Trainz is a well known braind when it comes to train simulator games, and for good reasons; it has a 12 year history and is backed by one of the biggest train communities as far as I can tell.More importantly: that community is also taken quite seriously, this blog alone should be proof of that.
But things are taken even further than that, just read on.
What makes Trainz so special and stand out from the rest is its diversity. Obviously you can drive a train around a track, that goes without saying, but you can do so much more than that. If you want to you can create tracks or whole sceneries yourself. You can even extend on that by creating so called scenarios ("missions") in which you can task the player to do something (for example hooking up a train, drive over to a mine to load coal and then drive to an industrial area to unload).
Trainz 12 - a desktop of its own
The first thing which you'll notice when firing up Trainz 12 is that it feels like some kind of virtual desktop. First you start of with 7 different sections which you can reach from the main menu (see image). But no matter where you go some parts will always remain visible; like the task bar on top.
Better yet: if you open windows, like the chat window, you can actually minimize those when you need to look at your screen, and they'll remain open. Even if you're actually playing the game, either on your own or in multi-player.
And when you do check out the chat window you'll soon notice that Trainz really is a popular game. During my stays I kept a chat window open, also because it heavily reminds me of IRC (though IRC commands don't seem to work unfortunately), and it didn't take long to meet up with some other players:
Chatting in the railyard
One of the things where Trainz truly excels are its building capabilities. Don't forget that this game has a huge community behind it. And here you can see some examples of it.To the left I'm in the so called route selection screen; here I can select a prebuild route and then a session to go with.
The session determines what I'll be doing; free roam (so basically doing whatever I want), OR I can opt to do missions (provided that the author made those).
The other option is to build a route (or even a whole session) yourself. When you start doing that you'll be taken to the so called Surveyor; you can see an example to the right. Here you can basically build your own scenery, as detailed or global as you want it. The six icons in the upper right side of the screen will show a control section of the part you want to work on. From the terrain (level or does it need hills?), the texture of the terrain (grass, wood or a desert environment?) right down to the actual track or the props surrounding it.
You can make this as detailed or global as you want it.
Contents ("assets")
I already mentioned the community, and the way that community is being treated really shows that the company behind Trainz respects it. At least that's how I feel about it.
And I'm not merely talking about blogs, the wonderful forum and all that. I'm talking contents or assets.
I mean; how obvious can it get if you check out the "new content" option in the game and you'll find 3 sections: Paid, Free and Upload. And when you go over these sections you'll notice that the Free section is easily two or maybe three times as large as the paid section. And something tells me that the company behind Trainz wouldn't really mind to make some extra money from it.
THAT is Trainz for you. It's way more than a regular train simulator where the best thing you can do to get new stuff is to buy into extra packs. Instead you get access to thousands of user made contents. Some better than the other, sure, but in general always heavily enjoyable.
Rounding up!
And that concludes my first post. There's bound to be more, but I first need to find my way around this blog (for example; keeping the 5 picture limit in mind before posting), the forums and obviously the game itself.
What can you expect to come? Well; I'll be diving into the game a little more, trying to show some of the stuff I discovered. I also want to cover the multi player feature; I've spend some time with that this afternoon and it was a lot more fun than I anticipated.
And we'll just have to see where that takes me. I'm not a die-hard train fan, merely a casual player who happens to enjoy creating tracks and playing with them.
