What kind of Simulator suits your needs? New simulators are on average produced every second month and some are highly expensive. I've known quite a lot of people that haven't known a lot about them and paid for very expensive plane simulators when if they had of being a little more experienced, could have bought a similar simulator for a vastly cheaper price.

So, I'm going to cover in the following summary types of simulators on the market and reasons why they may best suit your needs:

An old favourite is one of the earliest simulators on the market - The subLogic flight simulator. This can run on an 8 bit machine and is still a great machine.

But with dramatic developments over time on semiconductor technology the hardware became much more important and powerful and the first PC home based systems became available. Games such as Red Baron 11 and European Air War were sold to the public and they remain very popular today.

The latest airplane simulators are much improved in the graphics area and offer the user a very realistic experience of airplane flying. Games such as flight pro sim and Microsoft's simulation version - Microsoft flight simulator should be investigated both for low entry cost and ease of use for learners.

The very latest version of flight simulation games offer network simulation, in that a number of PC pilots can fly and practice together, enhancing the experiencing in every respect.
VATSIM and IVAO are two current networks offering this to their users.

So, depending on where you want to go with flight simulation games you can spend a lot of money on sophisticated games or you can begin by choosing some basic low cost games to learn with and if you enjoy the experience, then advance to the costlier games later.