Sunday, August 24, 2014

Ship Simulator Extremes - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

VSTEP and Paradox are proud to announce the next installment of the acclaimed Ship Simulator series. With over 550K copies sold, the series returns to take you into the most extreme conditions on earth… 

Ever wonder how it feels to sail a half-million-ton supertanker through the perfect storm? To take on illegal whale hunters in the Antarctic? Or to feel the rush of being part of the Coast Guard as you evacuate a cruise liner in distress? Ship Simulator Extremes has players take on exciting missions all over the world as they pilot an impressive array of vessels and live the stories of real ship captains. With missions based on actual events in realistic environments at locations all over the world, the new Ship Simulator game is sure to take you to extremes!


Previous Play Time

0 hours

Prior Experience

Like most of these challenges, I've not previously played it. However, I'm not coming into this experience a total innocent either. I've never really gotten into these sorts of hardcore simulation games, but I've always kind of wanted to. Ship Simulator would not have been my first choice as an intro to the genre, but I'm still nonetheless interested.

Expectations

This is a tough one. At first, I thought for sure this was a backfire, because of my aforementioned desire to play more simulation games. Specifically, I was always kind of interested in Farming Simulator (but I never acted on it because I'm certain I'd be disappointed in how little it resembles Harvest Moon), so I was initially pretty positive. However, doing some poking around I discovered that this game and Farming Simulator are done by different companies, despite having very similar branding - what with the basic, utilitarian names written in blocky font. And while this, rationally speaking, should have no bearing on my feelings one way or the other (ships and farms are so different that there's no reason to believe there's any overlap in simulating either one), I'd kind of imagined that Ship Simulator, and Farm Simulator, and Train Simulator, etc had all been made by one super-dedicated group of nerds that did nothing but simulate the sort of things that are ordinarily too boring to be made into video games.

So, having my flights of whimsy unwittingly punctured wound up damping my enthusiasm. It's still my hope that this will be unexpectedly great and that I'll learn a lot about ships in the process of playing it, but if I'm forced to be realistic, I suspect there's a reason it's not tearing up the charts.

Also, the superfluous extra "s" at the end of the title strikes me as deeply suspicious.

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