Bagger Simulator 2008: Can you dig it?

Yes you can! If only for five minutes. After our recent lovely experiences with playing German demos and computer gaming simulations of pretty tedious jobs involving heavy machinery, when "Bill" pointed us in the direction of the Deutsch-only demo of Bagger Simulator 2008 we took one look at the video of enormous sand-moving machines and had to immediately pull on our hard hats and have a crack.

Sadly, you don't get a chance to drive the monstrous pictured machine in the demo (Or maybe you do - it is in German, after all, so it could be hiding in the coils of their Teutonic tongue). Instead, you get a chance to drive what I'm going to call a digger, if only to give someone in the comments thread to have a chance to chip in and tell me it's actually called Her Majesty's Holy Soil Shunter or something.

Anyway - here's my little baby.

As you see with the vehicles crossed out on the left, there's other things to drive, but I'm stuck with this chap. He's got two sets of controls - movement and the shovel-thing (Which can be lifted and tilted). I Immediately set to work playing with the sand to discover it's got some kind of (er) sand modeling physics, so you can move the stuff around. Which is handy in a game based around enormous earth moving machines.

So starts my quest to find something to do. Sadly, there's not actually anything.

I'm actually relatively experienced with building sites - the word "relatively" being key, as it's in comparison with the rest of the weak-limbed RPS-team. My Dad's a builder, so I spent a fair chunk of time working summer holidays hefting hods and applying grout, which taught me valuable life lessons like "Do anything to avoid a job that actually involves real work". However, I never really had a proper crack at any of the machinery. Clearly, this grated somewhat - diggers are kinda awesome. I suspect it's these fantasies which Bagger 2008 exists to fulfil, so as I'm playing I'm trying to show my Dad exactly how great I'd have been if I'd been put in charge of several tons of metal.

I do this by working out how much havoc I can cause. So I pick up a mass of sand, and trundle off to a the nearest machine, which I'm going to call an Ostrich-Head Digger. At which point I discover there doesn't appear to be any collision detection with the vehicles, as pictured above. This means my plan of burying the other machines under piles of sand is ruined.

Man!

Instead, I dump the sand through it and go zooming off the ramp on the right.

Since I can't do anything here, all is left is escape. I work out how to accelerate and speed off to try and break through the exit. No collision detection, alas, only works on vehicles, so I come to a halt. I petulantly dump my sand there and wonder what to do next.

At which point my five minutes is up. Which is appropriate, as five minutes is about as long as I worked on a site before slacking off for tea anyway.

As far as I can work out, all you can do in Bagger 2008 is move sand around, with no discernible purpose. Well, maybe there's sophisticated Role-playing elements I've missed or something.

Anyway - here's a video of it in action, enlivened with some impressively inappropriate eurohouse.

You can download it from here.

I have no idea what "Bagger" means.