Hello! I never did add an FSX article? Well, here is the long belated/awaited FSX article! And with more to come later.
Ah, looking back I see I don’t have many gaming articles on games I like. Let’s go ahead and add one right now to change pace, and to add a slightly different vibe to the place. It’s not one ‘hard-core’ gamers may play, but it is still highly entertaining. With my interest in travel, flight, and planes this simulator manages to please most of my wants and desires. Though, it does lack in scenery quality.
Am I reviewing FSX? Maybe, maybe not. I simply wanted to share my for the game with others, nothing more.
(Link – MySite) – P-3C V2.9 – Lockhead and Kawasaki Canadian Air-force over Northern Canada
(Images of varying quality and planes. Not actual representation as I don’t have the top of the line gaming computer. This game is a resource hog.)
Well, where to start? Started off with F98 with horrible results. Managed to learn how to land a plane in that game and moved onto “A century of Flight”. Had most of my fun and craziness there while recreating my flight from Montreal to Amsterdam. All fun and games, but got bored without any cool AI planes, or add-ons so I started searching high and low for them. Went onto multiplayer a lot with military jets until FSX came out.
Now I’m basically at the point where I can land the plane semi-professionally while my ATC skills are “meh” at best. I can obey AI ATC due to the yellow line it shows you when landed, but multiplayer? As long as I play on “free flight” I’m fine online. If I was to grab a mic and speak? Ya, no.
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Site’s of interest:
-Simviation- Add-on download site:
http://simviation.com/1/browse-All+Files-0-0
– Flightsim
http://flightsim.com/
– Youtube channel – Cessna154 Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/Cessna154
– My World Tour – Forum thread:
http://forums.swgbex.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=382
– J7w1 Shinden (as seen below in images):
ftp://www.simviation.com/dynamic/1J7W1.zip
(Use Firefox to right-click download. It hissyfits on Chrome from what I can tell.)
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(Link – MySite) Aurora landing @ Yellowknife during dense white-out/fog.
So what makes this game fun for me?
1) Flying –
Grabbing a plane (any) and letting off into the air with the challenge of keeping it up there. Some planes just won’t listen. It’s also not as easy as people may think when trying to land a real or digital plane. Even in the digital world you have to keep in mind of traffic, altitude, aircraft stress (if settings high), not crashing into runway or scenery, not having your plane take control of you while staying airborne. Sometimes I have to even estimate when to descend towards an airport and how to line up with ILS to have airport guide advanced planes down towards the airport. Gotta love it!
I also tend to keep the game on real-time and leave it on auto-pilot half-to-most of the time. It gives the game a more realistic and enjoyable vibe for me. It may end up boring for casual so feel free to fly without autopilot, or limited autopilot use. I love flying around real time around the world getting that certain vibe when flying over a certain digital nation in FSX while forcing it with youtube or radio channels.
HEY! I know what you maybe thinking – “Go fly there yourself and experience the fun first hand!” Well, you’re right but hey, tickets don’t come cheap. Trust me, I’d love to.
It would also go without saying that it would help having a joystick!
2) Multiplayer –
I play with a few friends that have this whenever possible. We basically do airport hops – going from one airport to the next while enjoying the scenery. We grab small private, fighters, or passenger liners while trying to “role-play” in an aviation sense. I’ve got a program called FShost that allows different versions to play with one another without ruining the professionalism of VATSIM.
FS-Host: http://www.chocolatesoftware.com/fshost/
3) Weather –
It’s always interesting to see real weather translated into Flight Simulator. Same could be said, and even more so with friends online seeing the exact weather as planes either bounce or get rained on, rarely with snow. I tried storm chasing during summer and had some interesting results appear in game.
4) Add-ons: –
With the ability to add scenery, AI planes, hosting tools, and the like makes the game far more entertaining. It may not translate to substituting for real life, But it sure as hell makes it far more entertaining in pleasing a few desires in wanting me to travel to the places I’m exploring ingame.
For example: You can add textures to improve Vancouver airport, Japan’s Haneda, insert new moon textures, add KLM airlines AI, some planes for yourself, sci-fi ships hanging over cities, boats to float about in the sea, or even ATC tools for both the ATC and search planes.
All the images you see in this article are custom planes and scenery for mine and your enjoyment made by skilled and enthusiastic modders in the Flight Sim community.
(Link – MySite) Beaver – Raven theme flying over Northern Canada during a cloudy sunset.
(Link – MySite) A340-200 – Formula 1 theme in Hong Kong Int during test flight.
(Link – MySite) – Aurora awaiting take-off from rainy Honolulu, Hawaii International.
(Link – MySite) – Aurora in Pacific heading to Wake island.
The next half of these images maybe in .bmp’s….I had a hard-drive error causing me to lose most of my images with these safely on dropbox. These next sets of images are of my favorite Japanese plane – J7W1 Shinden – that never got to see the light of day in the Japanese skies of WW2.
If you want the plane for your FSX then search up “Tim Conrad” and “Kyushi J7W1”. I tried linking it but FSX results aren’t coming up for some odd reason.
(Link – MySite) – Shinden airport hopping in southern portion of Japan. It appears to be an island chain north of Fukuoka.
(Link – MySite) – Shinden south of Osaka.
(Link – MySite) – Fish farm? Google Map’s link for comparison.
Waiting to either cross over or wait to see my friend land his little Katana plane at Fukuoka airport.
(Link – MySite) – Shinden observing a JAL airliner taking off from Fukuoka.
(Link – MySite) – AI Traffic at Fukuoka at roughly 8 am Japan time and 3 am my time. Yes, I was up that late with friend.
(Link – MySite) – A sunrise from Fukuoka in a wallpaper-esque manner. Just look at that crisply sweet sky! Now go look at yours!
Stopping swiftly in Canada for a bit with our killed & national aviation pride – Avro Arrow! Flew it over Vancouver in this image in a test flight. It’s an unnecessary payware item that should actually be freeware in the way it was modeled and made. If anything, Shinden far outshines the modeled Avro Arrow in add-on quality; they should swap. It’s a decent model that just barely even beat’s it’s freeware competition.
(Link – MySite) – Avro Arrow over Vancouver, Canada.
And another game session with my friend – Back with the Shinden at Narita Airport.
(Link – MySite) – Shinden observing a 747-400 JAL early in it’s take-off overhead.
Just look at that clear sky! I love seeing this here in Ottawa as well with similar trails being left behind. I actually light up with joy trying to spot as many planes as I could – 3-4 being my max count.
(Link – MySite) – Passing Tokyo while heading to Nagoya with two JAL planes heading opposite directions.
(Link – MySite) – Me and friend flying from Nagoya to Osaka in 737’s.
(Link – MySite) – Me intentionally blocking runway at Osaka’s interior airport (there is an island one).
(Link – MySite) – Vineyard spotted! It looked funny from up high.
(Link – MySite) – Flying over Japanese mountains.
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And guess I shall leave this at a suspenseful ‘mountain-hanger’ image of the Shinden flying over some lovely Japanese mountains! I’ll up more once I get my FSX client back up to speed with add-ons from a month ago’s hardware issue and more images to snap-to- share!
Hope you liked the images. I’m actually going to be adding these images every now and again whenever I get some decent plane and scenery add-ons, along with friend joining in on the fun. Actually, there should be some more images for Sunday or Monday for you to view! Two FSX articles to stare at. I’ll also edit in links to plane I use if you want to fly what I’m flying in the next article, and may edit them in above the secodn image.
See you in the skies!