Having spent the weekend flying the new G4 Sim, I found it very realistic. The draw back is that it takes a lot of memory.. I had to use a friends computer to get it to work. I didn't have enough memory in my video card to make it work with my computer. I'm going to have to up grade. The G4 is very lifelike.. Trainers fly like trainers and the feel is the same to me as actual flying. Has anyone else tried it? I have flown the G3.5 at my local HS and found the G4 much better in all phases (Graphics and "feel"). The Extra 300 is on rails! You can use a gyro to help learn to hover. And the flying fields and water are very lifelike. You can feel the floats by comparing several different types of aircraft with and without the floats; some types fly much better than others with floats. I'm sure that it will help me a lot learning new manuvers and just general flying. I think that anyone just starting out would be miles ahead flying similators first. The cost of a sim will pay off with the first crash.... MY advice fwiw, buy a sim before you buy anything else if you want to get started in R/C flight...