But something else they excel at is virtual video game tourism. They're based on real-world destinations, where you can jump in your favorite ride and take a tour, seeing the sights: the Mediterranean coast, the Scottish highlands, the Outback, Tokyo city. This is an activity I treasure.
I love road trips, both in real life and in games. I love them to the extent that I mapped out and built a guide to the best scenic drives across every Forza Horizon game. But still, there's an unreality to the Forza road trip experience that bothers me.
The maps, as big and spectacularly beautiful as they are, are condensed, theme-park versions of the real thing, where you can drive from a Cotswolds village to the Scottish highlands in five minutes. You don't get that sense of journeying from place to place. The Test Drive Unlimited games I played on Xbox 360, with their 1:1 recreations of the islands of Oahu and Ibiza, were much better on this score.
But, on these islands, there's a limit to how varied the terrain can be, and to the sense of long-haul adventure they can inspire. Trucking fans know the answer to this conundrum: SCS Software's peerless, long-running and hugely popular sims, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. These feature astounding, continent-spanning maps on a roughly 1:20 scale, parceled out as DLC, and expanding all the time.
In these games, you can drive from Uppsala, Finland to Malaga, Spain, or from Galveston, Texas to Seattle, Washington. It will take you hours instead of days, but the in-game clock is to scale, too, so you'll watch the light fade and the stars come out as you drive. You'll even need to plan stops for rest and fuel.
But you're in a truck, and instead of heading to scenic hotspots, your destination is usually a logistics facility in an industrial park. There's a workaday romance to this, but it's not quite as inspiring. This has been the one thing holding the SCS truck sims back from being the ultimate road-trip games… until now.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
