Giugiaro
Established Member
A simulator is a program intended to reproduce the reality in a virtual environment.
A Train Simulator is a simulator intended to reproduce a real life train driving experience. The most modern train simulators offer tools to build, easily, scenarios of real and fictitious lines and create activities to simulate real life's tasks and operations, like running a passenger train service, driving a cargo train and do shunting procedures at local sidings.
These kind of simulator games are awfully popular in Japan. They take serious driving has a fun challenge, especially the Shinkansen bullet train activities were time is measured till a tenth of a second! The most popular series were Densha de Go! [http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCbuiC7Jnag] and an arcade game of train racing was made over the name X-treme Express [http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewvIVZwi3g.] They made Densha de Go! to many platform, including PlayStation 2, PSP, Wii and game machines. They also made an exclusive Shinkansen controller to be used in a game console. Nowadays, since the last launched Densha de Go!, they are playing also VRM Online, a simple game made in a closed circuit scenario were players can drive many Japanese trains on a Multi-player environment. [http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l5xilOW9_E&feature=related]
Western train simulator are unpopular in Japan because they hardly feature any Japanese train or line, neither a translated version with instructions to model new add-on trains and objects and build other lines for the simulator, even if the western guys put monstrous graphic renders on their simulators. They prefer to play Japanese train simulators with rather basic graphics than adventuring in English based simulators with no trains nor lines from Japan.
If Train Simulator 2012 went to Japan, with Japanese translation, featuring at least one Japanese line and it's correspondent rolling stock and having finally the multi-player mode published, it would made such a success that the other western competitors would lose popularity at the speed of light!
What do you think? Should RailSimulator.com invest in such a promissory market? Will we benefit from integrating the Japanese rail community on RailWorks? Is there a point in doing such thing? Should we focus more on the still not covered western world were so many countries still haven't started their own RW community? Should the Japanese version include also all the standard Train Simulator 2012 content or should it be exclusively packed with Japanese content? What about the Western edition? Should we have the Japanese expansion pack for free or has a payable DLC?
The debate is on!
