If this and the last post seem like excuses to reel off cool-sounding game titles, I can assure you that you’re absolutely right. Possibly thanks to 16-bit consoles and the vogue for fancy stealth planes, the flight sims I played in the 90s turned abruptly arcadey. Someone obviously figured out how to breed the career sims on computer with coin-op legends like Afterburner and Thunder Blade, creating the likes of Core Design’s Thunderhawk, the obvious Desert Strike series, and a typically artsy-fartsy experiment by Psygnosis called Armour-Geddon. That last one was more a ‘war strategy’ game, though, and the flight genre has exploded in many such directions. I wouldn’t return to true sims until Falcon 4.0 in 1998, by which time my attention span had been well and truly destroyed. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings, Dino Cattaneo’s F-14D Tomcat (freeware).

A personal history of the flight sim. If we exclude Novagen’s Mercenary for the 800XL (on the grounds of it being, umm, too green), then my first was Microprose’s F-15 Strike Eagle for the CPC 464. This was followed by Gee Bee Air Rally, which introduced me to ‘flying engine’ sportsters – the golden age of air racing; either it was incredibly hard or I missed the point of all those pylons and balloons. I bought Falcon for the Atari ST at a car boot sale in 1998, and spent more time reading the manual (which in my version doubled as the box) than playing it. Then came Interdictor for the Acorn Archimedes, which was hard to play because I didn’t actually own an Acorn Archimedes; instead, I took it into the school’s computer science lab where everyone else played Hostages and E-Type. At home, meanwhile, it was all about Bob Dinnerman’s F/A-18 Interceptor for the Amiga. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings, Dino Cattaneo’s F-14D Tomcat (freeware).

Alt version here. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings.

It’s immensely cheering that I could show this to my kid and tell him it’s the Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah, and not have to explain all the degrees of separation between reality and videogames. I could show him how you get there from Escalante, and how beyond lie the Henry Mountains and Colorado River. And I’d remember a time when all the kids I knew played games that tried to teach them something, whether they realised it or not. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings.

This, meanwhile, is all about REX, source of all those clouds and one of the most professional mod packages you’ll ever see. While it’s true that there’s a culture among flight sim modders for price-gouging, it only happens because the line’s so often blurred between the best mods and full-blown aviation software. Despite FSX being cheap and TileProxy being free, I’ve still spent more than I have on any game this year. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings.

As a concept TileProxy isn’t quite so stupefying when you consider the reality of flight sims: that at these altitudes there’s almost nothing to render but skybox. It’s just that half of that skybox is a planet. It’s a breathtaking illusion, though. Despite being six years old, FSX has landscape meshes detailed enough to stop it becoming photos wrapped around a ball. What’s more, its own GPS-mapped landmarks are often so accurate that even the 3D runways line up with today’s satellite snapshots. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings.

Funnily enough, this wasn’t the ‘cloud-based’ I had in mind. Not that I’m complaining: TileProxy is blowing my mind right now. Long have I dreamed of a flight sim that actually captured the most important thing about flight: the Earth. What’s amazing isn’t so much that PC gaming has somehow found a way, but that it did so four years ago. TileProxy yanks imagery from geospatial mapping platforms (Microsoft Virtual Earth/Bing Maps in this case; it got a cease-and-desist from Google some time ago) and wraps them around the game’s meshes. Of course it does. It sounds so obvious once you’ve stuck the pieces of your mind back together. Alt version here. Tools and tricks: Real Environment Xtreme 2, REX Overdrive Pack, DBS Walk and Follow, TileProxy (w/ Bing Maps satellite imagery streamed at 40Mbps), 2160p rendering, 4k texture settings.