OK, drop the sax and eat the soap
I've been spending a lot of my spare time immersed in a virtual world set fifty years ago, and just a few miles from where I live. The new rail simulation program from EA Games arrived by post a couple of weeks ago. After getting to know the quirks and foibles I've found myself wandering around the landscape looking at the trees and bushes, the people on the platforms, the flowers in bloom in the meadows and along the trackside, even plants gently swaying from side to side in the virtual breeze. The level of detail that the creators have put into the game is amazing. But then, unlike driving sims and shoot-the-monsters, some of the players of this game are going to be out for a stroll. Once I get the content-creation toolpack I shall be adding some of my own details, such as people walking through the streets, and swans swimming serenely in the river.
It isn't the only train simulation software around, there are earlier simulators, some of which are cab-driving viewpoint only, but others also allow you to roam the landscape almost as you please, but these earlier simulations are showing their age in quite a few areas. Not everyone has been as taken by the simulation, blandly entitled 'Rail Simulator', as I, and if you want to read through the war of words between the extremes of users, go to this site and head for the forums. I've taken to the new release because it offers the promise of trying to model some of the past in much more realistic detail than the two earlier simulations I have used for a couple of years.
I haven't been an avid games-player before these railway simulations came along, or at least, I haven't been attracted to the graphics games as much as I was to the adventure games a quarter of a century ago. That long?
I walked into a video rental shop back in the eighties, saw that they were selling of stocks of a small personal computer quite cheaply, and bought one for myself. After a short while, I went back and bought a couple more, for two other members of the family who trusted my judgment on computing matters. The machine was the Dragon32, a rather quirky piece of hardware in a creamy plastic box with a rattly keyboard. It had a reasonable selection of games available for it on cassette tapes, although not as many as the Commodore 64. I didn't bother with the graphics games, I didn't find them realistic enough to make me overlook the cartoon-like representation of reality; I played the text-based adventure games.
One of the first titles I picked up for the Dragon32 was called El Diablero, and I realised, within a few minutes, that it was based on the Carlos Castenada books. I roamed happily around a magical landscape, dreaming, flying, changing realities, and finally solving the puzzle after several weeks. And that, of course, was the whole problem with adventure games. They were a linear sequence of experiences, flashes of enlightenment as you found your way past obstacles, and once known, the flashes of enlightenment couldn't be repeated. The game couldn't be replayed in quite the same way, but because of the linear structure, it couldn't be replayed in any other way.
Rail Simulation is a game. Not everyone agrees with me on that, in fact, a large number of the forum members that you will meet should you follow the earlier link would disagree quite strongly with me, and if the game was a shooter, I would probably end up being turned into one of the legions of gun-fodder that seem to come out of doorways and round the corner as though there was never going to be an end to it. Games players, though, need to believe strongly in the reality of what they are playing. The difference between the modern simulations and the old text-based games is that you are no longer being challenged to use your imagination to bring the game to life, you are instead presented with a set of visual and aural events and invited to either accept or reject them. It reminds me of some of the older films, where the special effects just didn't live up to the rest of the standards; Marlon Brando cradling a blowup sex doll meant to be a drowned Stephanie Beacham in 'The Nightcomers' being a prime example.
Some of the earliest computer games, things like Space Invaders and Asteroids, worked because they made no attempt to try and depict reality with any degree of realism, they simply flung the situation in your face and let you either dive straight in or walk away, in much the same way, I suppose, as cartoons did. A step beyond the acceptance of cartoons lead you into the area of the Gerry Andersen puppet series like Stingray and Captain Scarlett, where reality was treated as a cartoon subject, but an attempt was made to add realism to a few chosen objects. In a similar way, the earlier generation of train simulation programs also tried to animate certain features of their virtual world.
Rail Simulator hasn't moved from the cartoon theatre to the Hollywood set. It does offer a promise of modeling the world with a greater degree of realism, both present and past. And it does offer a new direction for gaming to head off in, or several, possibly. There is the open-ended scenario where you can roam as you please without finding that the game stops as soon as you stray from the storyline, and there is the possibility to recreate the past. This opens up a whole new range of activities investigating some of history's mysteries.
There are already games where you can hunt Jack the Ripper, or try to solve the Black Dahlia riddle, with the limitation that the creation team have already written the script and scattered the clues. Like the earlier adventure games, they tend to be linear. Rail Simulator allows the addition of user-created content, in fact, the whole ethos of railway simulation seems to be one of adding to the game. Sadly, and this is probably the biggest incendiary source that has been found in the forums, the Rail Simulator program was released several weeks in advance of the tools which allowed user-created content to be added to the game. Perhaps the marketing part of the game creation process didn't look closely enough at the players whom they expected to embrace the new product within a few days of release. The game is certainly marred by a scattering of bugs, but this is to be expected in any new release. But the inability to change the world to how you wanted to see it appears to me to be the biggest block towards universal acceptance. It is like stepping back several years into one of the old linear adventure games. Adding user-created content to a game removes the limitations imposed by a single author or directed team, and allows the game to evolve according to a multitude of whims.
It has, though, reminded me of how quirky and at the same time, appealing, some of those old games where. As well as the sorcerer game, I have fond memories of an adventure set in a castle. I can no longer remember the exact title, 'The Castle of Adventure' is actually an Enid Blyton book, so it can't be that, and I think the author was called Conrad Jacobsen, but again, it's all a blur to me now. He played some cunning tricks in the game, for example, setting a maze challenge in underground tunnels and caves, where everybody kept the torch alight. Well, you must, mustn't you? Even my old tricks of dropping selected objects and moving in each direction in turn, recording those ones which lead back to the dropped objects, didn't seem to help. But, if you turned off the torch, you saw, glowing faintly in the darkness, luminous arrows which you then followed and eventually emerged into the garden to find a hot air balloon. If you had remembered to bring the bow and arrow with you that had resolutely failed to kill any of the earlier hazards you had encountered, you could enter the basket, wait until the balloon had risen some distance, and then puncture it by shooting the arrow to allow a descent into the final area of the game.
I was playing it once, with my youngest brother giving suggestions. There was a saxophone that you could, and should, pick up. You could also play it, and in a certain situation it would spell instant doom to a fat greasy white blob that otherwise spelt instant doom to you. There was a bar of soap that you had to pick up, because otherwise you would immediately slip on it and fall to your death. Anytime you put it down and then moved meant instant end of game. As with most games, you had a limit to how many items you could carry at any one time, and we found ourselves overloaded at the point where we needed to have the saxophone, plus everything else we had speculatively picked up, and there was that damned bar of soap in the way.
"Drop Saxophone", instructed brother.
There is a saxophone here. There is a bar of soap here.
"Get soap", instructed brother.
You pick up the soap.
"Eat soap", suggested brother. I baulked at that, but he was insistent.
You choke to death trying to swallow a bar of soap.
Of course you do, doesn't everyone know that?
It isn't the only train simulation software around, there are earlier simulators, some of which are cab-driving viewpoint only, but others also allow you to roam the landscape almost as you please, but these earlier simulations are showing their age in quite a few areas. Not everyone has been as taken by the simulation, blandly entitled 'Rail Simulator', as I, and if you want to read through the war of words between the extremes of users, go to this site and head for the forums. I've taken to the new release because it offers the promise of trying to model some of the past in much more realistic detail than the two earlier simulations I have used for a couple of years.
I haven't been an avid games-player before these railway simulations came along, or at least, I haven't been attracted to the graphics games as much as I was to the adventure games a quarter of a century ago. That long?
I walked into a video rental shop back in the eighties, saw that they were selling of stocks of a small personal computer quite cheaply, and bought one for myself. After a short while, I went back and bought a couple more, for two other members of the family who trusted my judgment on computing matters. The machine was the Dragon32, a rather quirky piece of hardware in a creamy plastic box with a rattly keyboard. It had a reasonable selection of games available for it on cassette tapes, although not as many as the Commodore 64. I didn't bother with the graphics games, I didn't find them realistic enough to make me overlook the cartoon-like representation of reality; I played the text-based adventure games.
One of the first titles I picked up for the Dragon32 was called El Diablero, and I realised, within a few minutes, that it was based on the Carlos Castenada books. I roamed happily around a magical landscape, dreaming, flying, changing realities, and finally solving the puzzle after several weeks. And that, of course, was the whole problem with adventure games. They were a linear sequence of experiences, flashes of enlightenment as you found your way past obstacles, and once known, the flashes of enlightenment couldn't be repeated. The game couldn't be replayed in quite the same way, but because of the linear structure, it couldn't be replayed in any other way.
Rail Simulation is a game. Not everyone agrees with me on that, in fact, a large number of the forum members that you will meet should you follow the earlier link would disagree quite strongly with me, and if the game was a shooter, I would probably end up being turned into one of the legions of gun-fodder that seem to come out of doorways and round the corner as though there was never going to be an end to it. Games players, though, need to believe strongly in the reality of what they are playing. The difference between the modern simulations and the old text-based games is that you are no longer being challenged to use your imagination to bring the game to life, you are instead presented with a set of visual and aural events and invited to either accept or reject them. It reminds me of some of the older films, where the special effects just didn't live up to the rest of the standards; Marlon Brando cradling a blowup sex doll meant to be a drowned Stephanie Beacham in 'The Nightcomers' being a prime example.
Some of the earliest computer games, things like Space Invaders and Asteroids, worked because they made no attempt to try and depict reality with any degree of realism, they simply flung the situation in your face and let you either dive straight in or walk away, in much the same way, I suppose, as cartoons did. A step beyond the acceptance of cartoons lead you into the area of the Gerry Andersen puppet series like Stingray and Captain Scarlett, where reality was treated as a cartoon subject, but an attempt was made to add realism to a few chosen objects. In a similar way, the earlier generation of train simulation programs also tried to animate certain features of their virtual world.
Rail Simulator hasn't moved from the cartoon theatre to the Hollywood set. It does offer a promise of modeling the world with a greater degree of realism, both present and past. And it does offer a new direction for gaming to head off in, or several, possibly. There is the open-ended scenario where you can roam as you please without finding that the game stops as soon as you stray from the storyline, and there is the possibility to recreate the past. This opens up a whole new range of activities investigating some of history's mysteries.
There are already games where you can hunt Jack the Ripper, or try to solve the Black Dahlia riddle, with the limitation that the creation team have already written the script and scattered the clues. Like the earlier adventure games, they tend to be linear. Rail Simulator allows the addition of user-created content, in fact, the whole ethos of railway simulation seems to be one of adding to the game. Sadly, and this is probably the biggest incendiary source that has been found in the forums, the Rail Simulator program was released several weeks in advance of the tools which allowed user-created content to be added to the game. Perhaps the marketing part of the game creation process didn't look closely enough at the players whom they expected to embrace the new product within a few days of release. The game is certainly marred by a scattering of bugs, but this is to be expected in any new release. But the inability to change the world to how you wanted to see it appears to me to be the biggest block towards universal acceptance. It is like stepping back several years into one of the old linear adventure games. Adding user-created content to a game removes the limitations imposed by a single author or directed team, and allows the game to evolve according to a multitude of whims.
It has, though, reminded me of how quirky and at the same time, appealing, some of those old games where. As well as the sorcerer game, I have fond memories of an adventure set in a castle. I can no longer remember the exact title, 'The Castle of Adventure' is actually an Enid Blyton book, so it can't be that, and I think the author was called Conrad Jacobsen, but again, it's all a blur to me now. He played some cunning tricks in the game, for example, setting a maze challenge in underground tunnels and caves, where everybody kept the torch alight. Well, you must, mustn't you? Even my old tricks of dropping selected objects and moving in each direction in turn, recording those ones which lead back to the dropped objects, didn't seem to help. But, if you turned off the torch, you saw, glowing faintly in the darkness, luminous arrows which you then followed and eventually emerged into the garden to find a hot air balloon. If you had remembered to bring the bow and arrow with you that had resolutely failed to kill any of the earlier hazards you had encountered, you could enter the basket, wait until the balloon had risen some distance, and then puncture it by shooting the arrow to allow a descent into the final area of the game.
I was playing it once, with my youngest brother giving suggestions. There was a saxophone that you could, and should, pick up. You could also play it, and in a certain situation it would spell instant doom to a fat greasy white blob that otherwise spelt instant doom to you. There was a bar of soap that you had to pick up, because otherwise you would immediately slip on it and fall to your death. Anytime you put it down and then moved meant instant end of game. As with most games, you had a limit to how many items you could carry at any one time, and we found ourselves overloaded at the point where we needed to have the saxophone, plus everything else we had speculatively picked up, and there was that damned bar of soap in the way.
"Drop Saxophone", instructed brother.
There is a saxophone here. There is a bar of soap here.
"Get soap", instructed brother.
You pick up the soap.
"Eat soap", suggested brother. I baulked at that, but he was insistent.
You choke to death trying to swallow a bar of soap.
Of course you do, doesn't everyone know that?
Labels: adventure games, rail simulator, virtual reality
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 11:07 am
2 Comments:
Firstly, as far as computer games are concerned, I've never progressed much beyond Tetris, so I ain't much of an expert.
On the subject of fantasy adventure games, I did enjoy those old Ian Livingstone books years ago, where you had to flip through to different chapters depending on your choice of action in the game. It was good to see recently, that his books are still available in well known booksellers. They have not, it seems, been rendered obsolete or irrelevant by the latest Playstation gadgetry.
And as for that rail sim you've got, isn't it about time someone combined it with a good old- fashioned shoot-em-up? Perhaps they could call it 'Manhunt for Beeching'. Yep, good idea, that. What are you like at writing computer code?
Hi Chris, don't bin the kettle just yet, ebay it :)
I saw a film recently, (on film 4, a WW2 naval story,) that also had an alternative ending, a sad one and a happy one.
Beeching has been made a bit of a scapegoat, the Railways had wanted to divest themselves of the miles of unrenumerative branch lines for years, his report simply put into writing what had been murmured round the boardroom tables for ages.
My coding skills are still there, I've been writing some utilities to analyse and classify the xml files that make up the content for the sim, but as you know, I'm more of a gardener now. Ssdly, the wrist pains are just as great from digging up hedge roots as they were from pounding the computer all day.
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