Trainspotting (Ahchay)

A Trainspotting simulation. Less fun than eating your own own toe-nail clippings surely?

You decide...

You play Darren, or possibly Kevin, anorak, NHS glasses, thermos flask, you know the thing. Nice strong, easily identifiable spod look. You have in your possession at the start of the game, a Map showing the area you'll be spotting in, a train timetable, a camera and a bus pass.

Now, the aim of the game is to spot as many trains as possible within the alloted time (before tea-time perhaps). You get bonus points for spotting other odd things (vintage cars, birds, areoplanes, ghosts, I dunno. Stuff) and you also get combination bonuses for spotting more than one train/thing at the same time.

Your timetable tells you where the trains should be at any given time, the game area will have a number of different lines, each one running a number of different trains.

You "spot" things by taking photos of 'em. The thought being that you can then grade the resulting photos for artistic merit. You get more points for a train in motion than for a train standing at the station, even more for a train coming out of a tunnel, that sort of thing.

Now, this is where the game stuff starts. You have to run around like a mad thing, using bus services, going cross-country, maybe stealing push-bikes from posties, hitching lifts. All the while trying to get to a place where you can get your next spot. The trains just do their thing running around the countryside.

The next important bit is that you can affect the train timetables. Pushing trees onto the track will slow them down, changing signals to speed them up, switching points to make them go on different routes, ferrying passengers around so they don't hold trains up at the station etc etc.

Why do all that? Simply so that you force multiple combinations of trains at specific junctions or stations. Combo's give you score multipliers so this is the way to get big points.

Realism sucks, so I was thinking that a good graphic style would be a cartoony take on the british countryside. Sort of a cross between Miss Marple and Postman Pat. Little villages full of vicars, little old ladies and get-orf-my-land farmers.

**CARRIER DISCONNECTED