Read any review of a simulator and you’ll find phrases such as “unbelievably realistic” thrown about by a jobbing journalist who has no idea what it’s like to fly a plane, run a football club or drive a train.
Games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator might look like a facsimile of the real thing, but unless you’ve sat in the cockpit of a 737 and flown it over the Atlantic, your opinion on how close the experience is to real life is, frankly, irrelevant.
That’s why we asked four highly trained professionals to play a selection of well-known simulators and tell us exactly how close to life these digital recreations are – starting with repair shop maestro, Lee Grant.
THE PC FIXER
LEE GRANT, PROFESSIONAL PC REPAIRER, PLAYS PC BUILDING SIMULATOR 2
PC Building Simulator 2 (PCBS2) puts you at the heart of a PC repair business, with customers clamouring for your services in return for hard cash. I was keen to see if it matched the reality of my experience of doing the same.
The PCBS2 simulator is wrapped around a narrative that begins after you’ve inherited a PC repair shop from someone called, and I kid you not, Tim. This retail empire has two rooms packed with workbenches alongside a vast showroom with décor that looks like Tim hired them out as nuclear testing facilities.
Typically, the early stages of are guided experiences, showing what and where to click in order to fix things. First on the bench is a virus cleanup, and helps wire up the machine and boot it from a USB stick. A click on the handy Clean Virus app eradicates over had already billed the customer $120 for this three-minute job, so perhaps I need to focus less on customer service and more on where I’m going to park my first crystal-encrusted Ferrari.
