After a successful Kickstarter campaign and probably a seance where someone spoke Jeremy Clarkson’s name into a mirror three times, an extensively realistic simulation game about being a car mechanic – rightfully named Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 [official site] – is now out.

… [visit site to read more]

Here in the UK we have an annual ritual called the MOT test. Once a year, owners of automobiles over three years old, report to their local garages to have their holiday plans torpedoed, food budgets slashed and Christmases ruined. The oil-smeared cutpurses doing the torpedoing, slashing, and ruining are called ‘car mechanics’. This is their game. … [visit site to read more]

A brief history of my car maintenance attempts:

1) Reinserting a loose spark plug cable by hand, then driving 80 miles. This caused one of the engine’s valves to meet its maker with such ferocity that the exhaust partially detached while the vehicle was in motion. Apparently, at least. It could have been a double-whammy of coincidence/ineptitude.2) Topping up the engine oil but forgetting to replace the cap afterwards. This caused boiling oil to explode out of the bonnet, in the manner of a particular catastrophic World of Goo error.3) In another car whose exhaust fell off (not actually my fault that time), in order to avoid paying to repair it I carried the broken pipe on the back seat of the car for months, so that I might show it to any police officer who stopped me & my raucously loud vehicle and claim it had only just come off.4) The same car later suffered a handbrake failure, which I also avoided getting repaired for weeks due to my conviction that I should run this ailing vehicle into the ground rather than prolong its misery. This resulted in getting four strangers to push against the car’s front while I reversed up a hill in Cardiff after I’d unwittingly tried to park on a downward slope, in order to prevent it rolling into a very expensive-looking car just in front of it.

So I should probably play the Car Mechanic Simulator 2014 demo. … [visit site to read more]