I’ve been driven over the Forth Road Bridge more times than I count, sat in the back of my dad’s car as we went to visit family. I’ve peered down upon the Deep Sea World, and watched the railway bridge be painted and re-painted and painted again. It’s unreasonably exciting to me, then, to see it in Microsoft Flight Simulator above. It’s one of many UK and Ireland landmarks being added to the game, alongside five new photogrammetry cities including London, in World Update 3.

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A white Christmas would be a lovely way to end a bit of a rubbish year, alas, I live in southern England, so it’s unlikley I’ll even get a peek at some real-life snow. I can, however, look at some lovely virtual snow in Microsoft Flight Simulator today. Asobo’s open air fly ’em up adds the white stuff in today’s free update, along with a smattering of ice and VR support.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator

features some absolutely stunning weather. But as far as the ground’s concerned it’s always the height of summer, with even the northernmost parts of Scandinavia left remarkably snow-free. That changes with next Tuesday’s free update, which adds a sprinkling of snow, ice, and virtual reality goggles to the planet-sized flight ’em up.

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Players do the darndest things—especially when they’re also game developers—and this sure is a thing that I feel silly for not seeing from miles off. Rami Ismail of former Vlambeer fame decided to really test out the accuracy of Microsoft Flight Simulator by piloting a flight in game while sitting on the same flight in real life. The future sure has arrived.

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See that blurry coastal mess up there? That’s North Berwick, my one-time childhood home and the first stop in my jaunt across Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s painstakingly thorough recreation of planet Earth. It’s been done dirty, I reckon, but that may be about to change. The next World Update for Asobo’s jet-setter is heading to the UK, sprucing up ol’ Britannia with improved landmarks, landscape resolution and plenty of sightseeing spots sometime next January.

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Yee-haw, pilots. Lasso the young’uns to their seats, because Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s next stop is the grand old US of A. The massive aviation sandbox just pushed its second world update, granting a number of states with improved resolutions, laying down some hand-crafted airports and 50 spruced-up points-of-interest to make your stateside tours an absolute treat.

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For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. As such, it is only natural that Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s massive hole in the ground be countered by two spear-like pillars of earth on the other side of the globe. Despite last week’s World Update re-jigging the nation’s terrain, pilots this week discovered these colossal spikes bursting out of the Japanese countryside.

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Following this week’s brief trip to Japan, Microsoft Flight Simulator is already booking its next intercontinental clean-up flight. It seems the gigantic flight sim has decided to take on the United States of America for its next World Update, bringing a similar mix of photogrammetry-improved cities and higher-resolution terrain in another World Update before the end of the year.

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The launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator has made me very aware that I don’t have a flight throttle and stick, but I’m not committed enough to buy one. Turns out, you don’t need to. Just fire up the 3D printer you definitely have, and you can print out a HOTAS that snaps onto an Xbox One controller and connects to its trigger and thumbstick. That’s the wild new creation from Akaki Kuumeri, who has even shared the schematics so we can all spin filament into a HOTAS on our own 3D printers.

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Yup. That seems about right. After evicting the Queen and erecting a colossal monolith in Melbourne, the unknowable architect behind Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s world gen now appears to have pulled at the very fabric of the Earth, ripping a massive hole out of a field in South America. At least, I very much hope this is a simple computing error – has anyone actually been outside to check lately?

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