So I persevered and did the stupid balloon mission. Flight has several options for your entertainment. You can Free Flight — set the weather, choose an airplane, go to the map and click on a location and away you go. Or you can do Missions or Challenges. Challenges are very short such as “Land X airplane on X airstrip”. There are lots of challenges, but the problem is they are all nearly exactly the same. After advancing through six Maule M7 landing challenges I recognized the pattern (I know, I’m slow that way) and can only assume the rest of them are the same. And here is where I bring up (once again) that I’m an interested and dedicated flight simmer with, what I believe to be, an open mind. And yet I grew quickly bored. So that new blood gamer that Microsoft is trying to lure in is going to reach their Boredom Quotient™ very quickly. Therein lies my ultimate problem with Flight: If Flight was designed to hook people into flight simulators all it shows is how boring our sims really are.
Don’t give up on me (or Flight) yet however. Flight is fairly stunning visually. It is hard to argue with their choice of the Hawaiian Islands as their introductory scenery. The graphics are very nice with beautiful water, clouds, haze effects, lighting, and overall texture quality. I have a relatively old rig (4 years old now) and I was still able to play at maxed out settings without much problem. Over heavily forested areas I’d get some slowdowns and when I coupled that with FRAPS recording I found I got better performance by setting everything to HIGH instead of maximum settings.