France and Benelux look fancy in new Microsoft Flight Simulator world update

Earth has been upgraded once again in Microsoft Flight Simulator, with the most recent world update applying a layer of optional shine to France and the nations of the Benelux Union (Benelux being a portmanteau of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, a fact I learned today and pass on to you).

If you download the free World Update 4 from the in-game marketplace you'll get a nicely high-res Paris and Amsterdam thanks to the wonders of photogrammetry, three hand-crafted airports plus "visual and logical improvements for 100 additional airports". There's also a new landing challenge at La Salette, a bush trip activity in the Alps and Pyrenees, and a huge amount of extra points of interest including famous French landmarks like Notre-Dame de Paris, the Arc de Triomphe, Carcassonne, and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

At the same time a new patch brings Microsoft Flight Simulator to version 1.15.7.0. This patch adds livery for the S7 Airbus A320neo and KLM Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner, fixes a problem that was reducing tree display distance, and addresses various bugs as you can see in the release notes.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.