You’ve ran through the Ikea warehouse shouting “It’s coming home!” You’ve rearranged H&M’s display of folded t-shirts into a Saint George’s Cross. You’ve had a football bouncing around inside your Electrolux washing machine for coming up two days now. You’re posting packs of Panini World Cup stickers to yourself then shouting as they fall through the letterbox. How else can you display your twin loves of Engerland and balls? By covering your Bus Simulator 18 buses with flags and truncated icosahedrons, using a free new skin pack. Other national and pro-ball liveries are available. (more…)

If Euro and American Truck Simulator left me with a deep envy of lorry drivers and a daydream of becoming one, Bus Simulator 18 leaves me with a deep sympathy for bus drivers and a great terror that I might ever become one. (more…)

Forget Newell’s billions, Plunkbat and whichever indie renaissance is currently happening: the real success story of Steam, over the years, is superficially dour and highly-specific vehicle simulations finding large audiences who have very little interest in steering torque or rim patterns. I have filled these pages with paeans to American Truck Simulator‘s soul-searching road odysseys, to the hypnotic satisfaction of stripping parts in Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, and even to the rhythmic, weirdly cyberpunk otherness of casting lines and gutting trout in Fishing: Barents Sea.

I’d had gentle hope that Bus Simulator 2018 might similarly be more than the sum of its dry, mass transit parts, but actually playing the thing reveals a game working overtime to be charming. This is a bus-driving game that is absolutely delighted> to be a bus-driving game, and wants me to feel the same way. And y’know what? I think I do. And it’s all thanks to Mira Tannhauser, the world’s number one fan of being on a bus. (more…)

In a week full of loud of colourful E3 announcements, what has me most immediately excited is the prospect of getting online with three pals to drive bus routes together in Bus Simulator 18. Released today, it’s a drive-o-business sim about, y’know, driving buses – with multiplayer! You can pass each other while driving your routes, go explore the city on foot together, and even ride the bus as a ticket inspector while your mate takes the wheel. Video games are amazing.

I am further delighted to hear that it has launched with mod tools that will let people create new maps, new buses, new missions, and such. In short, yes, you could create the Vengabus and make it play We Like To Party. (more…)

As much as I enjoy a lonely life on the road with my big rig in American Truck Simulator, I’m also well up for a spot of larking up with my pals in a different transport sim. Bus Simulator 18 is coming next month with four-player online cooperative bus-driving, and it sounds promising. Here, come watch this new trailer with a four-bus convoy taking up the whole road and trundling through town like the world’s slowest hoons. You’ll also see the greatest treat of video game trailers: people squirming and waving controllers as they pretend to play. (more…)