What Price TrainSim?

[Anonymous]

What is the typical price for TrainSim in the US?
Over here in England it has just been launched at (rounded) UKL50 (Approx $90). I seem to recall an ad for it in Trains or R&R for about $30. Is this MS r*****g o*f the UK market again? Or am I being less than kind?

[Pruitt]

In my opinion, you're not being at all unkind. But I wouldn't waste $90 or $50 or even $30 on this simulation until a patch is out to fix the many problems on the various routes, in particular the uncoupling bug that shows up in several routes. I was herding a train across Marias Pass, well over an hour into the "explore route" activity, and suddenly my train uncoupled and would not recouple and continue. Apparently beta testing the routes with a variety of trains never even entered the developers' minds. And apparently, judging by the posts on the message boards at train-sim.com, the routes themselves have all sorts of garbage in them - invisible objects that serve no purpose, many of which are misplaced into the center of the tracks and may or not cause other problems. The routes are apparently cobbled together with NO effort at cleanup, and minimal effort (if any) towards debugging them. There are also errors with speed limits and such.

Bottom line - until these problems are fixed, don't waste your time and money. I bout when it first hit the market, and the problems ruined the enjoyment for me. If people stand up and demand that MS (and others) start releasing quality products, this kind of garbage dumping will stop.

Sorry about the soapbox.

MAB

[Anonymous]

Dear Mark,

I think you are being ridicoulous. How much is TrainMaster 4 paying you to bash Micorsoft? You seem to do so every chance you get. I think Microsoft TrainSim is the best to ever come along for railfans. So what if there are a coulple of bugs in the system? All of the bugs combindined account for, what, maybe less than 1% of the entire program? NOTHING is perfect and I'm sorry that you are an ungrateful perfectionist. Did you ever try calling tech support, or getting a refund, or an exchange? Microsoft spent over 2 1/2 yers working on this and maybe the problems lie within the process of copying the program to all those CDs.

With all the complaints you describe I think you seem to be the only who picked up the box with the most flaws in them.

Sorry you can't deal with your own problems. I personally highly recommend this game/simulator over any other computer games on the markett, and especially over any other train simulator. I've tried TrainMaster 4. It sucks. There's nothing to do in it. It's confusing, hard to learn, and completly unrealistic.

Mark, maybe you're not planted here by TrainMaster or maybe you are, but if you haven't tried TM4, download a free demo, try it, and you'll be gratefull you have Microsoft Train Simulator. If you read the reviews at TM4's website you'd think it was the greatest thing since slice bread.

So quit complaining. Mircorsoft Train Simulator is great!

[Anonymous]

Hey j,

I second that opinion. I got TM4 early this year before Train Sim was released and removed it from my comp. once I got Train Sim. There is alot better interaction with Train Sim than TM4. I like to be able to look out the cab windows instead of panning the view and feeling like I'm floating in space with a control stand(and not a very well rendered one at that). The variety of routes and equipment makes the game interesting.

There are problems with Train Sim but nothing that I would call bad enough to warrent not buying the game.

As far as the price goes I paid around $70 for TM4 . I only paid $49 for MS Train Sim at Walmart.

David, Try amazon.com They have Train Sim listed at $39.99 US.