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[THE FMS IS COMING]

well thats pretty anoying now that you have to buy the game now
well i hope the people who made this not free
well
ill be seeing them soon
i hope this will change soon
some how

[The Fifth Horseman]

Well, it's your criminal record...

(Man..I must've rewritten this about a dozen times...trying really hard not to be long-winded about all of my thoughts on this game..it's as short as it's gonna get now.)

. <ramble>
I'd never heard of this game until the other night whilst browsing the archives here. As so many people have stated over the years, the concept and story is amazing. Snow and trains...there seriously is just no way to make a bad game with that, right? ...so I went and found a copy.

I've played around with it for a few hours and have to say...it's kind of a beautiful piece of work. ...but only kind of.

As with so many games from the 90's, it had a lot of great ideas...but it falls pray to the unfortunate concept of "people were still figuring out how to make a game fun".

There's definite intrigue and it'd be easy to lose entire days to exploring this game and making notes on every town, drawing up strategies for getting around...but the interface, while not horrible, is just clunkier than it needs to be.

What follows may sound like I'm being overly critical and I promise, I'm not trying to be. For when it came out, it'd have been an awesome game and I understand why everyone on this forum who has expressed endless love for it loves it endlessly.
Let's face it though...(as an example) actually sitting in the engine room or heading back to the private car does a decent bit to add ambiance to the game...but nothing story-related happens in those places and while they serve to immerse you a bit more in the world you're exploring...that's all they do.

- There's no reason you HAVE to go into those cars except to access the other interfaces you need. (which could have just been hotkeyed)

- There's zero functional reason to use the mouse at all except for combat (and I'm pretty sure there could be a way to do that via simple hotkeys as well). Some people prefer the mouse..but does that mean the rest of us should suffer it too?

- There are a few places where information is removed when it'd be useful to have (buying/selling..your currency on hand is obscured by item descriptions).

- There are a number of concepts put into the game that are poorly explained or flat out ignored (i.e. boiler pressure, piston pressure, efficiency decline of the train as you increase your speed) that could've been expanded on...

I mean..I understand that not everybody wants to learn the physics of how a steam engine works on a mechanical level, but if the game's manual is going to lead me to believe that such things have been incorporated into the game (it did), why not explain it to me? Obviously it's simple enough that anyone can move the train around without blowing it up but..why not reward the people who want to LEARN the system and operate the train more efficiently? I feel there was just so much wasted opportunity for this to be one of those "as deep or shallow as you're looking to find" sort of games and it wouldn't have required much more effort on the developer's part to incorporate such things. Alas *le sigh*

Could've been better in so many ways...for me it just boils down to there being too many things to provide ambiance but at cost of having zero need or actual functionality...which there isn't always a problem with, but in this case, it was just too unnecessarily cumbersome.
BUT
All in all...the game rocks. It's for sale now through one of those soulless companies that acquires rights to older games and vomits them back up on the market in what's generally considered irreverent fashion. ...but really, I'd LOVE to see this game remade as a flash game or other simplified format.

There's SO MUCH POTENTIAL here...take some of the amazing concepts from this game and make ever-so-slight tweaks and adjustments to the interface and mechanics...make it something truly, truly incredible and available to everyone who wants to appreciate it's beauty (giving full credit and inspiration to the real McCoy, of course). And if I knew how to build a flash game, I'd totally do it.

Despite all of my complaints, I do look forward to continuing to play through it

. </ramble>

You migt be interested to know a fan-made remake of the game is in the works at http://www.sunlightsystems.de/