Every now and then a game comes along you're surprised it took someone so long to make. Sometimes, of course, it's the opposite.
Trainspotters are a special type of railway enthusiast. There are people who are interested in trains, and there are trainspotters. If being interested in trains is like nodding along whenever ‘Bad Medicine’ comes on the radio, trainspotting is like camping at the front of the concert line in the hope you can get close enough to the stage for Jon Bon Jovi to flick some of his sweat into your mouth. They’re pretty hardcore, you know, about trains.
Anyway, trainspotters sit with a data book listing all the locomotives or rolling stock they wish to “spot” and tick them off as they pass by. That’s it. That’s trainspotting.
Trainspotting is a thing that exists. It’s not just a Scottish movie where everyone does heroin and Robert Carlyle’s moustache swears at people for 90 minutes.
REDACTED.
On the list of human hobbies that require a video game adaptation it seems impossible that trainspotting would be anywhere but precisely last on that list, but for one British developer it wasn’t.
In 1995 Sensible Software, renowned for classics like Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder, released Sensible Train Spotting on the cover disk of the September ’95 issue of former UK video game magazine Amiga Power.
Even the sun thinks you're pathetic.
A small man sits alone on a train platform with naught but a Thermos flask to keep him company, ticking off train numbers as locomotives pass by. That’s it. That’s the game. Of course it’s clearly all a big joke – each time you complete a sheet of train numbers the game quips “Well done my sad friend, on to the next card” and Amiga Power was a famously tongue-in-cheek magazine – but that doesn’t make this bizarre game any less unexpected.
Welcome to the Worst Airport in the World. Of course, for gameplay’s sake if you’re making a game about firefighters you need to ensure there are always plenty of fires for them to put out. The result, however, is an airport where there’s always something burning. Planes. Dustbins. Trees. If it’s flammable it’s only a matter of time before it’s in flames. It’s the only airport in the world that employs a full-time arsonist to keep its bloated department of airport firefighters busy and to justify the cost of the five thousand different trucks they’ve been allowed to purchase.
"And this one was SUPER expensive!"
There’s no way you’d want to fly into this airport. You’ll be burnt to a crisp. You’d be safer travelling via a giant cannon; just have your hotel set up a giant net and you can blast yourself directly to your beachside holiday.
Excalibur Publishing has carved a bit of a reputation for its incredibly niche and insanely specialised job simulators, but really guys? Like, we know being an actual airport firefighter is probably a pretty good gig because air travel is statistically extraordinarily safe and out of the hundreds of planes that will cycle through a major airport on any given day, on average a grand total of none of them will be on fire. This will give you a lot of time to pose for calendars and watch Backdraft a lot.
"Whatever. You know who's buying those calendars? Your wife."
In a game though? Come on, guys.
Speaking of incredibly niche and insanely specialised job simulators, here’s another from Excalibur Publishing, the master of the art!
“Brush off the dirt and make a clean sweep as you embark on a career to become an accomplished street cleaner,” reads the pun-filled blurb on Excalibur Publishing’s website (which is more entertaining than all of its games put together). “Use your highly detailed sweeping machines to roam the city in search of muck. As your experience grows so will the tasks you have to deal with! Get swept up into fighting the flotsam and jetsam of city life with Street Cleaning Simulator!”
FLOTSAM!
It’s actually a little difficult to criticise Street Cleaning Simulator for being boring. It is, of course, staggeringly boring – but how could one expect any less? It sounds like someone asked a friend to think of the most boring idea for a video game ever, and instead of laughing when they came up with it they took notes, went away and made it.
Cleaning streets is literally all you do. You slowly cruise around in the game’s “highly sophisticated street cleaning machine” equipped with three high powered and independently operated brushes, cleaning streets.
We're honestly not even kidding.
This will be the last Excalibur Publishing title because spectacularly mundane games like this really are the firm’s specialty, to the point where it’s almost no longer surprising when we discover somebody published a video game about being a garbageman.
Garbage Truck Simulator is an April Fools’ Joke gone wrong. There’s no other explanation. Somebody at German simulation specialist Astragon has received a hilarious press release from Excalibur, panicked because they figured they’d missed the “Make us a game about garbagemen” memo several months ago and quickly cobbled this game together that afternoon in response. That has to be it. Nobody could’ve seriously asked for this trash.
Garbage collection is in no way as cool in real life as Emilio Estevez made it look.
Every single thing about Garbage Truck Simulator is conspiring to stop players from having any fun whatsoever. Not only is it a game exclusively about collecting rubbish and absolutely nothing else, you’re also penalised for driving too fast and crashing into anything.
It’s not even funny in an ironic sort of way. Find us a person that enjoys playing Garbage Truck Simulator and we’ll show you a person that isn’t allowed within 300 metres of a school.
Seriously. You see this in somebody's house, you leave.
Check out the cover of this game.
DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER!?
It’s insane. It looks like the cover of a first-person shooter. In fact, it looks like the cover of this first-person shooter.
CRABS!
The reality, of course, is that it’s not. It’s a deeply monotonous adaptation of the popular Discovery Channel series Deadliest Catch, taking everything exciting and dramatic about the TV show and dumping it overboard like an undersized crustacean.
However, is crab fishing on the Bering Sea something that desperately needed a video game in the first place? Even the real-life crab fisherman the developer roped into shooting FMV sequences for the game seems surprised to be there.
Since when do documentaries need video game spin-offs, anyway?
Oh.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and jobs they haven't made video games out of yet on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Source : ign[dot]com
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