If you’re a twitchy-fingered master of First-Person Shooters (FPS), or a Mario Andretti of the fast-paced car racing games, this post is probably gonna be a snoozer for you. This is written for the rest of us, the slow-moving gamers. Perhaps we’re an older crowd, or perhaps you’re a youthful FPS master who is looking to take a break from the frenetic pace of the latest zombie wars.
Train and truck simulators both provide a great way to take a virtual tour of some extended countryside, and see some cities along the way as well. There are many similarities — both truck and train sims use maps of virtual worlds that you travel through as you play the game. Granted, the train sims like Trainz open up a whole world of route creations, but this post is focused on gameplay, not content creation.
There are significant differences between truck and train simulations (sims). You can’t steer a train, and in Trainz I’ve never seen a cow or a car stuck on the tracks. All you have to do is obey the signals that come along every minute or few, and you can play Trainz largely without worrying about “steering.” I suppose there’s a chance you could derail, but otherwise Trainz can be hands-off to a certain extent.
Truck sims are different. In addition to the throttle you have a steering wheel to contend with, along with other drives, lanes, cops on the side of the road and many other obstacles. A game like American / Euro Truck Simulator (ATS/ETS) is not fast paced like your favorite FPS game, but it still requires near constant attention. Short of pausing the game, you can only take your eyes off the road for short periods of time, just like reality.
Let’s explore the two simulations genres, trains and truck driving sims, and see why I like to play both.
Not Historically a Gamer
I pretty much ignored video games most of my life. I played Asteroids and Defender in the arcades when they were new games. Yes, I’m old. And I made it blissfully through most of my life without playing any computer games. This means I am largely unskilled at the rapid-fire action most of the first-person games involved.
I did get a VR headset a couple years ago and got into Moss and other games. I largely use it for Walkabout Golf, which is really fantastic, but that’s another story. I find the Moss fight scenes to be difficult and boring, they are not what I’m looking for out of games.
Now before I dismiss all other genres of games and focus on the simulations, I will mention that I like puzzle-style games as well as economic and historical simulators. I recently got into Sid Meier’s Civilization IV but I haven’t really dug into it yet.
I also enjoy playing economic railroad simulation games, I have Railway Empire 2 and some ancient Railroad Tycoon versions. While I found these games enjoyable, they are lacking in the scenery and realism I realized I was looking for in a rail sim.
First Rail Sim Purchase
One week in August, 2024, Steam had a super-sale on train simulators. I started with Train Sim World IV, but it had display issues on my computer so I returned it. I got Trainz 2022PE instead and I haven’t looked back.
Now let me reiterate, as I said above, I am not a fast paced action gamer. I am not young, I didn’t spend my life playing games, so I just don’t have the game-related dexterity to keep up with fast paced games even if I wanted to. But me, I get enough fast-paced games playing with Linux and related technologies many hours every day. I’m not looking at games for stimulation and sweat sessions. Instead I look to games to escape and relax.
I found something interesting after I played Trainz for a month or so. I have 2’x4′ N-scale layout which is largely neglected. I just never find time to get into the physical model railroading which I was never very devoted to in the first place. I was always a person who mostly enjoys watching trains running around in a big circle. I can’t tell one locomotive from another, for the most part. I am not a “rivet-counter.”
Virtual Model Railroading
What I found interesting was that I was effectively doing model railroading in a virtual space. No, not virtual reality, the only railroad simulation that offers VR right now is in the early stages. It looks promising, but to me, at least by the Steam videos they show for a demo, it looks like all the plants came out of the tropics. Nowhere is there a North American mountain region scene in their demos. To be fair I haven’t bought the game to find out what all is possible, but it looks like their assets are very limited right now.
No, what was interesting was that for me, a guy who just like to build scenery and watch trains run, I found Trainz to be much more enjoyable than the real thing! I can load so many different routes at the touch of a button. I would have to have a football field of basements to hold all the routes I have in Trainz. I can say that and I don’t own nearly a twentieth of what’s out there in terms of paid content. As far as the downloadable free content goes, there’s a total of over 700,000 assets in the Trainz download station (DLS).
Honestly, I buy most of my routes, I don’t really spend time looking at much free content. I’ve bought plenty of content to keep me busy as a player, so I spent such little time downloading from the DLS that I’m not mad at N3V Games for charging $5 a month for speedier access.
In fact, you can spend a couple more bucks in the months where you want it and get Trainz Plus, which brings even more content as well as the fastest downloads. You also get Trainz Living Railroad, which is a fascinating new system for automating railroad operations in Trainz.
Trainz also has a great Surveyor feature that lets me build routes if I want to. In fact, there’s a somewhat complex but well documented process to take data from Google Earth and translate it into train routes. Someday when I get past my current technical mountain (some Docker and Snort/Wazuh thing), I will look at building a route of my favorite railroad, the Virginia & Truckee Railroad in Virginia City, Nevada.
Transition to American Truck Simulator
Ok, enough about Trainz. I still play it when I want a chill, relaxed gaming session. I’m thinking of streaming my Trainz play on Twitch, perhaps. But I find there are limits to how much it holds my interest. The game makes it too easy to look away and answer an email or a Slack message while the train rolls down the tracks.
Enter American Truck Simulator. It goes on sale often for $5 on Steam (not right now, watch for late November / early December), and that’s what I paid for it. Along with that sale price, I bought the western states for roughly $5 each. The base game includes California, Nevada, and Arizona. I added Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Oregon and Washington.
These are the states where I personally have extensive driving experience, so a large element of this game is to relive long drives from my past and see some familiar scenery I may never see again in real life. Sure, I’ve driven in Texas and plenty of other states, but I don’t know those roads the way I know the west.
For transparency, I was never a truck driver, beyond tow trucks eons ago. I’m not into country music, I don’t wear jeans and I don’t generally fit the truck-adjacent profile. What I love about this game is that it’s similar to Trainz in that I get to journey through scenery that is very pleasant to look at.
ATS/ETS Require You to Pay Attention
But it’s very different from Trainz in terms of the attention needed to play the game. There’s not really a time where you get to look away for more than a few seconds when playing American Truck Simulator (ATS). I find the game hits the limits of how much “virtual risk” I want to take. Crashing on the freeway is scary enough, and I’ve done it once or twice while I was learning how to control the game.
ATS also imposes a time pressure on the player, you can’t just toodle along at a low speed playing it safe, or you get assessed significant late penalties at the end of the run. I’m also currently convinced that real time plays a factor in late penalties. I usually get a sizeable late penalty, long story short I played with a controller until only very recently when I got a PXN V9 steering wheel.
Now that I have that wheel, I still have noticed that on runs where I take a break overnight, I got a late penalty, though not as bad as with the controllers for steering. But when I played a route straight through this morning, I was driving at the same slightly pokey speeds, partially because my truck is a used piece of junk and it’s not a powerhouse. All the same, when I played straight through with only a couple fifteen minute breaks, I didn’t get assessed any late penalty.
Controllers and Steering Wheels
Now, let’s talk about controllers. There is a stark difference here between Trainz and American / Euro Truck Simulator. For Trainz, it’s all about your mouse and keyboard, especially if you get into route building. Because trains have no steering, you don’t need any controller. A steering wheel would just be a sick joke for Trainz, which probably wouldn’t even recognize it.
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