Rock, Paper, Shotgun

No! But yes. Continuing this morning’s transportation theme there’s a new 18 Wheels Of Steel game on the horizon, Extreme Trucker, and it’s almost sexual: “Experience the freedom and charm of a trucker’s life, as trucks of chrome and metal pound the hot asphalt highway.” Man! Check out the extreme environments of the latest American Longhaul below. I’m sure there’ll be a demo along soon, and I, for one, cannot wait.
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And it’s pretty good. I mean it! I know that driving an HGV across central Europe was exactly the kind of activity you took up gaming to avoid, but SCS Software have somehow made a brilliant job of it. It’s about as close as we’re going to get to a really compelling lorry simulator – and that’s why you should play it, right now. The demo is a mere 116mb.

Can the upcoming Euro Truck Simulator really deliver the same open-road mythos as its predecessor, 18 Wheels Of Steel: American Long Haul? I can’t see how it can: even the name is less interesting. And European lorries are rubbish. 18 Wheels, incidentally, is the greatest trucking game ever conceived – a bit like Elite if it were based an American road-lore film starring Patrick Swayze. It’s the only haul ‘em up I’ll ever need. Don’t believe me? Play the demo and tour the sinisterly miniaturised America in your grand “rig”.

Euro Truck Simulator will be published in the UK on the 29th of August.

A couple of my PC Gamer reviews have been posted on CVG. The Universe At War piece seems to have a random sentence out of place, but I don’t have a copy of the magazine handy to check their edit of it… and the Savage 2 review starts with “So games have souls?” When actually the magazine copy read “Do games have souls?” Which leads me to believe that it has subsequently discovered that games do indeed have souls, and the review has been edited in light of that. Anyway, this is what I was getting at:

Do games have souls? They certainly have personalities. Savage 2’s is warm, complex, and yet oddly unlikeable. He seems like a fine chap, but you’ll never be friends.

It’s a shame they didn’t post my review of 18 Wheels Of Steel: American Long Haul, which is altogether more satisfying. Instead, perhaps you could go and read this interview with the devs who make their living from mesmerically boring driving games.