One of the juxtapositions of Microsoft Flight Simulator [GN score 9.5 out of 10] is that it puts you in an airplane and sends you up into the sky—so that you can get a good look at things on the ground. That's the biggest selling point of its entire simulation. Bing Maps that have somehow rendered a 1:1 recreation of the whole planet, all of Earth. And they put it into a video game. That's crazy talk. I watched maybe a hundred different people broadcasting their time in Flight Simulator. Know what's the first thing almost everyone does? They fly over their hometown. They see how close the simulation got to the real thing. That's how players personalize their experience in a simulation that is virtually impossible to see all of.
The machine learning and execution to recreate the entire Earth, however, can't translate everything 100 percent. More iconic buildings and bridges, etc., are genericized. Flight Simulator's developers have to go in and make specific touchups to those more uniquely constructed bits of architecture, if it's worth their time.
And they've done exactly that in World Update I. Japan gets an update in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Very apt for them to start off this video for the Land of the Rising Sun with a sunrise, ha. There's a double rainbow (all the way) over Utsunomyia, a plane coming in for a landing next to Hachijo-Jima's volcano, and a flyover of Yokohama where you'll hopefully get to see a Gundam factory or what are we even doing here? There's Himeji Castle, a structure that's included in every grown-up coloring book in existence; the Great Seto Bridge which is eight miles long; and Horyuji temple which is just pure Buddhist perfection.
World Update I: The Japan world update features an upgraded digital elevation map across the entire country, high-resolution 3D photogrammetry for six prominent Japanese cities (Sendai, Takamatsu, Tokushima, Tokyo, Utsunomiya and Yokohama), and six handcrafted local airports (Hachijojima, Kerama, Kushiro, Nagasaki, Shimojishima, and Suwanosejima). Players will also be able to try their hand at executing a trio of exciting new Landing Challenges set at Japanese airports.
After you're done flying down Main Street in your hometown, it's probably worth swinging by this Japan World Update. This update is free to all Microsoft Flight Simulator players. It'll be out on September 29. Hopefully downloading the update will go smoother than downloading the base game, which is the worst nightmare of a loading scenario I've witnessed in 30+ years of gaming. And Microsoft has always struggled to sell well against Sony's PlayStation in Japan. I wonder how much of this update is made as an offering to elevate Microsoft's namesake in Japan, a country that's just never been that interested in what Xbox is selling.
