You Must Play Flight Simulator X on an Approved Monitor

So, my boys at Kotaku turned me on to Gamespot’s brief lowdown on some of Flight Simulator X‘s new features. Check out what Kotaku had to say:

Flight Simulator X, which is due out near the end of 2006, was created by Microsoft Game Studios’ own Aces Studio and will be optimized for Vista. (read this is going to be a requirement.) It sounds like the sim’s major improvements will be in the area of graphics and physics. In particular the the team really concentrated on working into the game some of the visuals pilots my run into in flight, like light glare.

Now, I’m not a flight sim player. Any simulation I do is mostly of the spawning tornados on an unsuspecting city I’ve been mayor of for a hundred years variety. But my little brother loves the things. The game’s due out in holiday ’06, which means this would be a no-brainer of a Christmas gift. The problem is, though, it looks like it’s going to require Vista to run.

Pretend for a second you’re a soon-to-be 22-year-old male whose primary operating system is OS X and you prefer to run Debian in an x86 environment, and you’ve got a major bone to pick with Vista’s DRM policies, but you still want to get your little brother a cool flight sim game. He already has 2004: Century of Flight.

Do those of you who know MS’s flight sim history think X will be worth upgrading to Vista?

I realize it’s a bit early to call, but the flight sim world seems to be aglow in this news.