The sloping runways are a bonus, or sometimes just plain un-usuable.  I've always heard that X-plane controlled helicopters with more realism than FSX.  It's been a few years since I tried copters in either sim. In reality, I just don't much care for real life helicopters, even though I flew RC choppers for years.  I did get a half hours worth on hands on experience in a four place turbine helicopter that a friend owns. I just preferred higher performance GA.

 

Yep, the sloping runways are sometimes great and realistic, like the one at Catalina Island with downloaded scenery. But you have to watch out for the ones that are auto-gen on the default terrain mesh. I've crashed on those, by landing on the wrong (sloping upwards) end.

 

Since I do a lot of flying in the FSEconomy game and want to complete the flight assignments into airstrips and runways I've never been to, I leave that setting for "terrain follows runway" off, unless I know it's a reasonably accurate model of the real thing. When I know it's an accurate local model, it's fun to land there!

 

WRT Helicopters, that was most of my real-life flying experience as a commercial aerial photographer, spending years in Jet Rangers and Hughes 500's with the door off. Never had hands-on-stick, but I think I know how they should feel in flight, X-Plane just does a great job of that for me, with the better payware birds. Right now my favorite is the payware Bell 412, deeply modeled systems and fun to fly. Not as twitchy as the smaller ones, so I actually have a chance of landing where I intended to.

 

 

During that local "out" period, I was able to fly X-Plane just fine because I had the disk (image) version on my hard drive.

 

That's the thing that now bothers me about the new call home DRM. Whilst it doesn't always need to call home, it's happened with other applications that I'd like to try them when the Internet is down and suddenly I can't because it wants to activate.