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If you want to go all-in, you can set it to ultra-realistic and spend ages prepping for flights, tweaking each individual setting and enjoying what seems like the ultimate in cockpit recreation. The flight simulator itself is reassuringly flexible and granular. The downside to all this is data: the base game is a huge install, and much of the map data will need to be downloaded prior to each flight, which means a superfast broadband connection is pretty much a must-have. Some places look more detailed and convincing than others, true – but the ability to spot your neighbourhood from high up in the air (where you’ll hopefully be) is undeniably appealing. Tapping into Bing’s vast vault of map data and some clever terrain algorithms, this version essentially allows you to fly to any point on the globe. The latest in a series of “games” Microsoft started almost 40 years ago, 2020’s edition of Flight Simulator (which launched on PC only but is now available on Xbox Series X and S and working like a charm on console) is a technical marvel. It’s difficult to explain how compelling the process is on paper, but I urge you to give it a whirl chances are you’ll be quickly hooked into Barlow’s brilliant narrative. The game’s library of clips features rehearsals, rushes and full scenes from all three of the films, plus table reads, behind the scenes footage and more, and the player gets to navigate them frame-by-frame in their own time, gradually piecing together bits of what becomes a creepy and brilliant treatise on the nature of filmmaking itself. A sort of visual detective novel, the player (perhaps ‘director’ is a more accurate term) is tasked with exploring the story of Marissa Marcel, a fictional actress who first came to prominence in the late 1960s but made only three movies (all unreleased) before disappearing in mysterious circumstances. Like Sam Barlow’s previous games Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality uses live action video, which players can spool through at their own pace and in their own order, to tell its story.
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