Thanks to the magic of PC gaming, I’ve not left England this week yet spent most of my leisure time North of the Border. Read on for fulsome praise of two Scotland-steeped playthings, and faint praise of a third.
It’s been a while since I last hiked hills and holed fauna in theHunter: Call of the Wild. Lured back by the prospect of deer stalking relatively close to home (a £10 Scottish hunting reserve arrived earlier this month) returning with head and hands atingle with Hunting Unlimited 3 memories and expectations was an interesting experience.
A bargain £1.70 over Christmas, THCOTW is streets ahead of SCS Software’s old timer in areas like animal AI, quarry variety, and vista verisimilitude. However, I hadn’t been in Torr nan Sithean long before I found myself yearning for HU3’s straightforwardness.
Oh, for a Quick Hunt option. Choose equipment, weather, start location and time of day/year, and get stuck in! In THCOTW, the untouchable clock, the welter of optional side missions, and the low-key emphasis on self-improvement can be irritating if you’re accustomed to a less structured and restrictive play environment.
If Expansive Worlds had let me teleport to any part of their Scottish slayground from the get go, I might have been less critical of this DLC’s ‘Scottishness’. The corner of the map where you start is pretty enough and festooned with appropriate flora (rowan trees, Scots pines, heather, blaeberry, thistles…) but, to me at least, feels like a fantasy – a Disney-esque confection – rather than a real location.
Maybe it’s the over-abundance of trees or sunlight. Perhaps it’s the lack of human touches – ditches, culverts, fences, forestry etc. Something about the shortbread-tin set-dressing doesn’t quite click. Hopefully some of the sections of the extensive wanderspace I’ve yet to explore, will look like the kind of barren places I see in my mind when I hear or read the words ‘deer stalking in Scotland’. I yearn to traipse over treeless tracts of moorland and trudge through soggy glens where the tallest thing growing is bracken or gorse.
Even if such places do exist in the game, THCOTW’s unsubtle weather simulation is likely to sap their ability to transport the player to the land of shaggy cows and peaty whisky. Yes, there are times when the game’s mercurial weather, solid sound effects, long view distances, and attractive vegetation, rocks, and lochs come together to produce apt ambience, but these moments tend to be fleeting. To properly evoke the often dreich Scottish highlands, root-and-branch reform of the meteorology code would be required.
Another sim add-on I’ve been enjoying this week recreates the moist Scottish climate and countryside with, I feel, greater success than Scotland Hunting Reserve.
A new £25 Train Simulator Classic adjunct, the beguiling Buchan Line resurrects a vanished piece of Aberdeenshire’s transport infrastructure with skill and energy. Buyers get all but the Maud – Fraserburgh section of the old Formartine and Buchan Railway as it was in the late Fifties and early Sixties.
Back then the line saw a goodly amount of passenger and freight traffic (fish from Peterhead and cattle from Maud dominated the latter) and was the stamping ground of both charismatic diesel and steam traction. The flavour and busyness of the era is nicely conveyed by a selection of ten engrossing career scenarios, the longest of which takes over an hour and a half to complete.
Click-triggered crane animations and cattle loading adds extra interest to shunting tasks. In the above image I’m loading freshly soaked sleepers at Dyce Creosote Works.
Too often in Train Sim Classic and TSW, predominantly rural routes are achingly dull to drive. This offering proves it don’t have to be this way. Suburban Glasgow Limited railway model with real panache. Their attention to detail and hard work ensures even the route’s most sparsely populated sections convince and catch the eye. It’s small things – tree and building variety and placement, signs of neglect and decline, interesting horizons… – but the overall effect is lineside views that stimulate rather than sedate.
The studio also works wonders with TSC’s weather tools. Whether you’re creeping into Aberdeen through soupy haar, rattling through snow-mantled pastures, or shunting under leaden skies at Maud or Peterhead, the atmosphere is splendid and unmistakably Scottish/British.
Climate honesty is at the very heart of Rainy Day Racer, a bijou retro driving game that can be bought for a piffling eighty pence at present.
Steam blurbs don’t come any pithier or wittier than RDR’s:
“3D time-attack motor racing in a city in Scotland where it rains like a bastard.”
Illegaldogs is too modest to mention that his three circuit (six if you count reversed versions), three vehicle (hatchback, saloon, transit van) creation is surprisingly moreish and could teach many much more expensive driving games a thing or two about atmosphere cultivation.
It’s not just the perpetual precipitation (“It rains all the time, all the time, just absolutely hammers it down every effing day.”) the architecture, the lighting, and the uttered words of encouragement and disapproval all do their bit in helping to build a powerful sense of place and time.
If Ridge Racer or Screamer had included a Scottish Easter egg and it had been made by a homesick/disgruntled coder from Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen, that Scotch egg would have felt something like this.
True, we might not have got the wonderful intros in which a wrapped-up lady takes a break from loafing/sheltering to announce the coming contest with the aid of a brandished placard.
Ignore the tiny selection of tracks, the absence of music, and the fact that you can only compete against ghosts, and RDR has plenty in common with the classic race games of the early Nineties. Although collisions don’t cause damage or prompt time-consuming reversing manoeuvres, they do temporarily muller your MPH – something that can really rankle when you’re looking to climb a few places on the global hi-score table by shaving a few seconds off your PB.
Obviously, 80p doesn’t buy you Assetto Corsa-calibre physics, or lavish, multi-layered sound effects. A manual gearbox option and finely honed, keyboard-friendly drift physics do come as standard though. While the body formerly known as the Scottish Tourist Board probably wouldn’t approve of this tongue-in-cheek celebration of Alba’s default weather, fans of challenging, characterful race games should enjoy the hours they spend sliding and squirming through Rainy Day Racer’s rain-greased bends.
