Microsoft have announced that Flight Simulator X has gone gold and offers up the Australian release date:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Captain is ready for take off - the newest addition to the 25-year Flight Simulator franchise, Flight Simulator X, has gone gold and will touchdown in stores on 26 October, 2006.

Gamers of all ages, types and skill levels will experience firsthand what it's like to be an aviator travelling the globe in one of the dozens of aircraft available.

The full press release has a little more information. Hopefully we'll see another demo released soon that offers a better example of the gameplay experience than the previous one did.

System Requirements

Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2 / Vista
PC with 1 GHz equivalent or higher processor
256 MB of system RAM for Windows XP SP2 / 512 MB Vista
14 GB available hard disk space
32x speed or faster DVD-ROM drive
32 MB DirectX 9 compatible video card required
Sound card, speakers or headphones required for audio
Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
56.6 Kbps or better modem for online play

14 Gb of HDD space? Holy flak batman.

strewth, I missed that bit. Must have heaps of uber high res textures I guess?

Holy crap, 14 gig!

What system was Flight Simulator 1 on?

Better hope that Tokyo to Hong Kong leg looks nice Trog

that's masseev

Linky for FS1

Required: 64kb RAM, a disk drive and a colour graphics card.

64K ram and disk drive, No wonder i never saw it. I didn't get a disk drive till like 1985 or so.

Hehe, I have Flight Simulator 1. It fits on a single 360k floppy. You can shoot down other planes too.

now i don't ever really see the appeal in flightsims, but this one you just fly around in random planes and do nothing right?

sounds like there are missions, and there's always the novelty of crashing into the air tower

and there's always the novelty of crashing into the twin towers

now i don't ever really see the appeal in flightsims, but this one you just fly around in random planes and do nothing right?

Yep. It's more of an enthusiast thing. I guess they add missions to make it more appealing, but at the end of the day it's just flying.