May 2022

I have had a fraught weekend. As reported, my existing pc has had an ongoing intermittent stuttering issue. Some games, like the Truck Simulator and Farming Sim games, it’s possible to play around that problem – when it manifests itself, just pull over and come out of the game. The Truck / Tractor will be where you left it when you return. The same cannot be said for games like The Hunter – you get dumped back to the last chalet you started out from, making it impossible to make meaningful progress in the game. For this reason, I haven’t played The Hunter for many months.

I decided to buy a new pc last week as it seems that prices have finally achieved some level of stability. It arrived on Saturday – a couple of days earlier than expected. At that point I had to re-locate the old photo-pc to a safe place downstairs – it hadn’t been used since covid lockdown as I migrated the photo tasks to my games pc before last football season. This was pre-planning for buying a new gaming pc. Then, the existing games pc, re-designated as the photo pc, had to be repositioned on the floor below my desk and the connecting cables re-run. Finally, the new pc had to be unpacked and carried up to my office for installation on my desk where more cables had to be rerun. After all that, my knees and back were killing me!

Sunday was spent installing my favourite games from Steam.- they’re in my Steam Library. This is a slow task, even with fast broadband, because many of these games are very large. We’re not talking Minesweeper or Solitaire here. I even managed to fit in a couple of games of online Chess while I was waiting😉 I still have several games to do! However, the Truck Sim and Farming Sim games are done along with The Hunter and Hardspace: Shipbreaker – another game I couldn’t play due to the pc issue.

Now for the next stage in the process – checking that the games are working as expected. This is where we hit some of the foibles of each game and of Steam itself. Let’s start with Farming Simulator 22. It runs fine and my Career save was there but when I tried to load it, it reminded me that I have to re-download and activate the associated mods that my save was using. What it doesn’t do is give a comprehensive list of all the mods that need to be re-attached – just some samples in the warning box. Inevitably, I missed one and that was my Ferme du Vieux Chêne save wrecked. SCS Software do the mod thing much better, including telling exactly which mods are missing in a table form – Giants Software, please take note! I hope to update where we are with Ferme du Vieux Chêne in a post later this week so I’ll give the full picture then.

Euro Truck and American Truck Simulator – both uploaded and only one of my profiles visible in each. That’s a Steam Cloud thing – for some reason despite having two profiles that are both backed up to the cloud, it only ever loads one when you install the game on a new pc. I do have a way around this – go to the previous pc and copy the ETS2 / ATS folders, then use those to overwrite the ones Steam has created on the new pc. However, I think I may restart my company profiles in both games. A few months of experience has further distilled how I wish to play each company and, for example, I decided that I wanted to relocate my ATS HQ after a few weeks of gameplay because the original choice proved to not be quite what I wanted from a traffic point of view. Someone with my level of experience doesn’t take long to grind through hire jobs to the point of owning that first truck and trailer😂 I did do a drive yesterday in ETS2 on my non-company profile. Here’s Carmen with a heavy Volvo A25G dumper on route from A Coruña to Le Havre…

The Hunter – Call of the Wild: I haven’t played this game in months and there have been a number of changes, some of which are not entirely to my liking (turning off poi icons not only disables them as you’re hunting, it removes them from the map too). I needed to get my feet back under the table with this game – it would have been nice to be able to start a second profile to get my eye back in, but the developers don’t allow second profiles. I decided to restart – it’s always fun wandering around the reserves regardless of what gun you’re carrying😎 Actually, it didn’t take very long to get my eye in…

…Though I’d forgotten how far a mortally wounded Bear can run before it goes down…

…and I got whacked twice in repayment despite a good lung-shot! Nice to get a Gold level Bear so early on though👍

Hardspace: Shipbreaker: I don’t even know what to expect here – the game was early access and has had a lot of improvements since I last played. It actually went full release last Tuesday! I will have to take a look sometime later this week.

That was the weekend of pain – now I hope there will be some fun 😎