Densha de Go!
January 1, 2012
I thought I’d do a short post about this series of games that I have been playing the past couple of weeks, the Densha de Go! series. For those that don’t know they are a series of train driving games, which originally appeared in the arcades in the mid nineties. The reason I started playing them recently is that my son is really interested in trains, and I remembered I had Densha de Go! 2 for the Dreamcast so I put it on for him and he absolutely loved it. The main problem with the game though was the language barrier and also that the regular Dreamcast controller seemed too complicated for my son.
This lead me to look for a proper controller, so that it would seem more like driving a train to him, and from my scouring of eBay I found that the PlayStation version was easier/cheaper to get a controller for, so I decided to get one, plus some of the PlayStation games. The games I got are Densha de Go!, Densha de Go! 2, Densha de Go! Professional and Densha de Go! Nagoya Railroad. The PlayStation games are much like the Dreamcast version, although obviously they look quite old fashioned with a fair bit of pop up and very rough textures. That said the game is still fun to play, once you know how. I found this tutorial on YouTube which was very useful indeed:
The basic premise of the game is to go between stations, without breaking the speed limits but arriving on time and aligning the train correctly on the platform. This sounds pretty boring but it really is addictive and quite a bit harder than it sounds. The best games to start with out of the ones I have seem to be either Densha de Go! Professional or Nagoya Railroad, as both of these have a very useful map which shows upcoming speed limits, stations etc. On the first two games you have to memorise the route which is obviously much more difficult.
There are many other games in the series, and I’d like to maybe try Densha de Go! 3 for the PS2 once I have played the ones I have. There is a very useful forum which has information about the games and controllers, its well worth a look. I hope this has been useful to someone as its and interesting series, it would be nice if Taito would bring the iOS version to Europe, although I understand it would be a big job to translate.
