Microsoft Train Simulator
Microsoft Train
Simulator review
By Robert Irwin
Release date
(UK) 21 July 2001
Microsoft have made their name in the gaming world for thier assorted flight sims, so I suppose moving onto other sim turf was only a matter of time. I must confess however to be a bit stumped by their releasing a train sim of all things. At this point in the review I must 'fess up to not being a train enthusiast, so I'm going to have to look at this as someone who knows nothing about the techinical details of trains, nor is even the sort of bloke who spends his Saturday mornings at railway stations with a notebook and flask of weak lemon drink. Moving on....
The box comes with 2 CDs (so it takes yonks to install), a quickstart guide, and a foldout quick reference thing with train signals and keyboard commands. All printed stuff is slickly done as you'd expect with a MS product. System requirements are a P2 266, a 4 meg 3D card, and 32 megs for Win 9x or 64 for Win 2000. At a guesstimate to get decent gameplay you'd need to double each of those figures. Worthy of note is that you'll also need about 1200MB of free disk space to install it. Trawling the MS website I see some people have had install problems with Win2000, but my review system (as follows) had no install probs. The only stability problem I had was with the nvidia WHQL 12.41 series drivers, which caused my system to instantly power down when I went to 'end session', which was more than a bit annoying. I'm now playing it on the 6.47 series drivers and all is OK. To test it I use an Athlon at 1.2 gig, 384 megs RAM, a Geforce 2 MX card and Windows 2000.
Getting going is fairly easy with the printed quickstart guide and the inbuilt tutorial, which sets you going on a Japanese electric train - one of the easier ones to control - i.e. there are very few controls to play with. The whole thing is a bit disconcerting to begin with as not everything happens instantly, so at first you think you're doing something wrong. The reason being that it takes a good few seconds from cranking up the throttle till the train actually starts moving. this is of course realistic but odd to someone used to driving games...You can control just about everything in a point-and-click manner using the mouse, like dragging the throttle and brake controls back and forward, or clicking on a dashboard button to ring the bell. However I'd recommend sticking with keyboard controls as using the mouse is a bit fiddly.
The tutorial also gives you an idea of how to use the briefing screens, which tell you your timetable and any problems you might encounter, like busy lines, poor visibility through bad weather, or even more specific objectives like rescuing stricken trains. The interface is pretty easy to use and its easy to get all the info you need quickly. At the start of each game you get a screen showing you your route and the gradients of the slopes you'll be crossing. Also, once you have completed a route you get a debriefing screen telling you how well you did or how many dumb mistakes you made, like forgetting to ring the bell while pulling into a station in the US.
Onto the gameplay. You start off by choosing a train, which also means in effect choosing a geographical location. You have several choices here. There are a couple of US routes, a Japanese one and a British one. Having said I know nothing about trains, it seems like the US trains are modernish, the Japanese one is a really modern electric thing, and the UK one is a flying Scotsman steam train. The Japanese train is the easist to control, while the old Scotsman is quite fiddly with lots of pressure settings and controls to keep you busy ( in all hosesty I still didn't master it after an hour, so gave up, while the others took about 5 minutes to learn). After selecting your train you select a route and objective, which can be anything from a short passenger run to a long haul goods train trek with millions of stops and some complex objectives. You can also select advanced objectives like rescuing broken-down trains or trips that require quite strict timing objectives. There are also different weather and visibility conditions, like night trips in snow. Good job these things have headlights as its effing difficult to keep the old concentration up sometimes and so you can miss a signal.
The graphics and sound are decent. nothing showy, but it all looks and sounds pretty realistic. One thing I should say is that you need to run it at a pretty high resolution (or use FSAA) to stop you getting jaggy lines around the edge of the train. Luckily it was smooth as silk on my Geforce 2 MX card at resolutions I wouldn't dream of touching first person shooters at. The normal view is the inside of driver's cab, but you can also jump quickly between several outside views and a passenger's view, all of which can be rotated and zoomed using the cursor keys. There are lots of nice little touches like cars and animals going by, and its all supposed to be accurately modelled off the real thing. Not having been to any of the places the trains here run on, I can only take their word for it.
So onto the tricky bit - giving an opinion on this. To an uninitiated train-idiot like myself, it all seems pretty realistic and a good solid product. The fact that you can literally spend hours on commercial train routes is its strong point and possibly a weak point too. If you are really interested in trains, spending ages glued to the screen watching the world go by, and keeping an eye out for signals or speed guages is probably good stuff. Personally I don't really have the patience for it - but others may. In the end I tried things like deliberately jumping lights but rather than letting you smash the train up, it gives you a dialogue telling you that you failed and takes you to the debriefing screen. Also some trains have inbuilt auto-brakes if you exceed the speed limit too much, so again no trainwrecking fun. Therefore I'd have to say its better for the real train enthusiast than the casual bod like yours-truly who wants a rail version of Destruction Derby. As a case in point, a chap from work dropped round while I was running it earlier this evening, and he ws fascinated by the game and will definetly buy it. He has a huge model railway collection at home, so I suspect it is precisely the millions of model railway fans like him who will love it.
