Do you like sloooow motion?

If you are planning to get Microsoft Flight Simulator X for that special someone on your Christmas shopping list this year, a word to the wise. You may be buying a product that is way ahead of its time.

You know how it is discussed that the computer industry is a complimentary game of one-up-manship, in the sense that new hardware makes it possible for new software and that new software leads to the need for new (better / faster) hardware? Well, Flight Sim X is one of those. It took me a while to research this, but the game was not designed for the average computer in use today. Firstly, it was designed to run on Windows Vista (with Direct X 10), which unfortunately isn't even available yet (expected release - Feb '07). Second, it needs some serious hardware to run with any kind of decent frame rate at all. I tried it on an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 7600GS. It was brutal. I get better frame rates from the original Atari game Pong.

It's not all bad news though. People have already come forward with some tweaks to help the game run better on lesser computers.