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.
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In Dutch, bagger can also mean “crap”, which fits really well with the music in the video.
This sounds interesting in a ‘oh gawd I must see how awful this game really is!’ kind of way.
Rossignol: “A tunneling machine sim would be awesome.”
If “Advanced Chunnel Simulator” isn’t released this decade, the world will be poorer for it.
As a person who enjoys Trainz, Ship Simulator and Bus Simulator… I have to say that this actually looks like a lot of fun.
(no, really)
If you want a real game on this subject, you need the awesomely Japanese Playstation game Power Shovel. It simulates exactly this sort of machinery, only, you know…Japanese. By which I mean, absolutely insane. There are lovely challenges like using your Power Shovel to serve some sort of Japanese noodle soup from an immense bowl. And the sound effects are wondrous.
Yes, I know, it’s a PC site, but it runs fine in Playstation emulators. That’s how I fiddled with it. (I probably shouldn’t say “played”. I’m more interested in how bonkers it is than actually seriously going through the whole thing.)
God I really hope that’s the actual music from the game! :)
The german magazine “Gamestar” were so staggered by this incredible game, that they made a “simulatoren spezial” on their dvd, featuring Bagger Simulator, Müllabfuhr Simulator, Bus Simulator and Farm Simulator.
Together with a really ironic voice about how interesting all of this is. I really need to find that gem somewhere, it was so fitting.
(The bus simulator has hdr btw..which brings even crossfire system to its knees)
There it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AMJQOgJ0Sc
Oddbob – If there’s the ability to mod Borderlands, you may just get your wish. (See the header graphic.)
This game could be improved if you could attack people with the machines.
To be fair, every normal german gaming magazin wrote something like: “why the fu** should I waste my precious gaming time on crap like this?” Munich-based GameStar even made a video, containg not only the Bagger Simulator and the above mentioned Müllabfuhr Simulater (you drive a waste-truck, but can’t kill anyone with it, worse, you can’t even dump pedestrians into the back of the truck), but also two other boring simulators (there – they were so boring, my brain didn’t even bother to remember the names). But I guess the publisher will complain about illegal downloads and how much money they could have made, if the people only had bought their crap.
The controls for these machines are just like CRAP. You have to chose between 2, 3 or even 4 different “systems” to control. On real machinery you can control them all together. You can driver forwards while controlling the “bucket” on your showel. Here you have to drive to the pile of sand, stop, use your showel to dig something up, and then drive again.
This makes the process very slow and boring.
I also tried to make a road with the sand, but it was impossible to drive on top of it. My machinery always just followed the ground, so there is some bugs with the physics.
Good idea, but it needs some tuning :P
Hi everyone. I recently played the demo of Bagger Sim and really enjoyed it lol .. I want to but it but I have only seen it on sale wriiten is German. Does anyone know an English site where I may buy from? Regards Rich
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Simulators are boring. Just wait until I finish my Big Bulldozer game, now that’s going to be fun! ;)