Microsoft has generally done an excellent job of rendering the basic aircraft included in each release of Flight Simulator, and the planes in this expansion pack uphold that tradition. Sim fans could always add the F/A-18 to Flight Simulator through third party add-ons, and Flight Simulator has typically come with an aircraft carrier you could practice landing on, but Acceleration puts them both together natively for the first time in the product. Navy’s multirole fighter is the headlining aircraft in Acceleration. The second is the simulation’s new expansion pack, titled Acceleration ($30, requires Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and an installed copy of Flight Simulator X, 2Ghz processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB hard drive space, 128MB DirectX 9–compliant video card, DVD-ROM drive, Microsoft, Speaking of Hornets, the U.S. This patch, available free from Microsoft (at fixes some bugs and improves performance, although FSX is still a hog and needs a lot of computing power to run smoothly.

Like the aforementioned aircraft, FSX has seen revisions since its 2006 release. Things like mission awards add excitement and give the virtual pilot incentives to play. The latest revision does more for the intangibles of simulation than previous revisions.

The tenth version, Flight Simulator X (FSX), brings the usual incremental enhancements to all the product’s features, but is most notable for the work put into improving scripted missions. Flight Simulator continues to see improvements to its core features of graphics, flight modeling and world modeling. The title is approaching 27 years as a successful software product, longer even than Windows, the company’s flagship offering. The leading exception is Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. Their lives are ephemeral, and only rare exceptions live multiple years. The Chance Vought F4U Corsair, the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark and the Boeing F/A-18 Hornet are but a few examples of designs that suffered teething problems before refinements helped them reach their true potential.įlight simulations lack the longevity of a production aircraft, and therefore are unlikely to see the revisions that can keep them on a path of improvement. Perhaps an evaluation of an airplane is less about the plane than it is about its maturation. A new expansion pack revs up Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.

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