Just look at that virtual cockpit, for Tron’s sake. The new Acceleration birds are like that, and I immediately fell in love with them as soon as I increased the throttle. Their VCs were worth the price of admision, and I fly them often. Those aircraft are objects d’art, inside and out. I sense here the same hand who conceived the previous masterpieces I adore from the original FSX: the Beaver, the Maule, the Goose, the Extra. The aforementioned race locations, the huge Edwards AFB complex, and a large area of Florida, around the Cape Canaveral NASA launch facilities.Įach aircraft deserves its own article, because they’re really well made. So what’s in for the orthodox? What does it offer to them? Just concentrate on the race and have lots of fun, either in the new P-51D (more on that later) or in the familiar Extra 300. There’s no need to even look at the instruments at all, because a panel of cartoonish, arcadey icons simply tells your fuel, temperature, power, and RPMs up there on your screen. You can easily tell this feature is not meant for the hardcore simmer who shoots precision approaches in IMC for fun. The main lodestone aimed at the general gamer is the new multiplayer racing system. So how does all of this affect our simmer lives? Is our dearest Flight Simulator being rapidly transformed into a game because of market demands? With that in mind Microsoft & Aces release FSX Acceleration Expansion Pack, their apparent goals being to attract a wider audience to the Flight Simulator franchise, and to further stimulate conversion of FS9 users into FSX ones. Willing to invest for our hobby in what may appear to some a ridiculous amount of time, effort, and money, we flight-simmers are a specialised, eccentric bunch, aren’t we. No wonder the flight simulation market has never been big. Or perhaps you are a flight controller at VATSIM, and enjoy coordinating thirty-eight flights in real-time on your area? Or maybe you are programming your FMC, preparing for a five-hour haul in your state-of-the-art big iron. So there you are, tracing your flight plan on a sectional, measuring distances between VORs, calculating the fuel, scouting weather reports and compensating for the wind. Microsoft & Aces wanna go faster! Are you game?

Fsx acceleration expansion