Fórum Brigadeiro Nero Moura

Having other people’s fantasies rammed down your throat day-in day-out can be wearing. Fortunately, there’s a refuge – a serene corner of gaming called simulation, where fiction is forced to play second fiddle to something that’s far more preposterous: reality.

Sim developers don’t set out to amaze or amuse, only to replicate. They know that a vehicle masterfully modelled can be every bit as characterful as an Alyx Vance or an Andrew Ryan, a situation plucked daintily from daily life or history just as absorbing as any laser-laced space opera or zombie apocalypse. Who needs plot or pathos when you’ve got a fiendishly piloted Fokker on your tail, or a tight timetable to keep to?

Where the mainstream designer looks at a Battle of Britain dogfight and thinks, “My audience are impatient and inept; what can I add and what can I take away to ensure I entertain them?” the serious sim-smith thinks “My audience is smart and willing to apply themselves; how much raw truth can I capture and convey?” Hardcore sims exude respect.

The good ones are also awash with atmosphere. However passionate you are about railways, it’s hard to claim that shunting wagons around a weed-invaded marshalling yard is VISCERAL!!! or HEARTPOUNDING!!! The appeal is more subtle. It’s in the clank of clashing buffers, the melody of distant birdsong, the glimpse of a grimy multiple-unit beetling past on the mainline. Yes, in Microsoft Flight Simulator there’s satisfaction to be found in mastering an elaborate Flight Management Computer or nailing a tricky crosswind landing, but much of the pleasure is in the being rather than the doing.

Watching peachy dusks transmute into ebony nights, hearing engines catch then splutter into life on chilly mornings… in sims, the mood and the minutiae matters.

Can a simulation ever be too real? Of course not. What they can be, however, is poorly explained and inflexible. It’s not increasing complexity that’s pushed sims to the periphery, it’s a failure – which has been exacerbated by the rise of inconvenient pdf manuals – to provide decent tutorials and supportive scalability.

Although most major publishers now run a mile when confronted with a game with more than 20 key commands, the world of hardcore simming has rarely been healthier or more accessible. You’ll soon discover 14 developers for whom realism is almost a religion.