Euro Truck Simulator 2

I gave up driving Ferraris in Oʻahu to drive Scanias in Europe. That is how much fun Euro Truck Simulator 2 is. Drive trucks, transport cargo and park trailers. And try to do it all without accidents or traffic fines.

Pros

I consider Euro Truck Simulator 2 to be the Falcon 4.0 of truck simulators, although I must admit, it is the only truck simulator I have played. I have not driven a truck in real life (I have not flown a plane either), but the driving in Euro Truck Simulator 2 behaves like what I would expect in real life. The weight of your cargo and the type of truck affects how easy it is to move or stop. Take a corner too quickly and it will easily tip over. Parking the trailer is truly as difficult as it looks. Traffic rules must be obeyed. Fuel and driver fatigue must be managed. There are also day/night cycles, rain, roadside events and different types of drivers on the road to give the real life driving feeling.

Despite all the simulation goodness, Euro Truck Simulator 2 has got a gentle learning curve. Not surprising since starting a truck engine is no where near as complicated as an F-16 ramp start and working the GPS navigation is far easier than operating an AN/APG-68 radar.

To give the game an even easier start, there is also a pretty good tutorial with a short delivery that teaches the basics. It gives a good feel of what is involved, but it is still very much just the tip of the iceberg. The tutorial can be skipped for those that want to get straight into the thick of it.

Even though the roads are not true to life, they are varied and long enough to make locations feel like they are very far apart. This combined with the faster time flow and nice change in scenery really made me feel like I have travelled a great distance, all without the boredom of a long distance drive.

The look of the different locations really blew me away. Individual scenery elements are repeated, but there is enough variety to make different locations look unique. 50 hours into the game and I am still looking around at the scenery. Not good as I am not concentrating on the road! I wish there was some sort of autopilot that allowed me to look around without worrying about driving properly.

The lighting and shadow effects look just like driving in real life. This is most evident as you are driving through shadows cast by trees or other tall objects, and when going through tunnels at night.

The game sounds great. Roaring engines, the sounds of rain, the turning indicator ticking away, other vehicles going past, it all sounds like driving in real life. There are even weird noises that occur when you have damaged your truck too much. One thing though, I cannot say whether the truck sounds are accurate to their real-life counterparts as I am not familiar with them.

Listen to real radio! They may be Internet streaming radio, but they are still real broadcasts including stations like the BBC. It doesn’t get more realistic than driving from London to Reims and hearing more about Brexit over the radio. When you are sick of the news, you can always switch to your own music or another radio station.

The game’s own music also sounds good. It only plays at certain stages so as to not interrupt the whole radio experience, but it does sound good.

Other than being a truck driving simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is also a trucker RPG with some simple transport business management on the side. Earn money and gain experience as you complete jobs. With enough experience, you level up and get a point to spend on upgrading your truck driving skills. Spend money buying new trucks, customising them and expanding your transport business by buying and upgrading garages, then hiring other drivers to work for you.

Almost everything in Euro Truck Simulator 2 is customisable. Customise the difficulty of the simulation. Customise the environment. Customise your truck including paint jobs, decorations, seating positions and mirrors. You can even customise your own trailers.

Mods, mods, mods! There are truck loads of them. Real company names, traffic modifications, truck customisations, custom maps and even a multiplayer mod. So far I have only tried Really Real Company Names from the Steam Workshop, a Hungary map from modland and the multiplayer mod TruckersMP.

The AI of other drivers seem to be pretty good. There are good drivers, bad drivers and really bad drivers that will crash right before your very eyes! Some drivers seem to react to your signalling while others ignore it.

Pause and quit at any time. Progress is automatically saved, even when you are in the middle of the road. The next time you play the game, it picks up where you left off but with your truck at a stand still. Just start the engine and resume driving.

From time to time, there are special events that are provided through the optional online community World of Trucks.  Complete the goals set out for the event and score some freebies!  I have only completed the Goodyear Roll-Out event, but was happy to receive the Goodyear Tyres Pack DLC for free.

The Italia DLC is a worthy addition to Euro Truck Simulator 2.  The scenery looks very much like Italy.  There are plenty of new roads to drive on and some of them are more complex to negotiate.

Cons

The police cars do not ask you to pull over or give chase. They will put on the lights and siren, but they just continue driving as normal. I know this is not Need for Speed or Test Drive, but I expect at least for the police to ask you to pull over rather than just issuing instant fines and driving away.

I understand the game world is scaled down to be less boring and more fun, but the cities feel like very small country towns. A few more blocks with a bit more traffic would make it feel more city like.

Other Points

There are some things in the game that are less realistic. I have already mentioned the scaled down distances and faster time flow. The amount of traffic is definitely less than in real life. There is no need for food, drink and toilet stops. These make for a game that is more fun to play, but I do wish there were options for full realism. I have not placed this as a con as I can see that simulating everything to the level of real life would be a Herculean task.

I know there are real pilots that play flight sims and real race drivers that play racing sims, but are there real truck drivers that play Euro Truck Simulator 2? Would they find it more of a chore or would they actual enjoy the game?

The open world nature of the game reminded me of Test Drive Unlimited. It is not as “open” as TDU though. There are invisible walls preventing you from driving too far off-road. Other than that, you can drive on all accessible roads and discover places of interest.

World of Trucks jobs are a bit unusual in that the time limit you have to complete the job is in real-life time rather than in-game time.  On the plus side, I could take a job with a 10 hour time limit, muck around and sleep in-game a few times before finally reaching the destination to finish it after 21 hours in-game time.  Since the job only took me 1 hour of real-life playing time, I did not get any time penalties.  On the minus side, if I took a job with 10 hours to go, but could only play the game for 10 minutes for that whole day, World of Trucks would flag my delivery as being late when I completed it the next day but only taking 5 in-game hours.

The Heavy Cargo Pack DLC adds cargo types that are extra heavy.  It sure makes for more challenging deliveries, but at the same time it also feels like more of the same.

Here is a montage video of Euro Truck Simulator 2 with Frank Klepacki’s Just Do It Up from the DOS version of Command & Conquer.

Biases

I love simulators, but have mainly played flight and car racing simulators. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is really getting me interested in truck simulation.

I know nothing about trucks except for what I see on the road and in movies, tv shows, etc.

There are other open world driving games out there, but the last one I played was Test Drive Unlimited.

 

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition

Mortal Kombat (1992). The versus fighting game that caused great controversy for its over the top violence and gore. Mortal Kombat (2011) is the ninth game in the series with the Komplete Edition incorporating all DLCs in one handy package.

Pros

The training modes are wonderful. The tutorial teaches everything from the basics to the stuff special to Mortal Kombat. The actual keys to perform actions are displayed, even if they have been customised. Very useful for absolute beginners or people like me that are not good at versus fighting games. Fatality training only gives guides for one fatality per character, but it can still be used to practise other fatalities. Then there is practice mode where you can set up conditions for battle and fight without health or time limits.

Challenge Tower is a nice single-player mode that puts you in all sorts of creative situations to test your skills. These include Test Your Might button/key pounding to get your metre up for smashing wood, slowly shooting zombies and landing hits for koins. Some challenges also feel like a continuation of the tutorial as they focus on a character‘s specific action.

Toasty! Loved it in Mortal Kombat II and glad to see it in Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition. Babality also made a return from MK 2, but friendship was left behind to die.

I don’t know when tag team fighting came to Mortal Kombat, but it sure is a good addition.

The game looks good at 1920×1080. There are more blood and guts in greater detail than the last time I saw Mortal Kombat (ie MK 2). I don’t know when X-Ray came into the fray, but it sure fits in nicely with the whole ultraviolent nature of the game. Despite all the graphical improvements, I actually miss the old FMV look of the characters.

There are 31 characters to choose from. It is 8 shy of the 39 in King of Fighters 2002, but it still provides plenty of variety. Too many for me to learn up.

As you play, you earn koins which are used to purchase extras. Apart from art works and music, there are also secret fatality directions that can be purchased. Everything is hidden, so you don’t actually know what you are purchasing until after purchasing.

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition is very keyboard friendly. Keys can be remapped easily, and the game responds well to key presses.

Moves for the characters are easily accessible through the pause menu. They are also shown with the exact key or button mappings that need to be used to execute the moves.

The story mode is great. The introduction shows that everyone is dead except for Raiden. Just before getting hammered by Shao Khan, Raiden sent a vision to himself in the past, in Mortal Kombat 1. Back in MK 1 time is where the game starts. Unlike MK 1, the current game has cutscenes flowing into fights, flowing into more cutscenes and fights if you win. The plot was quite interesting and is not just about fighting in the Mortal Kombat Tournament.

Freddy Krueger. Nice to see a familiar face from the 80s join the crew. Apparently, Shao Kahn annoyed Freddy, pulled him out of the Dream Realm and beat him senseless. Now Freddy wants revenge before returning to the Dream Realm. I am not a Nightmare on Elm Street fan, but his claw thingies sure fits nicely with the whole blood and guts thing.

The game has five difficulty levels and the easiest difficulty of beginner is definitely easier than the likes of the original Mortal Kombat and MK II. Good for players that like versus fighting games but are simply bad at them. With no limit to retries, I managed to complete story mode and also ladder mode on beginner.

Cons

Hardly anyone plays online. Not surprising since there is the newer Mortal Kombat X and soon Mortal Kombat 11 will be released.

When you are part way through story mode, there is no way to restart the story without finishing the whole story or deleting your save files. If you are like me and forgot what happened the last time you played, the only choices are to finish the story and be puzzled by what is happening or delete your saves and lose all your unlocked goodies and koins.

Keys can be remapped easily, but some sections of the game, like character selection and moving around the Krypt, still use the default keys rather than the remapped ones.

An extension of the previous con, there is a Challenge Tower challenge that displays the wrong keys for you to follow. I had to set the keys back to default so that the displayed keys matched the keys to press.

The game does not output audio properly for my Logitech G35 headset on Windows 10. Half the sounds disappear and the other half plays in stereo properly. It may be a driver issue, but so far this is the only game that has such an issue.

Other Points

I have always felt that Mortal Kombat games moved slower than other versus fighting games like Street Fighter. It definitely felt slower than my recent playing of The King of Fighters 2002. Although slower, I still find MKKE just as difficult as all other fighters.

Biases

The only other Mortal Kombat games I have played are MK 1 and 2. I played them a lot back in the day and against other people too.

I did not get to play MKKE against other people.

I have completed the story mode on the easiest difficulty of beginner. I have also played many games of the single-player ladder and the Challenge Tower.

More recently, I was playing The King of Fighters 2002.

The King of Fighters 2002

The King of Fighters 2002 is a 2D versus fighting game from a lesser known franchise. It is no SF or MK, but it does have plenty of fighting action.

Pros

There are 39 characters to choose from. I have enough trouble getting my head around 3, so I have not tried them all. As opponents though, they do behave different enough to be their own characters.

If you lose a match and elect to continue, you get to choose an advantageous adjustment for the next match. You can choose to drop the difficulty level of the AI, lower the health of the opposition or give yourself an energy gauge boost. This continue option is on by default but can be changed in the game options of the starting menu before selecting “launch”.

The default match setting is 3 vs 3 fighting. Each player picks 3 different characters and selects what order they fight in. Each character fights until their health reaches zero or win the whole match. There is no tagging different characters to enter the fight, but it still makes for an interesting match with skills required for different characters and also varying strategies depending on who the opponent is.

Cons

The keyboard control is one massive con point for The King of Fighters 2002. The keys cannot be remapped. This by itself would not be that big a deal except the keys shown in the options are partially wrong. ‘Q’ and ‘W’ do not work. ‘Z’ and ‘A’ are used instead. This makes the game buttons A,B,C,D map to the keys Z,X,C,A, which makes this con point even worse. Who on earth uses Z,X,C,A as fighting buttons? Z,X,A,S, OK. Or Z,X,C,V all in one line also makes sense, but not what they have.

The game does not support my old generic digital USB 2-Axis 8-Button Gamepad. Windows 10 detects it fine, but the game just says bugger off.

Once the game has “launched”, the game options settings cannot be accessed. So, settings like continue options, number of rounds per match and difficulty level cannot be changed after the game has launched.

The audio sounds washed out to me. I wonder if all direct arcade emulation games sound like this or whether this game just sounds like that to begin with.

Other Points

Moving backwards automatically activates block, so more like Street Fighter and less like Mortal Kombat.

The graphics are low resolution, but the game still looks OK with smooth animations. When playing in windowed mode there is no way to resize the window, so the only view choices are full screen or small window.

Biases

I have only played The King of Fighters 2002 against the CPU.

I am not good at versus fighting games with Mortal Kombat (1992) being the only game that I completed and only with one character.

The only other versus fighting games I have played are Mortal Kombat 2, Street Fighter 2/Turbo/Alpha/Zero/Too/Many/Names/Cannot/Remember, Tekken 3, Soul Blade/Edge and Budokan. I enjoyed all of them despite not being good at versus fighting games.

I got KOF 2002 as a freebie when GOG was giving it away.

On the easiest difficulty level I managed to reach the boss (I think it’s the boss) but could never defeat him.

The King of Fighters 2002 is available DRM-free from GOG.com.

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Play as Indiana Jones through Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade in one of the most fun ways possible, with LEGO! Build, destroy and whip your way through the scenes from the movies and have a good laugh at the funny LEGO antics.

Pros

Most of the iconic scenes from the movies are in the game. They have been modified to make the game fun to play and funnier, but they are still easily recognisable.

Hear the music from the movies! The quality is not as good as the movies, but good enough for LEGO Indiana Jones to run around. I am not sure whether all the music is taken from the movies or whether there are some original compositions as well. It does not matter though, as all of it sounds great.

There is a lot of different things you can do. There is the usual LEGO building and destroying as well as collecting studs to unlock stuff. Then there is the fighting, digging, driving, fixing, screaming, blowing up stuff, solving simple puzzles, throwing all sorts of objects and of course using Indy’s famous whip. Everything you would expect from Indy and company.

For the intrepid explorer, there are plenty of hidden areas, artefacts to find and more things to unlock.

It is not Monkey Island, but LEGO Indy makes me laugh every time I play, even when I know what is going to happen.

Feeling stuck? Vent your frustration by breaking everything. More often than not, this will reveal the solution to progress the game. Satisfaction and progression at the same time.

Cons

The cutscenes cannot be skipped. Even though they are entertaining, I have had to repeat levels a few times and watching the same cutscene over and over is just a waste of time. Cutscenes only play in story mode, so repeating a level in free roam mode is not an issue.

Sometimes the camera angle makes it difficult to judge how to jump or get over certain obstacles. Or maybe it is just me since I am bad at platformers.

I encountered one progress killing bug in the last level of Temple of Doom. On the bridge fighting Mr Heart-Extractor, some guards are supposed to appear with swords for you to take to chop the ropes. I played for 30 minutes and quit because no swords appeared. A quick search revealed that this is indeed a bug and one way to work around it is to change the game’s screen resolution to 800×600. A big thank you to BrickRaiders for the solution. Note that I would not consider my machine as a “less powerful PC”, but I still encountered this bug.

Between 01 March 2019 and 27 October 2019, an update for Windows 10 or my graphics driver (or both) caused resolution problems for LEGO Indy. I usually play at 1920 x 1080 but have changed resolutions without any issues. Changing to 800 x 600 to address the above-mentioned bug worked painlessly. Now, the game would keep minimising on most resolutions, including 800 x 600. Thankfully, 1920 x 1080 still works. An interesting workaround is to automatically hide the Windows 10 Taskbar.

The resolution can also be set by manually editing the settings file C:UsersAppDataLocalLucasArtsLEGOIndianaJonespcconfig.txt. Just change the “ScreenWidth”, “ScreenHeight”, “WindowWidth” and “WindowHeight” numbers to the resolution you want to use.

A strange side effect of this resolution display problem is that the progress killing bug mentioned above, changed. I have no problems getting swords anymore. Unfortunately, there is a new small problem where the character gets stuck trying to run on to the bridge from the sides. It is minor and not game breaking, but it is still a problem. On the plus side, there is no need to change the resolution to 800 x 600 anymore.

Other Points

The game is very simple to pick up and play. The difficulty is also quite easy, probably helped by the fact that you cannot die as such. Overall, this makes for an easy platformer that even I can reach the end. After that, there is still quite a challenge for those that seek to find and unlock all the secrets.

The Last Crusade starts off in Venice where Indy searches for the tomb of Sir Richard. There is a level with young Indy, but it must be unlocked first.

Biases

A decade ago, I played LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy alongside LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures on the PlayStation 2. Both games were fun, but I enjoyed LEGO Indy just a bit more.

I have completed the story mode for all three movies. Time to find all the secrets.

I never got to try out the drop in/out co-op mode.

I like all the Indiana Jones movies.

I enjoy platformers but I am not good at them.