Microsoft Flight Simulator's USA update makes America seem like somewhere you might want to go

Microsoft Flight Simulator - United States World Update Trailer - YouTube

The second world update for Microsoft Flight Simulator is live now, and it brings a variety of visual improvements to an obscure foreign country called the United States of America. The USA will benefit from hand-crafted versions of four new airports (Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Friday Harbor, and New York Stewart), a Discovery Flight pilots can take across its eastern seaboard, a Bush Trip over the Alaskan wilderness, and "an improved digital elevation model with resolution up to one meter, along with new aerial textures for significantly better appearance in several states across the country."

There are also 50 high-fidelity points of interest to gawp at as you fly past, many of them highlighted in the video above. Something about being able to fly over Tucson's Airport Graveyard is a little creepy, and frankly those oil rigs off the Gulf of Mexico look like they're about to pull some Death Stranding nonsense. Las Vegas does look amazing all lit-up though, and the video climaxes with a flythrough of the Grand Canyon for good reason. Also you can fly past the Statue of Liberty, which I believe is in Liberty City.

World Update II: USA is available for free. To access it, first make sure your copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator has updated to the latest version, which should be version 1.11.6.0 at the time of writing, and then go to the Marketplace to download the USA content bundle.

While you're here, perhaps you'd enjoy getting fully spooked by Microsoft Fright Stimulator, the series where we visit the real-world locations of scary stories in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.