Maybe you feel the need to poke fun at the soaring and inspirational music attached to this Euro Truck Simulator 2: Scandinavia launch trailer. Well, know this, Mr. Strawman Cynic, I did two honest-to-god fist-pumps during the course of its one-and-a-half minute running time. Complex road networks? Oh yes, I'll have a bit of that.

The Scandinavia expansion is out this week, and adds 27 new cities across Sweden, Norway and Denmark. There's new industry, new cargo and new companies, too. It all sounds like a rather fine package, all attached to a game that remains one of the most compelling road sims of recent years.

Scandinavia is due out on Thursday, May 7, and will cost  18. To prepare, developer SCS yesterday released the game's 1.17 patch, bringing improvements to weather and lighting systems, as well as engine performance, stability and AI behaviour.

Sometimes I worry that my love of Euro Truck Simulator 2 is misconstrued by those who've never played it as some gimmicky affectation. It's not; it's genuinely great. Rather than the undulating pace of some high-action shooter, ETS2 is a constant low-level challenge. You have to obey the rules of the road, maintain balance between speed and controllability, and negotiate motorway junctions. And that's all before each delivery's final boss: reverse parking into the cargo space. 

It's a very calming game, but it's also an unnerving one. It's a battle between relaxation and the fact you're driving a giant metal battering ram.

None of this comes across in the medium of video, which is a shame because SCS has released an hour of alpha footage from their ETS2 follow-up American Truck Simulator. At one point, a trucker delivers a tractor to Fresno. Exciting, no?

Look, if you're not visibly shaking at the prospect of delivering 38,600 lb of peas to Los Angeles, then frankly I don't know what to say.

As SCS reminds viewers over at their blog: "American Truck Simulator is still very much under development and features and environments may change prior to the official release."

Don't let the reindeers and sleigh fool you: Santa is essentially a glorified trucker. As such, it makes sense that virtual truckers get in on his action. A new Christmassy update has landed for Euro Truck Simulator 2, and with it, a new challenge for would-be gift deliverers.

Top of the billing is the Christmas event. Truckists can now accept a cargo of "Christmas Gifts" to be ferried around the game's truncated Europe. If a player can, over the course of the event, deliver gifts across the distance from SCS's office to the North Pole, they'll be rewarded with a unique paint skin.

Also with the update: new fixes and features, including showroom improvements, driving tweaks and, most importantly of all, new sounds for Scania 6 cylinder engines. Game changer. You can see the full patch notes here.

Update aside, I'm writing this more to remind people that Euro Truck Simulator 2 exists and is still surprisingly brilliant. In a year of comedy simulators, it's nice to remember that serious sims can still be a lot of fun.

Outside of Europe, SCS are making progress with the upcoming American Truck Simulator. You can see some of the latest screenshots over at the ETS2 Steam page.

Unironic truck driving game Euro Truck Simulator 2 now has three new European cities to drive to and away from. Venice, Graz and Klagenfurt are now feasible destinations thanks to update 1.11, which also introduces a range of other new features and fixes. For example: you can now adjust your seat. It s possible to adjust your seat in real world trucks, so it s about time this was reflected in Euro Truck Simulator 2.
There s more of course. Car AI code has been tweaked extensively, there are new cruise control features, the radio player now has sorting and filtering options, while the user-interface has been given a significant overhaul. Here s a list of the major changes, with the full changelog available on the Euro Truck Simulator 2 website. The update is available right now.



3 new cities: Venice, Graz, and Klagenfurt with a lot of new kilometers to explore


Seat Adjustment feature


Several months of tweaks of car AI code


Re-designed radio player for with additional sorting and filtering options


New Cruise control features


Displaying current road speed limit in Route Advisor (disable, or switch car or truck speciefic limits in options)


Complete UI facelift


Support for sway bar simulation


Refined the truck suspension for more control over truck and trailer stability


Recalculated the center of gravity of each cargo (more individual behavior of the whole rig)


Controls to adjust trailer stability in options


Improve collisions of player's truck and AI vehicles


Re-created all scratch and crash sounds in the game


Equalized the sound volume of in-cabin engine sounds and external engine sounds for all trucks


More realistic timing for the air brake sound


Retarder indicator is lit during automatic retarder usage


Ability to sell a garage


Ability to relocate your headquarters to another city

A big update to Euro Truck Simulator 2 is adding three new cities to its lineup of places you can keep on truckin' through, as well as truck-specific speed limits to the GPS route adviser and the hotly anticipated "Seat Adjustement" feature. But perhaps even more interesting than any of that is that Tomas Duda, one of the developers on the game, was banned from Steam for a year for using a "Daily Deal" announcement to bring a potentially serious security vulnerability to Valve's attention.

If you hit yesterday's announcement that Euro Truck Simulator 2 was the Steam Daily Deal, you might have found yourself redirected to an unexpected place: the Harlem Shake video. The idea, according to Duda, was to force Valve to take notice of the security flaw in community announcements, and then fix it, but what happened instead was a one-year ban "for violations of the Steam Subscriber Agreement."

Duda said he went with the ill-advised Harlem Shake redirect after talks about the vulnerability with "a Valve guy (a) few months ago" went nowhere. "I was talking about the script tag vulnerability multiple times. No one fixed it. Now I did Harlem Shake for fun (yay for #steamdb)," he wrote. "Imagine if someone used the vulnerability to steal users' session IDs? Redirected to a phishing site?"

He also claimed that he didn't want to make the vulnerability public, but said it's hard to avoid widespread attention when you post something funny. "People then just share it and it spreads," he wrote. "Had like ~100 people at the time on the announcement page a few minutes after doing that."

Duda and his supporters are working on an open letter to Valve appealing the ban, and an "Unban Timmy" user group (in reference to his Steam ID) has also popped up. You can also keep track of his status at istimmystillbanned.info, which for now remains at an unhappy "Yes."

One of two things are usually the case if a game has "Simulator" in its title. Either it's an overly earnest attempt to provide accurate simulation, or it's a joke. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is something of a rarity. It's the former, sure, but avoids the usual trap of being buggy, obtuse and transparent in its limitations. It's good. You're probably sick of people saying its good, but by all logic it shouldn't be, so it bears repeating.

Only one thing could make it better, and that's the inclusion of friends. Strong is the draw of a convoy, especially when filled with folks hauling concrete across Belgium. That dream is increasingly approaching reality. Today, the ETS2 Multiplayer mod launches into open alpha.

It's definitely an alpha. Having attempted to connect a few times this morning, its server has either been full or down. Still, if you have the patience to persist, you can download the installer from the mod's alpha page. At least, you can if it's working it too has had more than a few wobbles since the mod's launch.

Naturally, this is just an early implementation of what will hopefully become a more robust creation. The life of a Euro Truck Simulator 2 driver is a lonely one, and the chance to populate its roads with other players will now doubt liven up an admittedly sedate experience.