TrainDad

Although Jonathan isn’t old enough to oper­ate the com­puter by him­self yet, he loves to watch me and “help.” (By the way, an extra [non-operational] cord­less mouse makes a great way for him to par­tic­i­pate.) There are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of soft­ware prod­ucts avail­able for our enjoy­ment, and we’ve tried most of them. Our lat­est is Sid Meier’s Rail­roads!

Meiers devel­oped the orig­i­nal Rail­road Tycoon, which was the first “tycoon” game and launched an entire genre. He didn’t give input on the fol­low­ing ver­sions, RT 2 and RT 3, but they were still great games — in fact, many peo­ple believe RT 2 to be the best rail­road strat­egy sim­u­la­tion made to date. The Rail­roads! game is Meiers’ re-entry into the field.

This review is from the point-of-view of a “train­dad,” not a pure game player. In other words, it needed to be fun for my son as well as for me. This game nails it to a degree noth­ing else has matched. While games like RT 2 allow for more intri­cate and pre­cise strat­egy, they aren’t as good at being spec­ta­tor sports. The per­son watch­ing becomes bored, par­tic­u­larly if they have the atten­tion span of a 2-year-old! Rail­roads does an amaz­ing job over­com­ing that. It’s quick to learn, par­tic­u­larly if you take ten min­utes to play through the tuto­r­ial. Then you are off and run­ning, and it’s a delight to watch. The gor­geous graph­ics pro­vide full visual inter­est. Trac­tors plow the fields, oil wells spew, trees fall into chutes at the sawmill, cows climb the ramp to load the cat­tle cars. Learn how to zoom in, and you can watch the trains in beau­ti­ful close-up. Zoom out, and you can watch all the lit­tle trains chug about. It has the feel of a model railroad.

When JB is watch­ing, I usu­ally jump into the Table Top mode. Here, it’s all about the trains. There’s no money lim­its, no eco­nomic require­ments or pres­sure — just lay track and run the trains. It’s fun, fast and easy. I’m pretty sure a 5– or 6-year-old could play this and have a load of fun.

If I want the strat­egy chal­lenge, it’s there too. Switch into one of the other modes, and play is fierce and com­pet­i­tive. While online reviews have fre­quently panned Rail­roads for not being as detailed, com­pli­cated, or real­is­tic, I found that Meiers made a valu­able though dif­fi­cult choice: he sac­ri­ficed a lit­tle of those fac­tors to gain a huge mea­sure of pure fun. The stock mar­ket isn’t as com­pli­cated as that in RT 2, the indus­tries work together in dif­fer­ent ways, but the game as a whole is sim­ply more delight­ful. As another bonus, game­play is faster; a full com­pet­i­tive round can be under an hour, which was rarely pos­si­ble with the other games.

I found a cou­ple dis­ap­point­ments, but I also found solu­tions. First, the steam engines inex­plic­a­bly lack ten­ders. What?! It’s ridicu­lous. Sec­ond, the focus is on the golden era of steam, so the game ends around the intro­duc­tion of GE’s GP series diesel engines in the 1950’s. That means the engines we see on the rails today aren’t rep­re­sented. Thank­fully, there are sim­ple solu­tions to both prob­lems. Both are small pro­grams you run which add these fea­tures. Ten­der­Cars auto­mat­i­cally adds cor­rect ten­ders behind engines; it worked flaw­lessly for me. Sim­i­larly, there are sim­ple installers to add mod­ern loco­mo­tives like Gen­eral Electric’s AC4400. More of these are avail­able at the Rail­roads wiki — more on that in a moment. Ten­der­Cars works all the time; loco­mo­tives are only avail­able in Table Top mode, unless you do some under-the-hood tinkering.

I did have a few tech­ni­cal prob­lems with the game. The pro­ducer has released a patch to fix many prob­lems; make sure you have installed it. I have ongo­ing issues with my video card dri­ver under Win­dows Vista, but I don’t think that’s a wide­spread prob­lem. The game does require a fairly pow­er­ful com­puter. In any case, there’s lots of help avail­able. There is an active player’s forum, Hooked on Rail­roads, with lots of help. Those peo­ple have also built a Rail­roads wiki, with lots of tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion as well as instruc­tions, hints and tips, and add-on files.

One add-on par­tic­u­larly worth down­load­ing is the offi­cial Hol­i­day Sce­nario released by the pub­lisher; you have to help Santa fight off rob­ber barons intent on get­ting a cut of his business.

This is a fun game for both the player and the spec­ta­tor; I rec­om­mend it highly. It’s avail­able at most stores for about $20; right now it’s on sale at Ama­zon for $12.99 with free ship­ping. Give it a try!

Our lat­est favorite video on YouTube: I’m a Train. Lots of UP action in the west­ern US, with plenty of other roads mixed in. Look for the amaz­ing shot where the cam­era zooms out to show the huge sky and broad hori­zon sur­round­ing the train. Nice for those with short atten­tion spans, because it is a series of short clips. Enjoy!

I didn’t expect this story to be full of dra­matic twists and turns!

I dis­cov­ered I was wrong in my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Percy body. I thought it was from the pull-back series, but a strange swivel­ing ten­der on the back made me real­ize that it was some­thing dif­fer­ent. After a lit­tle research, I dis­cov­ered that it is from a set called the Thomas Mail Deliv­ery set. Out of curios­ity, I also picked up a Percy pull-back to com­pare. They are very sim­i­lar in size. I was sur­prised to see that they vary in details — rel­a­tively impor­tant details, such as the num­ber of steam domes.

In any case, with my two Per­cies and “Blackie” in hand, I started dis­as­sem­bly. (“Blackie” has become our nick­name for that early Geo­T­rax steam engine, taken at the rec­om­men­da­tion of some­one on the Yahoo group recently). I got so far as to real­ize that both Per­cies are about 1/8-inch (say, 3 mm.) too nar­row to fit eas­ily. Con­sid­er­ing the options, I was lean­ing toward an evil jux­ta­po­si­tion: chop the front end and the cab off Percy; add the front end to Blackie, and replace Blackie’s cab. A few touch-ups to the “kick plate” around the sides, and the buffers front and back, a lit­tle paint.…

Just then Jonathan entered the room and caught sight of what was going on. Oh my, the excite­ment that can be gen­er­ated in such a tiny fel­low! He gave total focus to Blackie –he really wasn’t too inter­ested in the Per­cies at all — and just went gen­er­ally crazy over him. He “helped” me reassem­ble and then add bat­ter­ies. I pulled out that bright blue remote, and he was so excited he couldn’t speak: “Oh! Oh! OH!”

Well, Blackie is now a per­ma­nent part of his motive team, and I’ll have to wait on my franken­stein­ian  project. For now.…

The results were slightly dis­ap­point­ing, in that some­body tried to cheat, set­ting up numer­ous false user accounts so they could rig the vote. They weren’t even cre­ative about it; I mean, they could have reg­is­tered Ronald McDon­ald (RMac@MickeyDs.com) or George Wash­ing­ton (TheOriginalGW@savethecherrytrees.com). Instead, it’s just things like user name “b” with address “b@b.com.” If you were going to cheat, couldn’t you at least do it with style? It didn’t changed the out­come, how­ever, and it wasn’t specif­i­cally against the rules, so in the end it doesn’t really matter.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed see­ing other par­ents and kids, reflec­tions of our fam­ily, enjoy­ing each other and enjoy­ing trains. If ship­ping weren’t so pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive I’d like to send out about 6 prizes — great pic­tures like Kasper in his “box­car,” Sean with the orig­i­nal Polar Express, the delight­ful look on Lex’s face while rid­ing and Jerzy’s face while watch­ing. Since I can’t do that, I have to nar­row it down. I don’t want to!

In any case, one prize will be going to Robert Muh for A Boy & His Dog, for get­ting the most votes. Another will go to my pick, Fox and Lex with their Geo­T­rax coaster, which makes me smile every time I see it. Two hon­or­able men­tions, even if I can’t send them prizes — one to Shawn’s first REAL train ride, for being the best pho­to­graph entered, and one to A.J., who is obvi­ously an all-trains-all-the-time kid like my own son; I wish I could send him an extra prize just because I know how excit­ing it would be for him to open that package!

These kids are at the cen­ter of our lives and it’s nice to see other par­ents enjoy­ing them the same way. Thanks to every­one for participating!

I hap­pened across two items yes­ter­day at Good­will: a Geo­T­rax steam engine, com­plete with remote con­trol, and the top shell of a pull-back Percy from one of the innu­mer­able Thomas the Tank Engine lines. The Percy is the exact size and shape to fit on the Geo­T­rax engine, so here we go. It’s been done before: you can see step-by-step pho­tos in the Yahoo Geo­T­rax group pho­tos. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Go to the bat­tery aisle of your local Wal-Mart, and you will find that a four-pack of any brand recharge­able bat­ter­ies will set you back about ten bucks. But Wal-Mart has a secret — half-price bat­ter­ies hid­ing out with the dig­i­tal cam­era acces­sories. Four AA or AAA recharge­ables (NiMH) are only $4.95. Amaz­ingly, this approx­i­mates the low­est price for bulk gener­ics on eBay (after ship­ping). They are also avail­able with fast 30-minute and 1-hour chargers.

These aren’t wimpy bat­ter­ies, either, with a 1,000 mah rat­ing for AAA (the higher energy capac­ity means longer run time).

Just look for the gaudy metal­lic blue/green bat­ter­ies in the yel­low “bub­ble” pack­age. A neces­sity for any­one using dig­i­tal cam­eras or battery-eating toys!