Fedmediate

It was touted as a 4k demo of the new Flight Simulator. Was I hustled by a fraud?

OK, OK, OK. I can consume crow with the best of them. My apologies to ganter and TechguyMaxC who turned out to be rightfully critical of my skepticism on p64 here whether this new sim was a true sim with flight controls. I just view this Flightchannel.com video of a Microsoft Simulator 2019 flight from Denver to San Francisco in 4k. I saw switches being flicked on and off. The yoke moving. Instruments working. So my doubts were unjustified. I wish I had seen the video first. Sorry guys. Pass some more of that delicious crow.

TechGuyMac replied to me. "Guess you missed the nearly 40 year history of this simulator and the fact that only 1 entry failed. But no, that's fine, let's just pretend like none of that happened and "MS doesn't know what they're doing"." This old Navy Pilot of Viet Nam era has been with MS Flight Sim from day one even before with Sublogic and Bruce Artwick. When MS dropped FSX like a stone and fired all the legacy programmers and offered us FLIGHT that was a serious betrayal. No TechGuy, I did not miss those 40 years. I was in on them throughout. That one failure was the warning signal that whoever was running that department was not interested in real simulation. Still have all those original vintage Sublogic and MS Flight Sim disks. Are they worth anything?

True Ganter. But I dismissed that brief flash of instruments moving as meaningless. Why barely seen? Why not go full panel? Why not demo working throttles, flaps, trim switches and all? I would have touted this feature somewhere in the trailer because it is important and demonstrates that Microsoft has really learned its lesson from FLIGHT that crashed and burned like a lawn dart. Not one thing in the trailer demonstrated that you could actually fly the plane as opposed to point and soar around boring holes in th sky like FLIGHT. MS burned us once and are quite capable of burning again. Too much unjustified faith and wishful hope here.

Well all ye faithful can indulge in the hope that Microsoft has learned its lesson from the spectacular failure of FLIGHT which was an arcade point and fly game with no simulation whatsoever. Having had the football pulled up by Lucy (Microsoft) this Charlie Brown declines to make another run at the ball. The trailer did not display any controls being used, no instruments working and no panels. Why? Could it be that they do not exist? Then we have it to be used by an Xbox control. Throttle, trim, flaps? I will believe it when I see it. Until then I am not counting on it being a flyable simulator. Once burned, twice wary.