Die Sim Awards 2009

The badly-mauled Mughals got some respite on Friday when I popped over to Dusselfurt to attend the Third German Sim Awards. Held in a disused schnapps distillery and hosted by eighties balloon squanderer Nena the event proved just as predictable as last year. Of the 709 awards only three went to dark horses...

Against the odds, the statuette for Most Self-Controlled Developer was nabbed by the people behind troglodytic train sim World of Subways Vol 2. The committee felt they'd shown admirable restraint in not filling their beautiful Berlin tunnels with irradiated rats, undead commuters, or cryogenically frozen SS sturmtruppen (despite obviously wanting to):

The announcement that Gabelstapler Simulator 2009 rather than DCS: Black Shark, had won in the Most Realistic Vehicle category, almost started a riot.

Visual Imagination Software's recreation of the Still RX 60 forklift  is decent enough, but is it really better than Eagle Dynamics' breathtaking Ka-50? Judge for yourself by downloading the German language demo, or save yourself the bother by reading the following word: no.

The last surprise of the evening came when local favourite Bagger Simulator lost out to an unknown Swedish title in the hotly contested Simulations of Diggy Things category. Bread rolls and beer bottles were hurled, but having played the Tenstar Simulator trial (which requires a gamepad) I can see where the judges were coming from.