Last weekend I had a major OMSI relapse. By the time I realised what was happening, I was so mesmerised by M-R-Software’s mellifluous MAN doubledeckers, I couldn’t even bring myself to accelerate time in the twenty-minute gaps between 13N Stadtgrenze ? U Rathaus runs. I’d just sit there at the terminus, eyes half-closed, ears full of engine purr and the pretty pitter-patter of the rain.

I knew I had to tear myself away, but just couldn’t face going cold turkey. What was needed was a transition sim. Something to ease me gently away from the eighty-seater sirens of Spandau. In City Car Driving I reckon I found the perfect easer.

While this Russian teach-yourself-to-drive sim isn’t in quite the same league as Marcel und Ru"diger’s masterpiece, it does scratch a similar itch. Like OMSI, it’s a diversion where dense, dynamic traffic flows, complicated road layouts, and unfamiliar highway codes, mean the simple act of driving from A to B is often far from simple. CCD’s seven rides might be nippier and far easier to get round tight bends but maximise the realism settings, and a few of them can be almost as challenging to drive well.

Soviet-era comrade-conveyances like the Lada Riva come with prototypical manual gearboxes and clutches, meaning you can embarrass yourself by…

a) …lurching into bollards after forgetting you’d left your vehicle in gear.

b) …stalling at traffic lights after attempting to pull away in third.

c) …gunning the engine foolishly after failing to lift the throttle during gear changes.

And impress (invisible) passengers by…

a) …spurning the hand-brake in stop-start hillside traffic jams.

b) …switching off the engine and free-wheeling down hills in neutral.

Ignore their misleading unwillingness to skid and wheelspin, and the cars handle remarkably plausibly. What they don’t do at present, is sound much like their inspirations. If I could persuade Multisoft to work on one area, it would be audio. The current sound sets are too quiet, too generic, and woefully short of the sort of transmission whines and suspension creaks that – thanks to M-R-Software – I now expect from my automotive entertainment.

The Novosibirsk studio have already demonstrated a pleasing willingness to enhance and expand. A December patch opened the sim up to user-made vehicles, added an adorable UAZ-2206 minibus, hastened already decent framerates and sharpened AI. Though CCD’s pedestrians are still ill-equipped to deal with pavement trespassing maniacs, they are on the whole brighter and more naturalistic than their stiff-limbed OMSI equivalents. I suspect fellow road users might be a tad smarter too. I’ve been rear-ended and side-swiped on occasions, but find I’m watching side-roads in the imaginatively monikered ‘Virtual City’ less nervously than I would in Berlin.

Not large or varied enough to be twinned with a San Andreas or an Empire Bay, Virtual City is at its best when it’s flaunting its Russian-ness. The glimpses of golden church domes, trudging babushkas, and war memorial tanks, make me yearn for a winterised CCD 2 incorporating a facsimile of a genuine Russian town.

Will we ever see such a thing? Having questioned Multisoft about their DLC and map editor intentions, I’m not holding my breath. The studio definitely have plans – plans that include the patching-in of some form of taxi mode to add a little structure to the non-mission side of the sim – but the difficulty of converting in-house tools into something amateur town planners could wield with ease, seems to have stymied, for the moment, any SDK releases.

(c) This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , "Rock, Paper, Shotgun"