I really loved Pokémon as a kid, so when I learned about PalWorld (bear with me, this is a Minecraft post), it was something I definitely wanted to try. My girlfriend and I gave it a shot, and we really got in to it. Going in, I didn’t know that I would have to chop down trees, craft my tools and weapons, and build shelters to survive nights. But given the overall idea behind the game (catching and battling Pokémon Pals), I was more than willing to do it.

Note: this is just a house tour post. I’m giving some background info and context for each build, but I’m not actually going to review or comment on the game itself much. I’m Just going to talk about the couple houses and bases and builds that we made, and why.

Also, as an Amazon Associate I may earn a small commission if you were to make a purchase using a link on this site. It’s at no cost to you, though, and can really help out the blog. I appreciate it!

As we played, I started enjoying the “survival” aspect of it more and more. And once I figured out the construction rules, I really loved bringing various build ideas to life (stay tuned for my PalWorld commentary and building tours). For a little while, I even got a bit of an itch for survival games and I branched out a bit giving Ark and Valheim a shot. I didn’t stick around long enough to give them a real chance, though (I may go back one day).

So, after taking a bit of a hiatus to play different games (like Split Fiction), we started itching to do some mining, resource gathering, crafting, and building again. Having just watched the Minecraft movie at a friends house with his kids, it seemed like the natural option.

The Beginnings

We wanted a relatively fresh playthrough, so we didn’t go in to the game with much information or any goals. We mostly planned to just explore and see what we could find, and I knew there were diamonds out there to be had. But otherwise, we decided to figure it out as we went.

I forgot how little information the game really gives you when you start. I did know that we had to sleep through the nights because there were enemies, but I didn’t remember just how dangerous they were. It was a pretty quick lesson.

I wanted to build a house, but between creepers, spiders, and helmet-wearing zombies, I didn’t feel safe just building out in the open, even during the day. I figured it would be a good idea to create ourselves a platform that we could build on top of that monsters couldn’t reach.

We found a good spot, kind of on a cliffside facing a village (something else that was new to us) and thought that would be great because we really only had to dig down 3 sides. Also, we found an area that already led pretty deep underground right below that spot, so it was a good place to start mining too. So I started digging three blocks down around the area that we decided would be our base’s plateau.

Digging out the space

Truth-be-told, I didn’t fully think the plan through. I thought the landscape would be largely unaffected, but there’d be one area just a little higher than the rest where our home stood. It was early in the game, so I didn’t have the blocks to build up, and in my mind, I’d easily achieve that vision by just clearing the blocks around where we chose our home to be.

I realized pretty quickly, though, that I wasn’t building a plateau, I was building a moat. I was just trenching out the area around my base, creating a pit. Oh well, it’ll still get the job done. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t think a one-block-wide pit was enough. It seemed like the enemies could make it across that gap with little issue. So, I decided to double-up my work and make the trench at least 3 wide.

It wasn’t my initial vision, and a bigger project than I anticipated. But after a couple in-game days and a few frustrating deaths, I got it dug out.

While finishing the bulk of the trench was relatively quick, it took several days of tinkering to finally get it to a place where I thought it actually looked decent. We had to fill in all of the creeper holes and block off any overhangs where skeletons could hide out during the day. It was a whole to-do, but I liked how it turned out.

I left an area off to the side as our “main entrance” to the plateau. It was an easy-enough jump for us, but one that mobs couldn’t make. I ended up making another easy way in — by climbing up and over the trap — but this space remained the main way we got on to the home area. There were various ladders within the trench, too, in case we missed the jump (which we did often. Frequently finding creepers waiting for us at the bottom).

Catching Mobs

Speaking of traps, I was thinking about ways to capture mobs to harvest their drops — especially the arrows from the skeletons. This was long before we watched any videos about what to do or how the game mechanics worked, so I was just trying different things.

I eventually got everything filled in properly, and actually buttoned-up, so there were no unknown/missing spots where mobs could sneak in. And on the outside — next to the doors that made up the “entrance” to the trap — I put ladders so I could climb over into the property while hopefully luring the mobs into the trap.

I say it was only moderately successful because I really only trapped zombies. I didn’t think about the skeletons’ mechanics and how they tended to stay a bit further away so that they could shoot. After the couple times zombies got in when I wrongly assumed I was safe, I ended up building walls around the trap to prevent that.

With those walls, though, I was out of the sight-lines for the skeletons, so they didn’t come into the trap that often. I tried luring them every once-in-a-while, but they usually lost interest after I got into the base. Or they’d kill me before I had a chance to make it back.

Spiders could obviously just climb over the trap, so I wasn’t really trapping them in the first place.

Instead of glass, I ended up trying a couple iterations of putting transparent blocks in different patterns in the opening between the trap and the home. I hoped that would lure more skeletons, while at the same time stopping them from shooting us. I kind of got close (and close to a traditional mob farm, accidentally) by putting blocks only on the top-half of the opening. But by the time I got to that plan, we decided to move on and explore another area.

Overall, I never got the base into a perfect place, or the trap as efficient as possible. But I did learn a lot and had fresh ideas for the next home-base we built.

What about the inside?

As for the house itself: When we first got to this plateau, I built a small hut to sleep for that initial night. But once we built the “main house”, it just became storage and extra crafting tables.

While I was digging the trench, my gf built the main house — complete with expanded storage and work tables. She even included a roof-top deck decorated with a bell from the nearby village (we didn’t know what the bell did yet).

I liked what she had done with it, and wanted to add something of my own. I decided on a basement, complete with a nice little fireplace; and I included a walk-out, so you could enjoy the water from that level. There was also a cleared out area under our house that we’d created by mining for stone and coal and getting blown up by creepers. I thought that area looked pretty cool, so I added a window looking in from the basement. I kind of made it up as I went, and I really liked how it turned out.

Haley also realized that she could potentially keep pets and wanted to see what that was about. Given the trench I made, it was difficult to actually get animals up to our homestead, but that persistent merchant was usually around.

Haley built 3/4 of a fence and waited until one of the merchant’s llamas were within it, and closed it off. Our first official pet. We were still learning at this point, and didn’t actually know about taming or breeding. So we just held on to the one llama until we moved on from that base.

Which leads me to house number 2

We were starting to get a little bored with our original home, and as I was out gathering resources one day, I came across a new biome and type of tree. It seemed like a good opportunity to explore and move on, so we packed up and did just that.

It turned out that the tree wasn’t much more than just a new variation of wood, so we moved past it. We had committed to moving on, so we didn’t want to simply go back. Eventually, we came across a huge chasm in the side of a mountain, and decided to explore that. It was pretty mob-infested, so we built a base pretty quickly right outside of it.

We, once again, gave ourselves a bit of elevation between the home and where the mobs spawn. But it was nowhere near as in-depth as the first spot. We basically just built a small platform in the side of the mountain to make a simple sleeping spot.

I wanted to give it some character, though, so I added a wall of windows to look out through. It turned out great, and it was very little work. Good thing, too, because we realized that this chasm didn’t have anything for us at the time, and we moved on pretty quickly.

Treehouses

When we left the base by the crevice, we immediately came across a swamp biome. And for the first time, we saw a Huge Brown Mushroom (I had to look that up, I thought they were just yet another variety of tree. I never chopped one down). We built a bit of a “treehouse” on top of that, but it was another quick one to just get through the night.

At one point, my gf and I got separated, so I built a base on the treetops so she could hopefully find it/me. In order to get into it, you had to navigate up and over using it’s leaves and the leaves of nearby trees.

Both of those interim houses gave us ideas for what would become our next main base. We wanted to create something up in a tree, with a more low-key hidden entrance up through the leaves.

We found a prime candidate for the treehouse and carved ourselves and entrance channel through the leaf-blocks. This still honestly might be my favorite entrance to a house we built.

We got to the top and cleared out a spot for the house. We had tons of stone at the time, so we built this grayscale monstrosity on top. While aesthetically the jury’s still out, I thought It was really cool disappearing through the leaves to secretly get inside this base.

We planned on staying here for a little while, so Haley built this wrap-around balcony and added a garden with some decorative plants. It wasn’t too substantial (and we didn’t really know the farming mechanics yet, so we weren’t trying to gain anything from it) but it was fun and we liked it.

I’ve also always like the idea of living furniture & decoration — like having a tree growing through the treehouse, so I tried to bring that to life here. We left the body of the tree, and just build around the trunk. At the time, we thought that leaves would continue to grow on trees, so I built a couple blocks off  the side of the top of the trunk, so there’d be more leaves above, too, which would have been incredible.

Turns out, leaves don’t grow like that, so it didn’t seem like my vision would be realized. But while creating the videos for this post, I added them in manually. I was in creative mode anyway, so I figured “why not?” It actually turned out pretty well, and I kind of wish I thought about it from the start.

Thanks for reading! This was actually just part one — It was getting pretty lengthy as is, so I felt like I should break it up. Be sure to check out Part 2 where I start to dabble in some Redstone and farming (and I don’t simply mean planting crops).

Let me know in the comments what you thought about my first builds after being away from the game for over 10 years. I think they’re pretty clever for having gone in with very little information. Hope to see you in part two, or if you enjoyed this, be sure to check out one of my other posts!

The post Minecraft Home Tour Part 1 | Plateaus & Treehouses appeared first on I Talk Games.

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I’ve always been into cars, but it’s relatively surface level. I once told a friend that my affinity for automobiles is “wide, not deep”. I’ve always admired the variations in body style and design, and learned a little bit about different types of engines and other minor stuff under the hood. I try to go to the car show every year.

But that’s mostly it. I’ve never done any deep-dives into the inner-workings of cars, nor did I ever have much hands-on experience. When I was like 17, I installed a new head unit in my car with no oversight using just electrical tape and ingenuity. I actually managed to get it to work and had it installed properly.

It took like 4 hours, but it worked and looked good (I even replaced the panel so the new unit fit in seamlessly). I showed my uncle — an actual mechanic and car-restorer — who said just using electrical tape was a fire hazard. He took it out, fixed it, and put it back in all of 5 minutes. I then realized I was out of my depth.

I Still Loved the Idea, Though…

I think a lot of what I like comes from the customization, too. I grew up with the Fast and the Furious movies, and really love the original trilogy before they really went off the rails (yes even — especially, actually — Tokyo Drift). Something about the endless amount of options to make your vehicle unique, and the earned-not-bought respect it can bring really gelled with me.

I always thought that maybe one day I’d have the discretionary income, time, care, motivation etc. etc. etc. to buy my own car and upgrade it myself. But that day hasn’t come (yet). I’ve had to suffice with video games like Need for Speed, The Crew, and more; along with this one, Car Mechanic Simulator.

I saw this game as an opportunity to take a deeper dive into the workings of cars without having to go out and buy a project car myself. And while I realize you can change engines and make different upgrades in the various racing games I’ve played; I don’t really look in to what I’m adding to the car. I simply look at the information that tells me that the car is becoming more powerful, and compare parts based on the speed, acceleration, etc. increases.

I don’t, however, look at what the various parts are called, or what the specifically do, or where they might be installed. So while I do have a slight frame of reference, this is an opportunity to get my virtual hands dirty.

Early Struggles & Frustrations

In the beginning, the game is pretty overwhelming. The tutorial doesn’t give you much information, and interacting with the cars and making the choices you need to make can be a bit confusing. Maybe it makes more sense using a mouse and keyboard, but felt a bit convoluted playing with a controller on Xbox.

Most of the time, when you’re interacting with a car, you press ‘Y’ to open a radial menu to access whatever tool you need at the time. And tools are buried inside sub-menus, which you have to remember. It’s mostly fine and easy to get used to, but there are times where I’ll press ‘Y’ to instinctively open a menu, but the action required pressing ‘A’ to select. And oftentimes when I tried to go back with ‘B’, it would exit the whole menu I’m in, rather than going back one level. Again, as you play you’ll get used to what menus you need to dig through to find what you need, but it’s not very intuitive.

I suppose when I went to spend skill points for the first time, I would have seen that there was an upgrade for something that I’d never used, and go looking for it. But even then, I’m inferring. I don’t mind figuring things out in video games — hell, I prefer it most of the time — but I wasn’t looking for a puzzle game here, I was looking to fix up cars.

This game’s premise is kind of niche, and I feel like they expect you to come in with some prior knowledge of what different things are supposed to do. But at the same time, if you’re an actual mechanic and you want to, say, work on the types of cars and engines you may never get to in real life; this might be unfulfilling.

“Story”

There’s a bit of a story mode, or more accurately, there are “story missions”. Some of the clients (they’re labeled “Story Order” and are at the top of the list) have more context behind them detailing why you’re fixing the car. For example, there’s the initial customer who sees that there’s a new shop open and wants to help out; there’s the family who was about to leave for a road trip when they discovered their car won’t start; there’s the kid who crashed their dad’s car; and there’s the aspiring influencer who wants to build a brand around a car (that you actually build). They’re interesting and add flavor to the game, and gives you reasons to keep progressing. 

You can only take one story mission at a time, but there are always cars that need fixing. They’re in varying levels of disarray, and each one is only available for a certain amount of time. You also have access to increasing amount of available customers as you gain levels, and you can accept as many non-story orders as you have parking spots available.

You start with 4 spots — a lift bay, a spot at each one of your garage doors outside (adding 2 more), and a spot next to the garage perpendicular to the other cars. Once you buy the second lift bay, a car can also sit there — so you ultimately get 5.

Gameplay

When you select a car to fix, you’re shown problems as if someone brought a car in to a mechanic. It’ll list things like “brake problems”, “knocking in the engine”, and “having trouble shifting”. You have to go in, find the problematic parts, and replace or fix them. You can open the hood to look at the engine, or lift the car to look at parts from underneath; and most parts can only be interacted with from one orientation or the other (even if seems like you could reach it).

An items amount of degradation is shown by how rusty it looks, and that goes for everything. Even things that seem like they shouldn’t be “rusty” to be bad like spark plugs, or things that physically can’t rust like rubber bushings still show a “rusty” look to show damage and wear. It’s certainly helpful, for the layman like me, to be able to quickly see what may or may not be a problem. But I understand if someone found it a bit lacking.

You select the part to remove it, and most parts are screwed in so you have to hold the button (in this case ‘A’ on Xbox) in order to unscrew the item. And if the car’s in bad enough condition, the screws themselves will be rusty, too. So you have to us WD-40 DW-04 to loosen the screws. And, naturally, some parts are under other parts, so you have to take them out (and put them back) in a particular order. It’s a lot of finding the next part, selecting it, holding the button to (un)install, and repeating.

Fortunately you don’t have to memorize the order, as you can’t cover something that hasn’t been installed yet, so that’s nice. And you don’t have to keep track of screws, so that makes things much easier than they would be in real life. Overall, it’s a very simple process, but can be incredibly tedious.

There are a couple exceptions to simply holding the button to dismount and replace a part, that I think are pretty cool additions. With the shocks, after taking the shock off of the car, you have to take it to the Spring Puller in order to separate the spring from the shock itself. And once you’ve fixed or bought new parts, you have to re-assemble the shock at the same machine.

Similarly, tires need to be taken off of wheels and rims and put back on at a Tire Changer. There’s even a neat animation that goes with it that’s similar to how it’s actually done. It doesn’t line up perfectly, but it’s nice. And you also have to balance each tire individually with the Wheel Balancer (and quick minigame) before you can add it to the car.

It’s not super often that a wheel or shock needed to be replaced in order to complete a car; but it was fun when I did get to interact with those. And I got to use them even more when I fully restored cars to 100% parts.

Finding the Problems

Like I mentioned earlier, you’re not given a ton of information on what exactly you need to do to each car. You’re told the issue the customer is having, and you have to go find the cause of that issue. You are shown, however, how many parts need replacing on each car. And there are often additional tasks that need to be completed like refilling the fluids (brake fluid, coolant, oil etc.).

With the Normal Orders, you typically only have a few parts to replace. But the storyline cars have tons. You can see the number of items that need to be replaced when you look at the cars information page (which you find in the car’s radial menu). It shows a list of parts, but most of them show “Part Not Discovered”, and you’ve got to find them on the car to reveal them in this list. Once you’ve installed a part with a sufficient percentage, you’ll get a star next to the part showing it’s complete.

There are ways to reveal some of the parts before just diving in to the engine and taking it apart. There’s the Test Track, where you drive the car through a series of tests to check it’s steering, engine, shocks, and brakes. And there’s a few tools, like the Electronic Multimeter and Compression Tester that may reveal information for you. They’re not always useful, though. It was a pretty common issue that a couple of the tools wouldn’t work because they relied on running the engine, and the problem was that the engine couldn’t be started. And, obviously, you can’t drive a car on a test track if you can’t start it.

Maybe there’s an easier solution than what I was doing, but by the time I figured out how to get the engine started, in those scenarios, I had pretty much figured the rest of it out anyway. The aforementioned “Examine” feature helps a bit, too; but still doesn’t reveal everything. The worse-off an area is, the more red it is, but it didn’t necessarily reveal the specific part needed. I found myself using that more just to farm XP than to actually figure out what was wrong with each car.

Truthfully, the most reliant/efficient way to figure out what was wrong with each car was to dive in (and with a little learning along the way). Instead of using the tools, I just tried to find the quickest way to get to the problem areas. If it was a transmission problem, I started to immediately check the gearbox (making sure to remove the starter from the engine bay side first — ugh, that was annoying). If there were issues starting the car, I started looking at the fuses and spark plugs. Some were a bit more obvious, like “suspension feels loose”, so I knew exactly what to check.

Engine Problems

Engine problems were a little more complicated, but I kind of came up with a system. I’d check the usual cam shafts and tension rods and gears. But if none of those jumped out, I started checking the pistons from underneath through the oil pan. I found that the rust goes all the way down, so I could quickly check there to see if the piston was the issue, rather than taking apart the entire engine top-down.

That said, there are Piston Rings in with the Pistons that you can’t get to without removing the Piston itself — and you can’t remove the piston itself without essentially taking apart the rest of the engine. That was the worst. Now that I’ve taken apart, and put back together several engines, it’s less daunting. But at first, when I thought I just had to find a couple things to fix so I could make a quick profit, I got incredibly frustrated having to take the whole thing down to the studs.

On top of the Piston Rings, there were a few other parts I had to constantly keep in my mind otherwise I’d overlook them and spend too much time searching. Rubber Bushings, Cam Gear Caps, Rod Caps, and Wheel Hub Bearings are all small, seemingly inconsequential parts that will often be the very thing that needs to be replaced in order to complete the job.

Solving the Issues

In order to solve the problems that the car has, you have a few options. You can buy a new part to replace the affected one. You can replace broken parts with parts that you’ve taken off of other cars (if they’re sufficiently not broken). Or you can fix the part and put it back. You have to spend skill points to unlock an upgrade the ability to fix parts — plus not all parts can be repaired — so you’ll end up buying parts most of the time.

When you find a part that needs replacing, you can add it to your shopping list. Then you run to the computer to buy the part, and head back to the car to install it. There is a tablet you can buy, though, that allows you to quickly access the shop from the radial menu (or, on Xbox, by pressing ‘X’). In order to add the part to your shopping list to find later, there’s a corresponding button you can press when you’re either looking at the item itself, or just the spot where the part goes.

Unfortunately, though, you can’t add parts to your shopping list from the car’s status menu. When digging through the parts, it can be a bit of a guess-and-check. I would often take off a part that looks like it could be one of the one’s that needs replacing; then head back to the status menu to see if that, in fact, was a correct part. Repeating the process until all of the parts have been discovered.

I think this definitely could’ve been handled better, especially because there’s no real rhyme or reason to which parts may need changing at any given time. There could be parts that you remove that are in worse shape than one in the list — but it won’t need to be replaced.

Shopping for Parts

When buying new parts for the car, I found it easier to just add the needed parts to my shopping list as I came across them. After repairing anything I could, I’d begin to put the car back together; and whenever I came across a part that I don’t have a 100% replacement part for, I’d quickly add it to the shopping list, pop in to the shop to buy the part, back out of the store, and install the part. When I only had a few parts to replace, I found myself just taking pictures of my TV so I had a list I could reference.

I also found it disappointing that I couldn’t see how many of each part I already had in stock. The only way I could figure was to manually count them and keep a record yourself. Overall, I would much rather be able to add all of the parts to a list quickly and easily, buy all of the parts in one go, then head to the car to put it together knowing I’ve got everything I need (and nothing I don’t).

Other Improvements

In addition to fixing/replacing the car’s parts and body panels, there are expansions to your garage that can be bought in order to upgrade cars in different ways. There’s the car wash, where you can clean up the exterior and interior of the cars (though the animation is pretty much the same for both — they just get sudsy for a while). There’s the paint shop, where you can apply a variety of colors and paint styles. This can also be upgraded to include additional paints and eventually a couple of decals. There’s also the “Test Path” calibration room and the Dyno where you can test your owned cars’ horsepower and further customize the tuning.

I will say with the dyno, I had a helluva time figuring out what to do (though this was partially user error). When you bring a car into the dyno and try to tune it, it tells you that the car needs a custom gearbox in order to be tuned. Fine, I’ll buy one. The only problem was, I couldn’t find it.

The “Tuning Shop” has a bunch of parts with increased tuning, but no custom gearboxes. I checked periodically over the course of fixing like 3 cars, and it just wasn’t there. Turns out, there’s a whole separate “Custom Gearbox Shop” separate from the other “Tuning Shop” section. That was frustrating — and I ended up submitting a couple cars “incomplete” because I wasn’t able to tune a car like the mission called for.

Once I did get a custom gearbox installed and was able to mess with the tuning, I was again lost. I have no idea what the ratios are, or what they should be, or how they work together to maximize output — I have literally no frame of reference for this at all. So I just made it up.

I noticed that my top speed was seemingly going up the lower I made the ratio. So I just set it to 0 to see what would happen. The car wouldn’t move at all. I ended up just searching for a guide and found one that said to basically follow an Aston Martins configuration, so I did that. I still don’t know what any of it means, though.

Upgrades and Skills

Upgrades

I touched on it earlier, but there are upgrades that you can get in this game, too. You can make your “Examine” faster. You can make unscrewing, mounting, and unmounting parts faster or increase your walk speed. And even unlock the ability to repair parts so you don’t have to buy entirely new ones each time.

Repairing

Repairing parts is interesting. You unlock a room off the side of the garage (which looks like it should be the convenience store part because there’s pumps outside for some reason, but I digress). And in the room are several tools and desks, though each one is either a “Repair Table (Parts)” or “Repair Table (Body). Each “tool” does one or the other. There are two exceptions in this room — the Brake Lathe, which fixes brakes; and the engine builder, where you can build your own engine from scratch.

I haven’t built an engine from scratch at all, just repairing the ones already in cars. And in order to fix the brakes, you just put them in the machine and wait. But in order to repair the other parts, you get to play a little minigame. You’re shown several bars in green, red, and gray; and an arrow travels back-and-forth along the top of these bars. You have to press A to stop the arrow on top of a green bar, failing if you do so on top of a red bar, and being able to try again if you get a gray one.

It’s a fun addition to be sure, but I do wonder if they could have made it a bit more interactive for those who want to be more hands-on with their repairs.

Not every part can be fixed, unfortunately, so you will have to continue to buy parts. You can unlock the ability to repair “higher level” parts. But in all honesty, I have no idea where the part level came in. I can’t find any indicator of what level an item might be and whether or not it’s fixable. And after going through an entire bout of repairs — with my repair skill maxed out — I still end up with broken items in my inventory. Again, little information. I do know that you’re not able to fix body parts until the top level of the skill.

Cleaning out Your Inventory

In order to get rid of parts, you can either sell or salvage them. Selling them nets you a small amount for each part, and removes them from your inventory (which is the important thing). And salvaging items give you a special blue-symboled currency (I can’t seem to find it’s name) which allows you to upgrade parts to better qualities.

Upgrading individual parts gives power benefits; but like repairing, I don’t know what is or isn’t salvageable. I’ll have a bunch of broken parts in my inventory (still, after having repaired everything available) and I’ll try to salvage them. I’ll go through the bout of that and check my inventory, and there’ll still be broken items. I just don’t understand.

Personal Cars

On top of fixing up other people’s cars for various reasons, you can also acquire cars for yourself. Theres the junkyard you can explore; there’s an auction house where you can bid on cars to try to get them at a reasonable price, which is pretty cool because they use the gamertags in your friends list as auction opponents; and there are barns whose locations you can find in chests that you receive for completing story missions.

You can visit these barns and see what cars happen to be forgotten about, and if you like one (or more) you can buy them. There’s also “junk” scattered around the barns, with random miscellaneous parts that you can buy (this is also true for the Junkyard).

You bring cars back to your shop, where you can make the same fixes that you can do to other cars, along with additional upgrades to make your car unique. There are more “custom” looking options for each car that you can apply instead of the default options. And you can install custom upgraded parts that add additional power.

This is where a lot of the fun for me is had in the game — buying an old forgotten beater, restoring it into something badass, upgrading it to make it mine (and, frankly, to have the best parts) and test them out. So far, I’ve only gotten a couple-hundred horsepower and a top-speed of about 180. I’ve got a long way to go.

Phase 3: Profit

This is also the best way to make money that I’ve found — flipping the cars you find in the barns*. I’ve done full 100% to the clips restorations about 4 times now, and have made a significant profit each time. I’ve also added more and more custom parts each time — wondering if the price of the custom part outweighed the profit from it — but in fact it was the opposite. The more I spent on the car, the more I got back.

The car’s handling is just… awful, and the touchiest move to either direction sends the cars into a tailspin. I actually ended up reading some forums to figure out how to fix it; and the best way people said was to use slick tires. But even then, I couldn’t maintain control enough to complete a full lap. I don’t love that, but truthfully, I prefer straight-line tests anyway. So, for me, it wasn’t a huge deal. But I could see how it would be for someone.

The Cars

There are quite a few types of cars in Car Mechanic Simulator, but none of them are licensed car brands (unless you buy the DLC). That said, you can pretty clearly tell what most of the cars are supposed to be — Like the FMW… I wonder what that is . It’s not just I.C.E engines, either. There’s an electric car or two thrown in there as well to keep you on your toes. And like I mentioned a bit earlier, there are quite a few engine options in this game.

I’m not as familiar with engines, though, so I can’t really differentiate them. I’ve kind of shied away from that aspect because I’m so unfamiliar and have just been rebuilding cars with their proper parts. I’d like to get into engine building and seeing what else is available but the lack of information is holding me back. I don’t want to spend most of my credits building something that I can’t use because whatever car I have or want isn’t compatible or something. So, I’ll tackle later when I’ve got more CR and the cost is inconsequential.

Conclusion

Overall, even though it’s a four-year-old game, I’ve still been really enjoying playing Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. While the lack of information was often frustrating, it was still interesting playing around in engines and under cars. And it’s very satisfying taking an old clunker into a show-worthy masterpiece.

Since starting this post, I’ve found an old Lambo Morena, and I can’t wait to get my hands on that V12. Maybe this is where I try my hand at building a new one. Either way, I definitely recommend this game if you’re interested in cars at all; but be forewarned, if you’re already a bit of an expert, you might find this lacking.

Have you played Car Mechanic Simulator at all? Let me know in the comments what you think about it; especially if you have any handling tips.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, maybe check out another post. And be sure to check back soon for more awesome gaming content!

The post Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 — Wait.. Isn’t it 2025? appeared first on I Talk Games.

Recently, I decided to give Crime Scene Cleaner a shot. Nothing about it really jumped out to me except the fact that I was looking forward to a pleasurable cleaning experience. I’ve played PowerWash Simulator (and subscribe to r/powerwashingporn on Reddit), and was excited by the prospect of similarly satisfying gameplay. Otherwise, though, I had no idea what I was getting in to.

A couple of disclaimers before we dive in. For one, I don’t hold much back when talking about gameplay and storylines. So if you’re sensitive to spoilers, you may want to be careful. Though I will say that I was a bit more conscious about it in this post.

Additionally, The game involves cleaning up crime scenes with dead characters and blood; which means some of the screenshots and video clips in this post do as well. Just FYI. With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy!

Story

You play as a humble high-school janitor, who has a daughter in the hospital with a terminal illness. Naturally, the bills are piling up. One day, you get a call from a friend who needs help cleaning up his “accident” — namely the dead guy he killed in his apartment.

Cleaning is your jam, though, so you do a great job. But unfortunately that attracts the attention of a local crime boss, who wants to employ you to clean up his messes. You’re in no position to say no to him, knowing he’ll probably kill you if you do. Plus, he pays pretty well — and as we’ve established, you need the money. So reluctantly, you continue to bag bodies and mop up blood.

It’s not the deepest story in the world, but it doesn’t have to be — the cleanup is what’s important. And surprisingly there’s voice acting, so you don’t have to worry about missing a pop-up that gives lore; I honestly missed a lot of the texts in PowerWash Simulator because I was so focused on the PowerWashing. In Crime Scene Cleaner, though, You don’t have to worry about that.

There are some funny quips here and there, too, and you can hear the MC rationalize his actions (poorly). It’s also pretty fun to watch little things change around his house as you progress (which you end up at between rounds — sleeping and initiating missions from your basement computer).

There’s also a very creepy/eerie vibe when you’re playing, separate from the main subject matter of the game. It has a good way of always making you feel on edge, even though it seems like all of the other “simulator” games where it’s first person and the other characters are only referenced. I don’t want to give too much away, you’ll have to play (and look out for secrets) to find out.

Speaking of, there are a lot of secrets to be found in Crime Scene Cleaner, and hidden areas to be discovered. I might even go so far as to say that you have to solve a puzzle, or two. Be sure not to just clean what you see and move on as quickly as you can. You’ll miss some pretty interesting moments and easter eggs.

Gameplay

Given the fact that cleaning up a whole crime-scene entails a lot more than just pressure washing dirt off of something; there’s a few different things you need to do. You have to mop up all the blood, clean up all the trash, dispose of dead bodies, find and get rid of any incriminating evidence, and put everything back in it’s place.

You’ve got several tools to facilitate your cleaning:

• A mop and sponge, to physically clean with
• A bucket to rinse out your mops and sponges
• Even a power washer to really blast away blood (and occasionally paint)

One of the most important things at each crime scene, you’ll learn, is the faucet. There’s a few around each level and you use them to fill up the power washer and bucket. And when the power washer runs out of water, or the water in the bucket gets too dirty, you have to return.

I was constantly trying to find the most efficient way to clean up the area I’m cleaning while having quick access to water. There are upgrades that make this easier — like making it so the buckets or mops get dirty more slowly (thus requiring fewer trips back to the bathroom).

Also, the bucket can be a bit annoying because it gets knocked over at the slightest provocation. You get anywhere near it, and you’ll probably spill it’s contents. And if there’s any blood in the water at all, you’ll have to clean up the spot where you spilled, on top of going back to the faucet to re-fill. It won’t take long before you become very conscious of where your bucket is at all times.

On top of the tools, you also have access to various soaps and shampoos to aid your cleaning. I played through the entire game and never used them once, though. I’m not a big fan of single-use items in games. I fully embody these memes:

Garbage is picked up by hand, but you are able to grab a few items at a time by holding down the “grab” button (instead of picking up every shard of glass one-by-one). The trash can container can only be filled up a certain amount before it becomes “full”, at which point, you have to take the bag out. Seemingly, though, you have an unlimited amount of bags.

To empty the can, you press the “empty” button, and Kovalsky will toss the bag out of it. It’s a little strange, because with the other toss buttons, the longer you hold the button, the further he’ll throw the item. With trash bags, though, holding the button makes no difference. He just tosses the bag in front of him.

More than once, I found myself looking slightly up, holding the “empty” button, expecting to launch the trash bag far out of my way; and it simply dropped a few feet in front of me… Also, make sure to keep track of the bags, you’ll have to remove them, too, to fully clean the scene (kind of˙).

Physically collecting the garbage was fine, though it had it’s own quirks. There are things around each scene that are pretty clearly garbage (like liquor bottles and drinking glasses strewn around the area), but they can’t be thrown away unless they’re broken. And somehow they’re both a little too difficult, and a little to easy to break.

They’re too difficult to break because when you’ve got the trash can equipped, you can’t do anything with those items. You can’t pick them up, or step on them or anything. You have to switch to another option — like un-equipping the trash can so you can use your hand to pick up and throw the item to break it so it can actually be thrown away.

They’re too easy to break, though, because anything besides the sponge breaks items immediately. The sponge cleans such a small area, though, that I ended up using the mop most of the time. But even when I tried to clean around things, I ended up hitting and shattering them. And, really, most of the time I didn’t see the item in the first place.

˙There was one time I was bagging up trash in a pool, and wanted to put the trash bag on the outside of the pool, but didn’t actually want to climb out each time.

I looked up toward where I wanted the bag, and tossed. It was one of those moments where I forgot that the trash bags only go a few feet, though, so the bag didn’t make it to the side of the pool. In fact, I was so close to the side, that the bag actually glitched through the wall, and I wasn’t able to get it.

I thought I’d have to re-do the entire level to 100% it, since I didn’t get rid of all of the trash bags. But fortunately, I didn’t seem to get penalized for it at all, so that was nice.

On the bright side, nothing that matters for completing the level can break. So you don’t have to worry about accidentally destroying something that you’ll need later. It’s just that the back-and-forth was kind of annoying. And sometimes I simply wanted to put an item in a certain place — just because I thought it would look nice or something — and I’d accidentally break it.

That said, since breaking items was largely inconsequential, I found it much more efficient to just break everything and clean it all up later. It wasn’t great, and I didn’t do it every time, but it worked when I did.

Bodies are also picked up by hand, and you body-bag them and “dispose” of them by putting them in your truck or the bin near the entrance. It’s here where all of your trash bags need to go, too. All you have to do is drop the bodies in the bed of the truck or near the bin (on the tarp) and they automatically get bagged and placed where they need to be. And the garbage bags organize themselves as well.

For some reason, when you pick up a body, the only way to put them down is to throw them. There’s no “Drop” button, it’s just “throw”. It was pretty disrespectful (but also kind of hilarious) yeeting bodies off balconies and through windows to get them to my truck. But I’d prefer to have the ability to do both as an option.

Actually, you can “drop” bodies without throwing them, but it’s a bit of a work-around. While holding a body, if you equip something with the tool wheel, he’ll drop the body in order to hold the item. So there’s that. I didn’t figure that out until like the 5th stage, though.

Also, this is kind of random but — It’s never said where the bodies go after we collect them. I feel like getting them out of the location would be the easy part in that scenario… I guess that’s not what the game is actually about, though. It’s not “Body Disposal Simulator”.

Anyway. Furniture, and some items need to be replaced to fully clean a space, too. Sometimes you can pick up the item, and when you walk near where it’s supposed to go, the area will become red, turning green when you’ve oriented the item enough to place it correctly. You don’t have to get it perfect — the game will lock in the item when the indicator is green, and that’s very welcome here. I’d be pissed if I had to slightly adjust a couch cushion in order to get 100%.

If you’re not sure where an item goes, or if you’re having a hard time finding what you need to clean, there is a “cleaner sense” that you can use that highlights where blood stains still remain, and shows you where furniture is supposed to go. There’s enough information that you’re rarely completely lost about what to do; but not so much that you feel hand-held.

Though I will say there was a time where I wondered around an area for I don’t know how long looking for the last thing needed to hit 100%, and it turned out to be a fire extinguisher that was in it’s spot it was just slightly off. Even after you “lock something in”, it can be bumped. I’m not sure if that’s what happened there, but that did piss me off. I feel like that was the only instance, though.

There are also the instances where you’re shown that an area isn’t 100% clean, but you don’t see any blood or anything. And it turns out that there’s one spot on the back of a pillar or something that you just really couldn’t see. I feel like that’s offset, though, by the times when you’re cleaning a large area, and everything in front of you disappears — finishing an entire section — because a certain threshold or percentage of “cleanliness” had been crossed.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, the game shows you how clean the overall space is in percentages. And you can “perfect” levels by cleaning up every bit of blood, throwing away every bit of trash, and (of course) getting rid of all of the bodies. And after each round you’re given a score based on the amount of money you earned from the job.

The amount you earn isn’t simply what you’re getting paid, though. There’s also jewelry and drugs littered around each area that you can pick up, that you “sell” after each round. It counts as income at the end of the round, and counts toward your overall score. A lot of the higher-value items are found when you come across a hidden area, so there’s even more motivation to look out for those.

Unfortunately, though, that’s all the information it gives you. And a lot of that I had to surmise (and could be wrong about). Nowhere have I seen how many secrets each level has; just how many I’ve found and whether or not I’ve found all of them.

If you want to discover them all, you might end up doing some “guess-and-check” where you replay a level, try to find a new secret or two, then check to see if the level is marked “completed” by the flag. Re-doing it if not. I didn’t feel like doing that on my initial play through, but I may go back one day and try to find them all.

There are also secret cassette tapes that can be found in each level, but there are more secret areas than tapes, so that’s not an indicator of how many secrets have been found. I’m also not really sure what’s on the tapes — as I mentioned, I was largely into it for the cleaning (and stayed with it for the secrets), and I never really concerned myself with what the cassettes were. Let me know in the comments what that was about, I am a little curious.

Overall, with the satisfying gameplay, the upgrades that you can acquire, and the secrets that can be found, I really enjoyed Crime Scene Cleaner. It honestly was a little too short, I’d say. Just when I felt like I was really getting into the swing of things — and coming into my own as a cleaner — it ended. Maybe they’ll release an updated version or DLC or something. In the meantime, I guess I’ll go back and try to find the remaining secrets and tapes if I want to scratch that itch again.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments if you’ve played Crime Scene Cleaner and what you thought about it. And if you recommend any other “simulator” type games, let me know. And be sure to check back soon for more content!

The post Crime Scene Cleaner – An Dark and Eerie Take on the Simulator Genre appeared first on I Talk Games.