Simulator games are a bit of a ironic twist. Most people play games in order to escape from reality, but simulator games allow you to do seemingly mundane tasks that you can do in real life. In real life, memory and mid to high-end graphics cards have skyrocketed in price due to cryptocurrency mining. So what's a PC gamer supposed to do? Well the next best thing is to build your dream gaming rig...virtually.
Developed by Claudiu Kiss, PC Building Simulator launched in Early Access yesterday on Steam and allows you to build whatever PC you want to your heart's content. You can build your rig using licensed parts, benchmark your PC, and even go into Career mode where you can build and service custom PCs.
While experienced PC builders will certainly enjoy the plethora of wish fulfillment, there's plenty of fun for novice PC builders as well. The game includes step-by-step instructions that explain the order in which to build the PC as well as providing information on what each part does. The parts list includes equipment from major OEMs such as AMD, Cooler Master, Corsair, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI. There's even a free build mode that allows you to build the most expensive rig you can think of with money as no object.
Currently, there are more than 500,000 downloads with about 1,300 concurrent players. The developer plans on the game being in Early Access for around 2-3 months "depending on feedback from the community." Additional features to be added include water cooling, overclocking, and more benchmarking options.
I've been looking into ways to get my daughter into computers and this just might be the tool to do it. PC Building Simulator is currently $17.99 on Steam. Specs (ha!) as well as a game trailer are below:
- OS: Windows 7 or higher
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Athlon X4 740 (or equivalent)
- RAM: 4 GB
- GPU: GeForce GTX 660 (2048 MB) or Radeon R9 285 (2048 MB)
- DirectX: 9.0c
- Storage: 4 GB available