Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004 announced

Auran Games has announced that it has a sequel to Trainz called Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004 in the works. Unlike Microsoft's Train Simulator, which focuses on driving real-world locomotives, Auran's train games focus on the construction and control of miniature trains. Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004 will feature a selection of steam, diesel, and electric locomotives, as well as a large variety of freight and passenger cars. In addition to using the game's prebuilt environments, players can build train routes and environments by choosing from thousands of objects and using built-in tools to customize them.

"Based on two years of continual product refinement and customer feedback, we believe Auran is poised to gain a major share of this rapidly growing new genre," said Tony Hilliam, Auran's marketing director. "We have listened to what the market wants and made everything even more realistic. We've put a tremendous amount of work into things such as steam locomotives and driving physics and are offering users a far greater sense of purpose with animated industries that use resources and output goods. We've also significantly enhanced the graphics utilizing the new Auran Jet V2 game engine."

Auran says that the amount of downloadable custom content will double, to roughly 20,000 items. "We have experienced more than 1 million downloads of custom content already from our Trainz Download Station," Hilliam said. "With TRS 2004, we've made sure that installing this new content will be even easier so that you don't have to be a computer expert to experience all the extra fun."

Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004 is scheduled for release at the end of this year. The game will initially be distributed online, and Auran will announce retail publishing deals in the future. A closed beta test for the game will start this June. Visit the game's Web site for more details.