Need a driving simulator game for iphone, chromebook or mac

December 18, 2020 5:21 AM

I am looking for specific recommendations for a driving simulator for a learning driver.

To begin: I don't know anything about video games. I literally have never played one and my house only has a broken Wii from 2011. So I hope all answers will explain it to me like I'm a 5 year old alien luddite who has been under a rock. Etc.

I want to buy a game that simulates city driving for someone who needs extra help getting "oriented" while behind the wheel, knowing instinctively what lane to turn into, where traffic is going to flow from in a multi-lane intersection etc.

All this is stressful when it's life and death in real life and you have to react fast. I would like them to get extra practice on a simulator as they learn to master the feel of the road in traffic.
This is for someone having a bit of a harder time getting the hang of it. We're looking for an advantage -- an extra tool -- off road.
This is not for a fun, race-car game, it is for learning to drive.
Possible difficulty is: no gaming set-up, no console, etc. The driver should be able to do this on their iphone or ideally a chromebook. Their macbook air is a possibility but for Reasons prefer it work on the phone or chromebook.
In the mac app store, I have found a driving simulator game but no one has rated it yet.

posted by nantucket to Technology (9 answers total)

Have you considered European Truck Simulator or American Truck Simulator? The traffic isn't as heavy as real life, but as an American learning to drive in the UK I enjoyed the roundabouts and maneuvering in ETS.
posted by johngoren at 5:44 AM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Which country are you in? Relevant both for rules of the road and for app store access.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:45 AM on December 18, 2020

Response by poster: Which country are you in?

This is for driving in the United States.
posted by nantucket at 5:49 AM on December 18, 2020

I second American Truck Simulator. At only $4.99 it's not much of a risk. YouTube has many videos that give you an idea of how it plays. You can adjust the traffic density, by the way (add uset g_traffic "1.2" to Documents\American Truck Simulator\config.cfg; default is 1.0).
posted by davcoo at 6:35 AM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Apologies if this is too off-topic, but as someone who had a strange time getting used to driving (and grew up in cities), for me it was really helpful to have experiences driving in less urban areas that were real but didn't have so much going on. Some brains do better with the jumping into the frying pan approach but some need something different and it was hard for me to find any confidence in myself trying to get the hang of driving in spaghetti-bowl highway situations, even if I could manage it, white-knuckled.
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:40 AM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

American Truck Simulator is probably your best bet, it lets you roam around interstates and small towns (the cities are significantly downsized in the game) and even penalizes you for traffic violations. You're going to need at least a 2012 Macbook Air -- you can install the demo for free to see if it'll work with your system. You may need to go into the game's settings and decrease the graphics quality to make it more responsive.

You can use it with a game controller, but I find it's easier to just use the keyboard.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:24 AM on December 18, 2020

Phone or chromebook plan:
- Six month "Founders" subscription to Geforce Now at $25 for six months (or $5 for one, but they are limiting those sign ups because the service had a recent spike in popularity)
- License for American Truck Simulator that redeems on Steam. If Steam is the same price or similar, buy on Steam directly. If you want, I can also message you a key, as it was in several discount bundles. LMK.
- An Xbox compatible bluetooth game controller, ~$50. This one is nice. and has an optional phone clip. If budget allows, I like the Razer Kishi for phone use. Two controllers will prevent needing to pair back and forth between devices, but that's usually just a small annoyance.

This will use data during use, about as bad as HD Netflix. How slow it feels also is affected by where in the world you are, are you're connecting to a gaming machine in a data center somewhere and streaming the results back.

I'm trying this now, will comment in a bit. I never played this game, but I worry truck driving won't map well onto the executive decision making that you use for non-commercial vehicles.
When I was a kid, we had a fake wheel and a driver's ed game, but I don't know what the equivalent would be now.
posted by Anonymous Function at 11:05 AM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Okay, that technically works. I don't think it's a good fit for this. ATS is very much a simulator, not an educational game. There's a lot of back and forth with the keyboard and the controller, which would make this very difficult on the phone, and it's pretty confusing getting started.
posted by Anonymous Function at 11:11 AM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sorry, I'm going to retract my suggestion of American Truck Simulator given the hardware limitations of iPhone or Chromebook. ATS requires a medium-power PC with a dedicated graphics card.
posted by davcoo at 1:26 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]