Microsoft Flight Simulator players are flying straight into Hurricane Laura

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With Flight Simulator's real-time weather, you can safely visit the world's worst storms.

Late yesterday, Hurricane Laura made landfall in the southern US as a Category 4 storm. The massive hurricane with 140 mph winds is currently weakening (it's now a Category 2), but has already caused widespread damage, flooding, and left hundreds of thousands without power.

As the storm approached the US, dire warnings were given to all citizens within its path to evacuate. Microsoft Flight Simulator players, however, used the sim's real-time weather feature to fly directly into the storm. And some of the images are astounding.

Microsoft Flight Simulator makes it easy to quickly hop around the world, letting you choose the location where you'd like your plane to appear. You can also quickly adjust the time of day and weather, including turning on real-world weather conditions. If there's a thunderstorm anywhere in the world, a few clicks will teleport your airplane there so you can check it out.

Naturally, players have flocking to Hurricane Laura en masse.

Hurricane Laura isn't the first visual wonder to draw players' attention. Everyone's fascinated with the bizarre, towering monoliths that have sprouted up due to, apparently, typos in a world map wiki. James, meanwhile, has been exploring the flight sim as a spooky story-telling tool.

Thanks, The Verge.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.