So, this site probably seems a little dead. Or more like really dead. Sorry about that, folks. To be honest, I have been thinking about closing it completely because in the end, I think it did not turn out to be as funny as I thought. I’ll have to think about this some more, see whether I can find things to post here that are more interesting and/or funny. And maybe play a few more games so I’ll actually have something to write about…

Oh, in case you’re interested (I know you’re not, but any link might help my Google Page Rank), you can also look at my much-more-frequently updated personal homepage.

The problem of course is that I have no damn clue about most games that are coming up, but there are some I’m excited about. The one I’m most excited about is Mirror’s Edge, shown above. The best description for the game is the first trailer, which is just raw gameplay. If you don’t have the time for watching that right now, imagine the jumping and running of Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia, only in first-person. Sounds insane, looks like fun, but the problem is that while godless heathens, i.e. console owners, get it like any day now, PC users will have to wait until January.

As for the train relation, well, you see the subway up there, don’t you? As far as I can tell the type looks vaguely correct for modern south-east asia, the important question is whether it’ll have a correct third rail for electricity, since it clearly has no overhead wire.

I mentioned Tomb Raider above. There’s a new one of that one as well. To be honest, I really didn’t follow the TR Underworld discussion at all. I didn’t even play the demo. It is pre-ordered (via Amazon), so I guess I’ll continue to ignore it right until I start playing it.

Finally, there’s Left 4 Dead, and I’m really not certain what to make of that. It’s a co-op zombie shooting game by Valve. Now, that would only be useful for LAN parties, and I’ve not been to many LAN parties recently. It has one thing going for it, though, and that is that it’s by Valve. As the count of games in the reviews section of this site should tell you, I’m a huge Valve fan, and I recently fell in love deeply with Team Fortress 2 and Day of Defeat Source, both games that I didn’t use to be interested in before I played them. If L4D was 20€, I’d have probably already pre-ordered it and would be playing the pre-release demo, but as it stands, I’m waiting for the demo for the rest of the world before I make a real decision based on that.

Oh, by the way

Something I neeearly forgot: If you’re into Half-Life 2’s trains, then I recommend the site http://www.train-photo.ru/. I don’t understand anything the site is saying, but the pictures of russian (or at least former soviet union) trains are great. While the level of detail that Valve implemented in Half-Life 2 can be disputed, it seems that they managed to catch the overall look perfectly modulo the game’s storyline-based desolation.

Go read the review!

While we’re at it, he also sent me some additional screenshots from Unreal Tournament 3, so don’t hesitate to look at that review again!

Go read the review, because if you don’t your time spent reading this will have been wasted!

On a forum called NeoGAF (no, I don’t know what that means either) someone opened a thread about railroad levels in games. Looks interesting, although it looks at the levels mainly from a gaming point of view, less about railroads.

Mac ATM, produced by The Daily Grind, simulates an automated teller machine. I haven’t had time to check whether it’ll actually print anything, to be honest, but it looks reasonable enough and is just as much fun to use as the real thing.

As far as trains are concerned, I’d give it a “Good” rating, which is the highest I give. There are no trains in there, so it has no mistakes when it comes to them.

Of all the games I have seen so far (which may not be that many, but are still more than the meager Reviews section implies), Legend has the worst trains of all. Wrong proportions, completely fictional motive power, platforms that won’t hold half a locomotive and a gas tank tank right in the middle of the tracks. I know that game developers have to make some compromises when writing their games and trains are not the highest priority, but this is just ridiculous.

In other news, there’s still empty space in the Comments section. If you start now, you could get “First post” in nine different threads all at once!

If that didn’t convince you to shell out 10 € for Battlefield 1942 (if you don’t have it already) and a few hundred megabytes of disc space for the mod, then you are beyond repair. Try it out, it’s great. You’ll find everything you need and a great community at IS82.com

So what is this community about? It’s about Interstate 1982, a mod for Battlefield 1942 in the spirit of the video game of the same name. Back in it’s day, Battlefield 1942 had lots of great mods. Then there was the switch to Vietnam, then suddenly 2… it’s a sad story I’m gonna tell one other day. Interstate 1982 was the best of all of these. You drive around in cars with huge guns on the rooftops, battle each other, or try to get to the end of hellish race maps. It’s a completely different game, and it rocks.

Development of the core mod stopped long ago (another long, sad story for another day), but the community, which is centered at IS82, has created thousands of add-ons and maps that continue the tradition.

So what do I want you to do? Nothing, actually, as I know nobody is reading this. But if you do happen to read this, I’d suggest you get the game if you don’t have it already (10€ with all expansion packs at practically every story you’ll find), install the mod, join the server you’ll see at IS82.com and find out what it’s all about. Should you happen to see someone named “Cochrane Mac” on there, that’s me.

If you like the mod, then go and join IS82.com. And, what’s even better, tell others about it! And, if that’s not enough yet, tell others about TrainsInGames.com! Frankly, I can use that traffic much more than they can.

The game will be Shadow Hearts, a game I don’t know, and it will take at least a week, possibly (probably) longer. If anyone else reading this wants to write for this site as well, please just ask me, I’ll take everyone I can get. In fact, at the moment you could just help me by reading this and telling me that you do so (hint: You can leave comments!). If you told your friends, that would be even greater.

In other news: My Photoshop should be up and running again pretty soon, so the Legend review shouldn’t take that long anymore. I’ve also started writing a review of Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness. It doesn’t have many trains, that’s true, but it’s still enough for me.

The text is all done (although I should and maybe will read it once more to polish it a little), but many of the images I want in there are still missing. I recently installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and while that’s a very cool thing (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live without Spaces again, for one thing), it also means that my trusty old Photoshop 7 will no longer work. That means for resizing images I’m stuck with GIMP, which is a slow and ugly piece of shit, at least in the Mac version. I did make some progress, and I just might finish that review using GIMP, but for the future, I’ll go back to Photoshop. My copy of Photoshop CS3 (actually whole Creative Suite, Student Edition) is already on the way to me, so that shouldn’t take too long, but you never know what might happen.

In other news, I recently acquired Sid Meier’s Railroads! and will, when I find the time, write a review about that one. This should be interesting, as that game claims to care about railroads, but from all the screenshots I’ve seen so far, implements them in a rather horrible way, trying desperatly to be cute. It was 10 € only, so I don’t think I’ll be disappointed too much.

And while we’re at it, I also bought Kuju’s Rail Simulator. For those of you who don’t know it, Kuju was the company behind the original Microsoft Train Simulator, in my opinion still the best railroad driving sim ever made. Their Microsoft Train Simulator 2 got cancelled, so they started their own project (from scratch, but the same basic idea), which is now published by EA. I haven’t installed it yet, as it requires Windows XP. I was actually hoping to skip XP altogether (currently, I use Windows 2000), and I’ll need Vista anyway for the new Microsoft Train Simulator 2 (which is not developed by Kuju, but by Microsoft). Going straight to Vista is not an option, however, as I can get XP for free using the MSDNAA program (being a student is rather cool), but not Vista, and I’m certainly not going to pay money for a Microsoft Operating System if I can avoid it at all.

I’m not certain if I should review the Rail Simulator. It’s a game that is really about railroads, so the errors they make (if any. Doesn’t look like it so far) are probably going to be on a completely different level, and might be justified in many cases. But then, it’s a game with trains in it, and this site can use all the content it can get. I’d ask for your opinion, but I’m pretty certain that nobody is actually ever going to read it, so I don’t.

In my review of Half-Life 2: Episode Two (HL2Ep2 from now on), I wondered about the locomotive you see before you go into the mines for real, and whether that was a real russian locomotive, or something invented.

The style with open walkways (known as hood unit or road switcher) is very popular in the USA, but not unheard of elsewhere, either. So there were two choices: This was either a russian (or soviet) diesel engine, or someone made that engine up, based on what he knew about american and russian locomotives. Now, by accident (doing research for the currently unfinished Tomb Raider Legend Review) I found an image of the real locomotive on RailPictures.net. You can find the image at http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=154112&nseq=91.

To be honest, I don’t know if it’s really that locomotive, or another one that looks exactly the same, but it’s close enough for my purposes. If you played the game and took the time to take a closer look at the locomotive, you’ll see it’s the same (only not green).

Isn’t it nice when a video game can make you happy, even though you aren’t playing the game at the moment?

In other news, I finally added the pictures to Common Sins, something I had been forgetting for a long time. You’ll already know the pictures, they are taken right out of the reviews of some of the games (which aren’t many). While I don’t plan to update the reviews (maybe remove the odd typo), that section will be updated, on a strict “whenever I think it’s necessary” schedule. I’ll keep posting about that here, in the News, of course, too.

Speaking of News, you can leave comments if you want to, which is rather neat, so don’t hesitate to do so. Everyone who isn’t an automated bot is welcome, even if you think that this site is useless rubbish.

If you’ve been keeping track, which you most likely didn’t, as there is nobody reading this except me, that means the last thing I have to finish before the official launch is my Tomb Raider Legend review. Patience is a virtue, my young Padawan. I have no idea yet what I’m going to do when I’ll officially launch this site, but chances are I’ll get some microwave popcorn and put on some Rome or similar. Have fun!

This is the second finished review after the one about Half-Life 2: Episode Two. And in case you weren’t certain, yes, one about Half-Life 2: Episode One is also on it’s way. None of this means it’s a Half Life centric website, I just wanted to get this all out of the way as soon as possible.

The fourth review I started to work on is about Tomb Raider Legend, which is a very different game, but still, it has trains. Once that’s done, I’ll declare the site as officially launched, which means I’ll start promoting it more actively. No idea how I’m going to do that yet. If you want to help, please do!

Other planned review include one about Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness (I tend to stay close to my preferred franchises) and SCAR (a racing game, which has trains only at the edges. Most people wouldn’t see them). I’m also thinking about Dreamfall, which is a very good game, but the train angle on this one would be rather forced. Will that stop me? We’ll see.

Looking along my game library, other candidates include Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 (I don’t recall Vietnam having any). Also, the demo of Sid Meier’s Railroads! (his exclamation mark, not mine) will be an interesting target if I ever manage to get it to work on my computer.

I have no plans to review stuff like Microsoft Train Simulator, Trainz Railroad Simulator, Rail Simulator or whatever else you have. Don’t get me wrong, I love those games, but they are really about trains and take them seriously, so my review approach wouldn’t work there (Never mind my plan to review Railroads!. From what I’ve seen so far, that game does not only not take railroads seriously, it seems to hate them). Also not on the list is Tomb Raider 4, which has a train that’s crap, but that’s because the core technology is crap. Finally, you might get the idea that I’d want to review the original Half-Life, but I won’t, partly because the trains are all fictional, so they’re correct by definition, and partly because it gives me motion sickness.

The problem is that when I’m done with all that, I’ll have to go out and buy some new games to review. I’m open for any kind of suggestion!

The news system is done, many of the reviews are done or nearly done (for the offical start, I plan to have four online, with two or three shortly following) and I decided to actually open the site.

Nothing here is fully done yet, although you should be able to get an idea of what I”m trying to do already. If it seems interesting to you, watch this space (or subscribe to the RSS feed), so you won”t miss the official grand opening.