What are you playing? (Coronavirus edition)

[dodint]

For some reason, I quit that game cold turkey without even knowing it. The kid got abducted and a new chapter started and I just never turned it on again. I'm sure I'll go back to it eventually but it's funny how I played it so much and then it just disappeared.

[Tom Servo]

How necessary is it to play RDR1 to enjoy 2?

[dodint]

It's not necessary. RDR2 is a prequel there is no backstory to catch up on.

[Rare White Ape]

I think RDR1 is better anyway. It’s a more cohesive game and isn’t let down by its own bloat.

Plus it was made before Leslie Benzies fell out with the Houser brothers at Rockstar. He was arguably the driving force of creativity for RDR and GTA.

[dodint]

The neat think is you can play both.

[Tom Servo]

Heh, well, I'll try RDR2. I mostly ask because I have RDR1 and got annoyed with it and stopped playing, so hopefully I'll side with Nathan here that RDR2 is better.

[dodint]

I haven't played RDR1 yet. I hoped to play 2 and then follow up with 1. But I think I started studying for the bar exam and then never circled back to it. As the bar approached the only thing I played was Rocket League because I could play that for has little as five minutes at a time, very granular use of spare time.

[Tom Servo]

Man, that is like my life with games now. I find I rarely have hours to sit down and play something anymore, so I have all these cool games that I've never finished because the idea of having to set aside an hour or two to play some more is just too much.

Probably why I play so much Forza Horizon - you can pick up and do a race in like five minutes and then be on your way. Otherwise, it's almost always Civ because that you can play with lots of distractions.

[Rare White Ape]

One game you definitely DON’T want to play then is Train Sim World 2, which is included with Game Pass. It’s very good at simulating the world of rail transport to a very high degree, so much so that playing it is a fuckin pain in the arse. Just like a real job!

The early adventures of a city express train driver on the Cologne-Aachen line in Germany aren’t too bad. It’s as you’d expect; stop here, open doors. Close doors. Go to next station. Keep to the speed limit and be on-time.

But I thought I’d try my hand at being a diesel freight train driver hauling 40-carriage coal trains in Maryland, US of A, on a faithfully reproduced 60-mile route through the mountains. Before you get to do that, you have to shunt rail cars using a dual engine setup in the immense CSX freight yard in Cumberland. Fair enough.

However the game gives you about five minutes of tutorial on how to cold-start a single locomotive before putting you in the dual unit scenario on a completely different model of engine. Plus, it doesn’t explain how to set up one engine as the master and the other as the slave. I had to Google how to get one unit to control the brakes of the other. Before that I was hopping out of one and into the other while it was moving to release or apply the brakes

On top of that the speed limit in the freight yard is 15 mph and all the points switches are manual (no central control like those fancy inner-city greeny electric communist trains) so you’re constantly stopping to get out and switch to the correct line to shunt the railcars into. And if you’re driving at the rear, it’s likely you have to run 200 yards to the far end of the combo to switch lines.

I’m not sure how much of that I have to endure before I’m set free to deliver a load 20 miles up the line. I’m pretty sure there bits where I have to load coal into empty wagons before that. And I bet it’ll be stop-start-stop-start 20 yards at a time to load one-by-one.

Flight sims and driving sims are pretty good because you get to live out some proper fantastical shit. This train sim business though… might as well get a job in the field.

[dodint]

Now you have me wanting to dig out my Dreamcast and fire up Railroad Tycoon II.