Ooooh, there's Fawley's forest of chimneys, the space-age incinerator at Marchwood, the stupidly expensive Spinnaker Tower! Pulling into Cowes I found myself scanning a familiar hillside for a particularly scary B&B I'd once stayed in. Again, what strikes you is the amount of custom architecture. Having crossed the Solent on many occasions, I can testify with authority to the fine job they've done there. Of course, I've never cruised down the Hudson River in a container ship so they may have fudged a lot of the vistas. if mood and atmosphere are as important to you in your sims as technical verisimilitude then SS2008 is definitely worth a look.

The milky swirl of the wake, the sun setting behind the skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty looming out of the gathering gloom. Threading a towering container ship down the Hudson River yesterday evening was really quite evocative. Perhaps I've had my expectations lowered by years of generic Microsoft sim cities, but these intricate ports with their crowded shorelines and numerous custom objects impressed me.

Not having to fiddle with crinkly Norway or all those annoying little archipelagos in Indonesia has obviously allowed VSTEP's scenery team to put a lot of love into Rotterdam, Hamburg, San Francisco, New York, Marseilles, and Southampton/Portsmouth. Using cranes to load containers is fun for about five minutes. While there's no comparison with the vast expanses of water offered by MS Flight Simulator or Silent Hunter, you do at least get a taste of Poseidon at his angriest, and a feel for the mind-numbing tedium of long-distance voyaging. The eight tracts of landless scenery act as token transition zones between the various destinations. Now, for relatively short distances, ships get to wallow in gloomy troughs and ride foamy crests. In SS2006 the brine was always close to shore and halibut-flat. Just as important as the extra craft and harbours are the new open ocean areas with their queasy wave action. Where the first instalment felt skinny and tentative, this one feels confident and plump. If you're familiar with Ship Simulator 2006 you'll appreciate the significance of those numbers and realise the Dutch dev has been damn busy during the past year. Thirteen different vessels ranging from tubby tugs and zippy launches to hulking oil tankers and car-crammed ro-ro ferries wait patiently in seven different ports for player pilots. It's these strange law-abiding toilers of the sea that Ship Simulator 2008 lets you captain and explore. Apparently some have holds stuffed with completely innocent cargoes (bananas, disposable nappies, tropical hardwood, mercury-laced industrial waste.) and ply the oceans on totally legitimate business. You know those big rusty things with the pointy fronts and the funnels and the anchors and the little round windows? Well, according to VSTEP - the creators of this atmospheric maritime sim - not all of them are crewed by terrorists and gangsters, or packed to the gunwales with dirty-bombs, guns or drugs. Sit down this might come as a bit of shock.

Sinking simulator 2 ships