Would you like Classic Game Room anymore Classic Game Room X‑ray Gulf Sierra. Mr. We would surely want to.

When you spent your formative years playing Top Gun on the NES and Afterburner II on the Sega Genesis, you can’t possibly be expected to take this game seriously. My God, the captain’s turned to jelly. Who’s flying the plane I don’t even have a body. But I do have a flight plan. Not a good one, but I’m going to terrorize the passengers here in Microsoft Flight Simulator. What a boring title. Flight Simulator. It’s fairly accurate, but do you know what would be a lot more fun Tokyo Extreme Racer F‑18 Edition.

Take that, rolling guy. Your gang sucks. Putting a bigger muffler and neon lights on your Impreza won’t save you now.

I tried to carpet‑bomb 376 outside of Pittsburgh, but apparently that’s not allowed. I also tried to find the weapons panel. Nothing. No missiles. No lasers. No cassette player. Not even a cup holder. But what I didn’t expect was to enjoy the non‑destructive part of the game. Like the part where you fly and enjoy the experience and see the sights. Exploring our beautiful planet from above without lasers and homing missiles.

Sure, you can take Flight Simulator a lot more seriously and actually try to simulate flying as realistically as possible. I’m sure there’s plenty of information out there about that. What I’m here to talk about is from the video game perspective: is it fun And yes, yes it is fun to just fly around the entire planet, see what things look like from the air. And I discovered that it’s actually really cool.

I took a trip and visited some of my favorite places. There’s Cape Cod. Checked out New York. Flew over London, crashed into a bridge, and left my plane in a back alley. Sorry about that, I’ll clean it up later. I even landed a helicopter thing in the beer garden of the Hofbräuhaus. The designers need to visit in person to put some more detail into it. Don’t forget the accordion.

So what do they use I guess satellite imagery. Something super realistic. It looks really cool. Except check this out: I discovered an alien artifact at the tip of South America. The government’s been hiding this from us for years. Look at that thing. Didn’t I see that in a Transformers movie

It’s trying to call Unicron. That would be a super cool addition to this game. Transformers in general. Careful now, don’t crash into Jesus. I tried to reenact some scenes from Miami Vice here, eventually crashed into the ocean.

Los Angeles Center, Boeing Alpha Sierra X‑ray. You know what they say: it’s all fun and games until your F‑18 lands upside‑down in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They build those things really well though. Not even a scratch. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

There’s a whole bunch of airplanes and I don’t know a damn thing about airplanes except that they transform into stuff in cartoons. If you get bored of the ones that come with the game, you can buy a bunch of other ones like the A‑10 Thunderbolt, except I don’t think it has the Gatling gun so really what’s the point

What I found most impressive was just exploring and checking out locations I’ve heard about but never actually saw, certainly not from the air. And in that respect, it’s terrific. It really succeeds at that. It could use homing lasers. Even though some cities get more detail than others, the bridges in Pittsburgh do look weird in the game. They don’t look that weird in person unless you’ve had like fifteen Iron Cities. But in that case you shouldn’t be flying an airplane anyway.

Flight Simulator is really cool. There’s lots of helicopters to choose from, a bunch of jets, commercial airliners. I don’t know anything about airplanes, but if you like airplanes, you probably already have this game. And if you like video games, or if you’d like to just explore the planet and check out different cities, fly from one country to another, it’s really cool. And I’m impressed. Flight Simulator, despite the boring title, has a lot of things to do, even without homing lasers.