Flight Simulator X

Microsoft has released a playable demo of Flight Simulator X, giving you the chance to get to grips with a fraction of the full game's 24,000 airports and countless planes. Good day for it too.

That fraction is two airports, and three missions on (or presumably above) the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean. The demo weighs in at 636MB.

The full game is due out in Christmas 2006, and will work on both Windows XP and Windows Vista, although the latter obviously won't be out by then. Those of you of a simulatory bent will enjoy the inclusion of dozens of new aircraft including the AirCreation 582SL Ultralight. We're particularly looking forward to the Maule M7-260C Orion with wheels and skis.

Downloaded the demo and had a play - seems like it'll be a good one! Great fun flying the trike around, and they have added some extra touches to the game making it "feel" more realistic, like the perception of "moving" as you control the plane in Virtual Cockpit mode.The textures and terrain detailare also far improved over previous versions.

Pretty steep on the system requirements though - you're gonna want a fairly current video card (at least a Radeon 9800pro/GeForece6600GT) and Athlon64 CPU. On my older 2.6Ghz system with a R9600XT it was struggleing even at low detail.