You know those really long car trips you're likely contemplating for either Thanksgiving or Christmas this year? The ones that make you seriously consider alternate forms of transportation so that you're not stuck in the driver's seat for hours at a time watching the amazingly similar terrain roll by, interspersed with a few moments of sheer breathtaking beauty? Right. Well, that's what you can expect to see in Trainz Driver Edition, only you're in charge of that alternate form of transportation. Anyone who has played flight simulators is familiar with this phenomena, but they are very popular because so many want to be armchair pilots without all the expense of actually getting a pilot's license. Similarly, anyone who is a railroad enthusiast, or even a railroad modeler, will get the same sort of thrill out of Trainz Driver, which is a very realistic simulation of an engineer's job.If you clicked more and are reading this part of the review, I assume you consider yourself a railroad aficionado. So, you may want to take a quick detour before jumping in to the cab and visit the railyard. In the yard you can see all the different engines and cars and get the specifications, description, and history of each.
You have full control of the throttle, dynamic break, train break, reverser, and horn for your first several runs, and must obey the whistle signs, speed limits, and maintain your schedule. That means you have moments when you are trying to do everything at once, and times when you are sitting just watching the scenery go by.
It is possible to control the levers with keyboard shortcuts, but my pet peeve with this game is that I'd rather use the levers, and you can't see all of your controls at the same time and look out the window too. I understand that an engineer can't either, but he can reach by muscle memory for a control or quickly glance at it and back out the window, whereas in this game you need to use mouselook to change your view to see the lever, then change the lever with the mouse, then use mouselook again to see out the window and judge, and repeat over and over as you try to make adjustments... particularly when using the train break to come in to a station.
My other peeve is that the game never mentions the use of the two different brakes and the reverser before your are expected to use them. So when you first take over as the engineer, you are likely very in the dark about how to pull out of the station, putting you way behind the time schedule. Granted, the next time you'll have a better idea, so it's not a horrible omission. It would be nice to have better directions though, for those of us who haven't been educated in the arts of railroading.
The graphics are nice. I didn't notice any loading issues or tearing in the several runs I've made so far, and the sounds are what I've come to expect from various commuter trains that I've ridden. The game will make use of surround sound, if you have it, allowing you to hear crossing signals move from in front of you to behind you as you go rumbling by. Even if you don't have surround sound, though, the game does a good job with volume and pitch control for simulating the Doppler effect as you go by.
All in all, I think this is a solid simulation, and one that train enthusiasts everywhere will want to experience. If you aren't a railroader, but enjoy flight simulators, this may be a nice change of scenery for you, and you'll like it. If your gaming tastes run to action games, this probably isn't for you, as there are those long moments of watching the scenery roll on by.
I first encountered a computer in high school, where we learned programming on workstations. Enjoying that, I became a computer lab assistnat which gave me the wonderful job of going to the computer room on my frees instead of sitting in the cafeteria or library. We later found out that the mainframe we first learned on was a bit older than we were... it had vacuum tubes in the back. Needless to say, no fun & games on that beast, so we brought in a Commodore 64 to play Ultima during our frees.
At home I had a Mac, and surprise... game options were slim there as well. So, while Dark Castle was good for a quick game here or there, and I ran through every Might & Magic game that came out for the Mac, I spent most of my gaming time playing AD&D with friends. I took my Mac to college with me, and started programming it to take care of most of the tedious dice rolls and book-keeping when I was the dungeonmaster for our regular group. Better games started coming out for the mac then as well: Tetris and Spectre were favorites.
After college, our AD&D group was scattered, so my wife and I started looking for computer games that would fill the gap. We also got our first Windows machines then, so there were many more options than in the mac arena at the time. We got each other EQ for Christmas, and have been playing MMOG's ever since. We left EQ to alpha and beta test DAoC (hey out there to all my scouts and the other archers from CritShot)and stayed there for several years, played around with AO in some spare time, tried SWG and Horizons, City of Heroes and EQ2 held our interest for a while, back to DAoC for Catacombs, and WoW. Although I've played some single player RPG games, and some cooperative RPG games, I definitely prefer MMOGs. FPSs tend to get me slightly motion sick.
We recently got a Mac Mini for the kids, and our oldest son has a PS2, so we're playing some games on those systems as well.
