Bushtalk Radio adds thousands of audio tours to Microsoft Flight Simulator
The add-on streams computer-generated audio clips for nearby landmarks
If you like to play Microsoft Flight Simulator as a tourist, I’d suggest hooking your game up to Bushtalk Radio. It’s a community generated landmark database that tracks where you are in-game. Get close to a registered landmark and the site will automatically start telling you all about it, just like my mum does when we're in the car ('Ooh, a red Volvo.'). Think of it as an audio tour for the entire world, one that covers everything from magnificent waterfalls to the world’s largest beaver dam.
The audio is a surprisingly soothing computer generated voice from a mixture of Wikipedia articles, website texts, and player-written scripts. Every official in-game point of interest has a tour, but beyond that there are over 8000 places found and tagged by the community. Even if you don’t use the audio tour, the site is a great repository of places to see, but don’t half-arse it. Get the client and sign-up to the site.
I had to shuffle Flight Sim off of my PC recently for space reasons (but I also have two 1TB SSDs now waiting to be installed, and I’m genuinely considering giving one over just to Flight Sim) so I can't log-in and record the thing in action, but you can listen to the tours via the site. Here’s what happens when you approach the world’s largest beaver dam.
You can download landmarks that will show up in-game as you fly, which is exactly what I’ll be doing after reinstalling Flight Sim this weekend. I might even add a couple of POI’s myself, there doesn’t seem to be entries for Inchconnachan or the Transcontinental Airway System. I need the world to know how cool those places are.