MALTA COMPLETE X

Enormous frame-rate killer especially at night and really not worth the money!

I was not expecting great realism or minute detail in this package but I did look forward to some degree of verisimilitude and "some" attention to prominent features, unique to Malta. I was disappointed and let down. It may be because I am originally from the island and spent a third of my actual life there that this package is a let down. For someone else, who has never been there, or has never seen photos of the islands, this scenery may be only a humdrum experience but not necessarily a disappointment.

My Equipment: Alienware 980x processor, 12 GB RAM GeForce 480 main video card.

For this scenery: Maxed out Global Texture , Scenery Complexity and Special Effects (I wanted to see if I was missing anything!); Medium on Terrain and Water; Medium High global settings on Traffic.
Sitting in the default 172 Cessna, I am getting 80 fps but the place is empty and it looks like a hot Sunday afternoon when everyone is taking a siesta.

PROS: excellent frame rate throughout Malta and Gozo; Vegetation, general ground color is typical of the island; general contours and elevation, including coast seems correct; there are no glaring scenery errors such as rivers or mountains which do not exist on the island. Outside top down views look great and at 32 zoom you can get most of the island and it looks decent. At 64 zoom, (top down) it still looks good. At 1K feet looking out of the side window, I still get very high frame rates of between 95 -110 which I suppose is promising for someone with a laptop or a 10 year old system.

CONS: I buy scenery because I DO like eye candy and as close to actual reality as possible. There's nothing here! There are several blotches of identical apartment buildings (as far as I can tell, only two kinds)thrown around apparently without too much attention to real population density; nothing that looks remotely like the limestone buildings I am familiar with.

Most disappointing (and I am not religious) is the fact that there isn't a single church in sight! Anybody who has been to Malta would know that the island is littered by them . A world famous one, at Mosta is missing and so is the famous Gozo landmark of Ta Pinu cathedral.

In fact there are no landmarks of any kind except maybe what could be seen on a Google map, such as an old stadium, just west of the airport. It is as if the producer of this little gem in fact took a satellite map and simply sprinkled a bunch of unrealistic buildings on it.

Valletta the capital city, is drab and uninteresting: There are no fortresses, ramparts; the Grand Harbor looks anything but grand with what seems to be an oil refinery where the citadels of Senglea, Vittoriosa and Birgu are supposed to be. But, there ARE a lot of boats and cruiseships, including an aircraft carrier. wow!

The airport itself seems bare, with the control tower seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Buildings here are sparse, even though I am maxed out in my scenery settings. The runway headings are or seem correct and I haven't tested any ILS approaches to runway 32 yet.

The lack of landmarks and details makes this software no better than the default scenery.

On the plus side, I didn't pay much for it.