliner, following strict procedure and experience a very close imitation of what airline captains experience every day in their comfy sheep skinned recliners. There are also 50 ready-made missions ranging from long-haul cargo runs and challenging instrument approaches to searching for missing elephants over a vast savanna using an ultra-light trike, and everything in between.

Not much visual glory here: this is how the game looks on a system close to the minimums specs - and still runs very poorly

What's really worth noting here is that flying "by the book" can actually be enjoyable on a system that would not necessarily cut for a different kind of Flight Simulator X experience - enjoying the scenery or buzzing down your local high-street with the aircraft of your choice. The catch is that when you're trying to simulate everything that takes place in a real cockpit during a flight, you'll be much more focused on looking at the instruments, maps and manuals than the scenery. You can easily drop the visual quality a notch or two without virtually any penalty to your flying experience. Just bear in mind that the game should run at a rate of 20 frames per second or more. Below that, controlling the aircraft becomes more and more difficult, and handling tough situations becomes unrealistic at best, impossible at worst.

The basic hardware requirements listed by the developer are surprisingly low but don't expect the game to run very well on systems close to the listed minimum. With the specified lowest system, you can expect very crude visuals and frame rates in the low teens and even dropping below 10 on occasion. 256MB of system memory is clearly not enough for enjoyable gameplay either. Sure, the game will launch and run, but to be brutally honest you'll get to your destination by foot before your polygon jet and landscape have loaded. With insufficient RAM, intermittent stops and jerks caused by extensive hard drive swapping are really annoying and effectively kill any illusion of actually being up in the air. Most aircraft won't just stop mid air for a few seconds and then continue as if nothing happened, so steady frame rates are definitely something you need to enjoy this game.