Epic video gaming moments
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
I have been a fan of video games for as long as I can remember. My first memory of a computer game is Super Mario Bros 1, which my mother rented for 24 hours as a reward to me for behaving properly in a hospital and some medical operation. Back then, it was common to rent not just the game, but the entire console. Thus, I did all I could to just play it to smithereens when I had the chance. To realize that you could push a button on the controller and watch Mario jump up and down blew my mind. I probably sat and jumped up and down for quite a long time before I even tried the D-pad. In my 30+ year video gaming career, there have been some defining, epic, moments like this that I will remember as long as I live. Some other examples are my first night in Minecraft, emergency landing a plane that could barely fly in Strike Commander, piloting my first gargantuan BattleMech in MechWarrior 2 and yesterday I could add another one to the list: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
What Microsoft has done with Flight Simulator 2020 is nothing but mind blowing. They have digitalized the entire world for us to fly around in. They have used map data with height geometry and flight and satellite photos from Bing and combined it with AI magic that have generated buildings and trees with image recognition technology. The weather is rendered in real time, so if you look outside and it’s a rainy sunset in Umeå, that is precisely what you will experience if you fire up the simulator and take off from Umeå Airport. If you go low enough, you can even see cars driving on the roads. The graphics are nothing short of stunning. It is by far the most beautiful video game I have seen. However, that last sentence will probably age poorly, because I have said the same thing about Super Mario on the NES. But anyway, the graphics come at a price. FS2020 will destroy your gaming rig with its insane system requirements. It is just like when Crysis was released in 2007. It took quite a long time before the hardware market could catch up and really crank the visuals in that game.
The first thing I did when the massive 150 Gb download had finished, was to take it to the skies above Umeå, my hometown and head North along the coast to check out my house. I have been flying a lot at countless business trips, so I could really recognize the ascent and orient myself as I did a U-turn above Holmsund. The whole experience is a bit like when I first tried out Google Earth. It is the feeling of freedom. You can go literally anywhere on the planet, but compared to GE, this feels real, because you are piloting a plane in the middle of it. I bought this game for sightseeing and my triple monitor setup can really do it justice. The peripheral vision from the side monitors adds a whole new layer of immersion. I can’t wait to try it in Virtual Reality in future! I think that by doing a bit a simulator flying every now and then around familiar areas, you will get a much better understanding of the geography. I have also done a tour above Kalix, the town where I grew up, and I could orient myself in the skies easily. I look forward to checking out some of the places I have visited, from above. It is interesting how different a place can look when you see it from above, even though you have been driving there with your car, perhaps 1000s of times.
I have been travelling a lot along the E4 (Sweden’s main road), especially between Umeå and Kalix. It would be a perfect little project to take off from Umeå and fly to Kallax, Luleå Airport, along the E4 and study the landscape from above. In a car, the journey takes about three hours. I suppose that in a plane, it will be a fraction of that, so I better use a slow propeller plane. In my first flights I noticed that I grabbed my phone a couple of times to bring up Google Maps and orient myself according to landmarks, lakes and roads. Microsoft FS 2020 could be considered as a game, but I consider it as something much more. It is also a powerful tool to learn geography and having a lot of fun while doing it. It is a game-changer. Who knows, in a couple of years, maybe we will get MS Car Simulator, where you can drive around in an open world with insane graphics?
I suspect that even though travelling has plummeted, virtual travelling is about to explode.