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Just like its predecessor, with the entirety of planet Earth available to explore, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has a whole lot to do. 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was the first (and, so far, only) 10 I've given in a review, and the enormity of the options available in this year’s follow-up have only been tempered by the lingering problems that accompany them. Because codes weren’t available early and unexpected turbulence at takeoff made it literally impossible to play for the first 24 hours, I’m still working on my up and coming aviation career, as well as this review. For now, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has some extraordinary features to set it apart, but its impact is also falling short of how blown away I was by the last edition, and I really wanted to be blown away. Instead, I'm "merely" impressed. Right off the rip, the biggest new addition to Flight Simulator 2024 is its career mode. You pick a starting airport as your home base, get hired by a fictional aviation company, and begin progressing through your career as a pilot. It all plays out like a traditional video game skill tree: after you master the beginner missions, you open up new options, and completing them opens up further opportunities still. So you can get a tail wheel endorsement, for example, after you complete the requirements for a commercial pilots license, which then opens up options for newer planes and jobs like search and rescue, or you can get certified in rotor craft (helicopters) which leads to stuff like operating a sky crane. Which, to me personally, elicits a "hell yeah." Each new certification or endorsement also opens up different jobs you can pick from, ranging from simple stuff like flightseeing, to more complex operations like, well, anything to do with the helicopters, basically. Eventually you earn enough money and reputation to throw off the bonds of your employment and start your own aviation company. I haven't gotten that far yet, but I am moving along with my fixed wing endorsements at a pretty good pace. To what end, I haven't yet decided, but I'm looking forward to opening my own company and taking the lion's share of the profits. Those profits are used to further grow your business, and I can’t wait until I can afford my own fleet of aircraft. The first few missions in career mode are just basic flight training, meant to familiarize you with the ins and outs of flying a plane. What I found disappointing is that the flight training is pretty much identical to the tutorials from 2020. All the training missions take place at the same airfield in Sedona, Arizona as 2020 and the actual tasks are exactly the same. The only real difference is that the AI-generated instruction and on-screen advice is a little more clear about what's expected of you in any given mission. I do appreciate the default tooltips in 2024 because there are about a million different buttons that do a million different things, and I used to have to go to Google whenever I'd forget how to release my parking brake. (I don't even think I'll end up turning them off like I did in 2020, just because I'm a forgetful fellow.) After the initial training missions, you do a few flights to get enough hours in to test for your commercial pilot's license. Taking the tests costs in-game currency, but you only need to pay for it once and you can retake it as many times as you need. You also need to have enough experience and do well enough in the training missions – but if you are already an experienced pilot, you can just jump right into the test and skip the lessons. The further along you get, the more missions and mission types open up. What I thought was a little strange, however, was that they don't all open up near your home airport. I picked a small airfield in the deepest parts of eastern Maine, KMVM Machias Valley Airfield, but after my initial missions, I was being sent to Europe to complete aircraft delivery and skydive missions. It's not something that bothers me too much, but it did come across as odd, which pulled me out of the “career” illusion I had built up for myself. Lousy imagination! Otherwise, I'm actually really loving career mode. In 2020’s iteration, I would make-up little missions for myself, like delivering pizza by air from Knox County Regional Airport in Owl's Head, Maine to the remote Matinicus Island 20 miles off the coast (a real thing that happens, by the way). Having structured reasons to better familiarize myself with the aircraft and patterns in the sky is going to keep me on course, so to speak, and stealthily make me into a better sim-pilot. So far it's my favorite part of Flight Simulator 2024 and I'm looking forward to starting either my own airline or a helicopter sky crane company. Or both! I've got time. Another new addition is the challenge league. This mode is the most game-y of them all, but retains all the simulation flight models and physics I love. There are three challenges each week, as well as leaderboards, which I am a huge fan of because I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. Of the three available in the first round, my favorite is the F/A-18 rally race through the Grand Canyon. You fly Maverick's modern jet of choice through a section of the canyon, slaloming gates in a hunt for pure speed. Since it's still the same flight model under the hood, that’s not as easy as it seems – but holy crap is it fun as hell. It took me a lot of tries to get to my final score of around 1 minute 54 seconds, and that's not even a good score: it only put me in the Bronze league. But the satisfaction of seeing my time raised up above the Xbox Live Gamertag of someone who I don't know at all, but is unknowingly my arch-nemesis, is great. I'm looking forward to revisiting the challenges each week. The previous Flight Simulator had landing challenges with leaderboards, too, but as fun as those were, they didn't quite hit the dynamism of flying a fighter jet through one of the world's seven natural wonders. One of the things I liked the most about the last Flight Simulator was how it let me visit places I'd either never been before or would almost certainly never visit again. In Flight Simulator 2024, sightseeing has been placed front and center in the photo challenges mode. You visit famous landmarks and places around the world and take photos of them. The type and criteria of the photos changes with each landmark. For example, in the first photo challenge, you need to take a picture of the Great Sphinx while the sun is above its right shoulder on the equinox. Oh, and you need to do it on foot. And that's one of the biggest and coolest new features: you can land, get out of your plane, and walk around. However, it's not quite as elegant as I had hoped it would be. First of all, your walking speed is paced realistically, just like the rest of the simulator, (who would have guessed?) so if you've been playing first-person video games all your life, walking at an actual human's pace feels almost painfully slow. Secondly, the level of detail is going to depend on a whole bunch of different factors, like the power of your PC, the strength of your internet connection, and the health of the cloud servers, so your mileage can (and probably will) vary. Still, in spite of some weirdly GoldenEye-esque objects around the Great Pyramid complex, the up-close terrain itself is really detailed. The sand and desert rocks look incredibly realistic, and the ground in general now seems to look more like how ground is actually supposed to look around the world. If you taxi through tall grass at the end of a rural runway, for example, the tracks from your wheels remain even when you return later. Same thing with snow or mud. Mud will even stick to your wheels and supposedly have an effect on your aerodynamics, although I can't speak to how true that is on account of never having flown an actual plane with mud-caked tires. There are also way more animals now. Instead of static points on a map telling you "there is a giraffe here," animals now pop up in the places you'd expect them to be. I very much felt like I was actually at an airfield in Maine when a bull moose plodded its way across the airstrip as I held short of the active runway. I haven't seen any other animals myself, but I know they're there because Flight Simulator 2024 uses an open-source database of animal locations to put them where they're supposed to be – so with some luck, I can go to Africa and see some lions before long. And when you lift your head up from the ground, Flight Simulator 2024 can look much better than its predecessor across the board (with an emphasis on can ). The improvement is especially stark in a place like the Grand Canyon, which I visited many times in 2020’s Flight Simulator. Whereas before it looked very obviously like a smooth, texture-mapped computer model up close, now it looks amazingly like the real thing. I am currently running Flight Simulator 2024 on a pretty beastly PC: it has an i9-13900K processor, a Radeon RX 7900XT GPU, and 64GBs of DDR5 RAM (disclosure, the RAM was provided by Corsair). With that setup, this year’s Flight Simulator looks and runs way better. Mostly. The problem comes from the fact Flight Simulator 2024 is streamed from the cloud, and so far they haven't ironed out all the issues. In career mode, I did a flightseeing mission around Venice, Italy, and St. Mark's Basilica was a purple-checkered polygonal model with no textures whatsoever, while the rest of Venice was rendered in perfect detail. I honestly would rather have something like the world map packs of 2020’s Flight Simulator living on my SSD and only stream the boring parts. Right now, though, there's no way to do that, and the reliance on cloud streaming was something the Flight Simulator team really hammered on the importance of leading up to launch, so I'd be surprised if they switched to some kind of hybrid model at this point. And in spite of everything looking really good on my beastly PC, it's worth noting that my GPU is running at 100% capacity at the recommended settings in order to make that happen. When I turned the graphics down to the next lower preset, it only brought GPU usage down to 98%. That ain't good. In spite of what can reasonably be described as a catastrophic launch, I'm already pretty much in love with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – I'm just not blown away like I was five years ago, when I first found myself faced with the opportunity to fly to literally any place on Earth. That option remains, of course, and it's been vastly improved by some smart new features, but it doesn't have that same impact, either. As we move away from the rocky launch, I'm encountering fewer and fewer issues, which gives me the chance to focus on what I love about Flight Simulator. Usually that’s flying around aimlessly, but this time career mode is also giving me real reasons to take off, as well as a better understanding of the world of commercial aviation. I'm going to keep at it before I render my final verdict, but right now, in spite of its initial problems, I think Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty damn great, even if it hasn’t caught the lightning in a bottle that was the last Flight Simulator once again.
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Article content Looking back over 2024, there’s good and bad news on the crime scene, statistically, for Edmonton. Year-end numbers show domestic violence was up in 2024, but homicides were down in Edmonton. Overall, the crime rate was down, but mid-year numbers showed violent crimes were up — at least in part due to repeat offenders. As of Dec. 29, homicides were down to the lowest rate in five years in the Alberta capital. There were 41 confirmed homicides in 2023 and 40 this time last year (Dec. 15, 2023). That number rises to 45 if you factor in officer-involved shooting deaths. For 2024, there are 30 confirmed homicides as of Dec. 15, 2024, a number that rises to 34 if you factor in officer-involved shooting deaths. Of these, 21 homicides are cleared, and nine remain under investigation, said Cheryl Voordenhout of the Edmonton Police Service’s public information office. Over the past four years, homicides have averaged 40 per year, according to EPS numbers. In 2018 and 2019, numbers were lower — with 29 homicides and 27 homicides, respectively. Officer-involved shooting fatalities were the same in 2023 and 2024 so far, with four deaths each year. However, the total number of officer-involved shootings was up from seven in 2023 to nine in 2024. There were fewer shooting homicides, EPS Chief Dale McFee told Postmedia in a year-end interview . McFee noted that rates go up or down depending on incidents throughout the year, but random attack numbers are stable. “What I’m looking for is a lot of that ‘stranger’ stuff. You know, those random attacks. And you know what? It doesn’t seem like there’s a real increase in relation to that,” he said. Domestic and interpersonal violence has replaced catalytic converter theft as the highest call for service, McFee said. “It could be anything from an argument to a bad beating to homicide,” he said. “So that area, going forward, in 2025 is going to need a little bit of a change in relation to how we approach that, and we’ve asked for that plan to come forward,” McFee said. On the positive side, resolving homicide cases has been going well, he said. “Our homicides, you know, got a significant clearance this year,” he said. Crime rate decreases: Statistics Canada Statistics trail calendar dates, and final numbers on the year’s crime indicators are expected in early-to-mid 2025. But according to mid-year results released in 2024 from Statistics Canada’s National Crime Data, Edmonton’s crime rate decreased by 11 per cent in 2023 from 2022, while nationally, the overall police-reported crime rate increased by three per cent from the previous year. “This marks one of the largest decrease(s in) crime rates among Canadian metropolitan cities in 2023,” said an EPS release, which attributed the improvement to targeted initiatives. “Safer public spaces, targeting social disorder and victimization, had an impact in Edmonton’s Downtown core and surrounding communities,” said Ron Anderson, chief innovation and technology officer for EPS, attributing improvements in the first two quarters of 2024 to the provincial government’s new navigation centre and dedicated LRT deployments. However, data from the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics showed Edmonton’s violent crime severity index (CSI) increased by four per cent in 2023, “a trend in which repeat offenders continue to play a significant role,” the July 2024 release said. The City of Edmonton’s overall CSI remained stable (0.6 per cent increase) between 2022 and 2023, and it decreased by 13 per cent between 2018 and 2023. “Make no mistake, violent crime continues to be a major concern in our city,” Anderson said. “While we still need to keep our foot on the crime-fighting pedal, we’re beginning to see some tangible traction with some of our targeted initiatives. EPS will continue to rely on evidence and data to deploy resources effectively while working collaboratively with our partners.” Edmonton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) had the 11th highest police-reported total crime rate, a drop from its place as the 10th highest in 2022, among the nation’s 41 CMAs in 2023. The City of Edmonton’s total crime rate decreased by 11 per cent between 2022 and 2023, the report found. The Edmonton CMA violent crime rate was 18th highest among CMAs, up slightly from 19th in 2022. The City of Edmonton’s violent crime rate increased by two per cent between 2022 and 2023 and is higher than the national average but below the provincial average. The Edmonton CMA property crime rate was 11th highest among CMAs, a drop from holding ninth place in 2022. The City of Edmonton’s property crime rate decreased by 15 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Fraud and extortion were both up in 2023. Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add EdmontonJournal.com and EdmontonSun.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters . You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post, and 13 other Canadian news sites. 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Pep Guardiola’s side avoided the indignity of a sixth successive defeat in all competitions and looked on course for a welcome victory thanks to a double from Erling Haaland – the first from the penalty spot – and a deflected effort from Ilkay Gundogan. Yet Guardiola was left with his head in hands as Feyenoord roared back in the last 15 minutes with goals from Anis Hadj Moussa, Sergio Gimenez and David Hancko, two of them after Josko Gvardiol errors. Arsenal delivered the statement Champions League win Mikel Arteta had demanded as they swept aside Sporting Lisbon 5-1. Arteta wanted his team to prove their European credentials, and goals from Gabriel Martinelli, Kai Havertz, Gabriel, Bukayo Saka and Leandro Trossard got their continental campaign back on track in style following the 1-0 defeat at Inter Milan last time out. A memorable victory also ended Sporting’s unbeaten start to the season, a streak of 17 wins and one draw, the vast majority of which prompted Manchester United to prise away head coach Ruben Amorim. Paris St Germain were left in serious of danger of failing to progress in the Champions League as they fell to a 1-0 defeat to Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena. Kim Min-jae’s header late in the first half was enough to send PSG to a third defeat in the competition this season, leaving them six points off the automatic qualification places for the last 16 with three games to play. Luis Enrique’s side, who had Ousmane Dembele sent off, were deservedly beaten by Bayern who dominated chances and possession. Elsewhere, Atletico Madrid were 6-0 winners away to Sparta Prague, Julian Alvarez and Angel Correa each scoring twice whilst there were also goals from Marcos Llorente and Antoine Griezmann. Barcelona ended tournament debutants Brest’s unbeaten start with a 3-0 victory courtesy of two goals from Robert Lewandowski – one a penalty – and Dani Olmo. Lewandowski’s first was his 100th Champions League goal, only the third man to reach the mark after Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. A Castello Lukeba own goal saw Inter Milan go top of the standings with a narrow 1-0 win over RB Leipzig at San Siro, whilst Bayer Leverkusen were emphatic victors against Red Bull Salzburg, Florian Wirtz scoring twice to move Xabi Alonso’s side into the automatic qualification places. Atalanta continued their strong start, albeit whilst conceding a first goal in Europe this season in a 6-1 win away to Young Boys, whilst Tammy Abraham scored the decisive goal as AC Milan beat Slovan Bratislava 3-2.DA suggests unusual idea for halting Trump's hush money case while upholding conviction
