Trucks In Europe

Remember in the last post when I said I wouldn't have Marvel VS. Capcom 3 on the next post? Well, I was correct! However, I did manage to get a Dreamcast emulator working so I could play Marvel VS. Capcom 2.

Now then, on to the topic of the current post! Over the Christmas break, one of my good friends bought me a game on Steam that I had my eye on for a while: Euro Truck Simulator 2. I'm not quite sure why, but I heard the game was pretty good, so I added it to my wishlist, and now here we are. 

What do you do in Euro Truck Simulator 2, you ask? Well, you drive trucks. In Europe. This isn't a silly simulator game like Goat Simulator, or Rock Simulator ( A game where you stare at a rock), this is a normal, full fledged truck simulator where you drive trucks. In Europe. It's really nothing more than just that, driving trucks. In Europe. You can have different kinds of cargo too, you could have a normal box truck, or you could be delivering vehicles, or maybe driving a tanker!

You may be thinking to yourself: "Carg, that's really boring! Why would you play this game? All you do is drive trucks! You could do that in real life! Get a job, you unemployed loser!" First of all, you don't need to be so mean about it. Second of all, I suck at driving, and when I say suck, I mean I suck at driving. If I had a job as a truck driver in real life, I'd probably crash in a ditch and die, and then all of that precious cargo would be lost! Also, I don't live in Europe, so I could never be a Euro Trucker, unless I really felt like moving across the ocean to drive trucks for a living. The weird thing about this game is that it should be boring, it shouldn't be fun, all you're doing is driving. But for some reason, I keep playing this game! It's so addicting, I've made around 60,000 in game Euros so far! I can't even explain what's so fun about this game to me, but there's something really satisfying about driving a huge truck around. It's fun to just go to different places, and see cool looking hills while driving.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the radio feature. There's an in game radio that lets you play a radio from a list of online radio stations, which is one of the reasons I bought the game, it just sounded really cool to me. I could be a real trucker, listening to music and junk! I could listen to music! While driving a truck! In Europe! In a video game! Wooooah! My personal favorite station is "HotMixRadio", a French Station that plays 80's music, but doesn't play any french music. Don't question the logic of HotMixRadio!

This here is Senor, the character profile I picked for my save file. I like to picture Senor as a Mexican outlaw who escaped to Europe to become a truck driver to get away from his crimes against his country. I actually just picked him because he looks like the guy who runs a store near my grandparents house

If I were to have one major complaint about this game, it's driving in the United Kingdom. It's more of a personal complain, but my god, driving there is awful for one main reason: They drive on the left side! It goes against everything I've ever known, how am I supposed to drive on the left side of the road? What makes it worse is that when you're in the UK, most of the time you're using a truck with a wheel on the right side of the car, which makes it even more confusing to me! Not to mention that the speed limits seem a lot higher over there, which resulted in a lot of crashes, and my truck sustaining 35% damage by the end of it. Granted, I'm sure people in the UK feel the same way about the right side of the road, but man, I can't stand it. I'm making sure to avoid any and all routes involving the UK.

One other weird problem I have with the game is the performance. I'd like to think I have a pretty good computer, it can run most games I play at a high framerate, but for some reason, Euro Truck Simulator 2 runs incredibly poor on my computer. I can't get 30FPS on anything above low graphics settings, which is really odd. Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand how I can run Team Fortress 2 at over 60 FPS on high-ish settings, but can't get over 30 FPS on a game where you drive trucks in Europe.

And that's about all I have to say about Euro Truck Simulator 2. It's an oddly fun game, and I do recommend playing it if you're interested in it at all. It's a great game to play while listening to a podcast, watching a TV show, or talking with some friends simultaneously. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to play some- Wait, this game has DLC? And mods?