Games for Learning Skills and Prepping

Posted bytherealgmanreviewsPosted inVideo Game Reviews
Games for Learning Skills and Prepping banner of a man sitting in a chair with cans of food behind him with a nuclear explosion in the background.

Welcome to Gman Reviews, and this guide is going to be a different guide of sorts as it’s not going to be per se a review of one game but a review of many.

Now I have quite an extensive collection of games in my steam library, and I have come across some cool types of simulator games that are games that seem to be designed to simulate doing an actual job, and they are great for learning actual skills.

Now just a bit of background about me in that I currently work in IT and I am also a trained programmer in web development while I have never actually worked as a programmer, but I have had some programming tasks in my current job and have built my own websites as part of my course.

Before working in IT, I almost completed an Advanced Diploma in Electronics Engineering but also did a smattering of Mechatronics(combination of Mechanical and Electronics Engineering) classes for 6 months, and I have also completed a Cengage Education course on Mechanics, so while I understand the theory of how cars work, I have never actually worked on a car for real.

I also have an interest in homesteading or prepping without believing the world will come to a terrible catastrophe in my life as it’s fun learning new skills. As a result, I think I am uniquely prepared to investigate these simulation-style games due to my smattering of different knowledge.

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PC Building Simulator

The first game on this list is the PC Building Simulator. This is a great game for people wanting to learn about how to put together pcs, and the soundtrack is awesome. There’s a mode that allows you to put together a pc from scratch.

Be aware that this is a simulator, so it’s not completely accurate like my friend who puts together pcs in his spare time commented on how a few things were inaccurate, like not putting stands on first before putting in the motherboard in the case but apart from a few things it provides a pretty faithful simulation of putting together a pc and is a great way for someone who knows nothing about pcs but wants to learn and especially wants to get practice putting together pcs before they embark on doing so in real life.

The game also has a career mode which simulates you running a pc repair shop which is great as the repetition of putting together cables in the pcs helps you to remember what they all do if you pay attention to what you are doing.

As expected, the problems become more advanced as you progress in the career mode, and you get to do things such as check why a pc won’t boot, clean out a dusty pc case and replace graphics cards, among other things, while keeping customers happy by putting in their favourite colour of cable or using their favourite brand of memory.

The one thing I will say is that it doesn’t allow you to simulate repairing circuits in the game or at least up to the part I have played, and I have played the game for over 11 hours, but the next game on this list does.

This game is also great for beginners in that the parts when assembling and disassembling are highlighted when you hover over them but considering that a pc doesn’t have a lot of components in this game, it’s more the connections you need to remember as you need to connect everything to power on the pc but just remember to apply thermal paste to a CPU if you remove the heatsink as the game will let you send the pc back to the customer if you haven’t done this but will punish you later for it.

Electrician Simulator

Now, this is the most recently purchased game on the list I have played, and I love this game. Now I spent a year and a half soldering circuits and diagnosing problems as part of my Diploma many years ago, so I have more experience in this field than any other.

Now this game simulates being an electrician and doing the regular things that an electrician does, such as fixing sockets and light switches, but for me, the real fun was fixing electronic devices such as video game controllers, hair dryers, robotic cleaners etc.

For me, this was the most fun as the game gives you a realistic depiction of the internals of different types of electronic devices and the tools used for fixing such devices from a multimeter (a device used in real life to test electronic circuits and devices), soldering iron (for removing and reattaching components that have been soldered to a board), anti-rust spray for dealing with rusted screws and a screwdriver.

In-game, the multimeter is used to check electronic components on circuits to see if they’re still working or not and provides a simplified version of how it’s used however, it’s still a great introduction to how you would test electronic devices for issues.

I think the company that makes this game should be combined with the company that makes PC Building Simulator so they can create a game that also allows you to diagnose component issues with a graphics card, among other computer parts, for a more complete experience.

Car Mechanics Simulator 2021

I have personally played the 2021 version and have not played an earlier version called Car Mechanics Simulator 2018, but I assume they are very similar. Now in this game, you do what it says you fix cars.

Now going from playing PC building simulator to this is a little bit of a jump as a car has a lot more parts than a pc does, but it follows similar user interface aesthetics in that you can go into an assembly or disassembly mode, and the part will hover and turn green if you can remove it or add the part.

Also, normally the jobs you get will tell you what parts need to be changed and so you can have these parts highlighted in blue so that you don’t miss them and can also put them on your shopping list so that part will already appear on your in-game computer when you decide to buy replacement parts.

I haven’t gotten to the point where you must investigate a car from scratch with no information from the job screen, but the cars have life-like designs, so this will really give you an idea of what it’s like to work on a car based on my understanding. These extra aesthetic features really set it apart from, say, PC Building Simulator, but since PC Building Simulator was released 2 years earlier than Car Mechanics Simulator 2021, it’s understandable that it has improved since that time.

World of Guns: Guns Disassembly

This one is different from the others in that rather than having a career mode, this game is all about learning how to disassemble and reassemble guns, including the 1911 pistol. Now this game is great because, as a homesteader, you need to think about self-defence, and firearms are a very efficient way of doing that.

Also great if you’re in a country like Australia or the UK that has very strict gun laws as not only do you need to learn the skill of how to field strip guns to clean them, but this game also provides what seems to be a realistic depiction of their operation with all sorts of x-ray modes to really see the gun in action as it firing, loading another round and reloading.

I was doing a small course on gunsmithing for the 1911 pistol, and I found that the games depiction of the gun in operation and all the parts in disassembly was very helpful, and they are often adding new guns to the game, which gets decided by a vote, but you will find models of most well-known guns.

What makes this game fun, though, is that they have managed to make a game out of assembling and dissembling guns by having like special modes that require you to disassemble and reassemble guns with pinpoint accuracy and a scoring system that scores you higher points depending on how fast you are and shows your worldwide ranking compared to other players.

Mr Prepper

Now this one is a lot of fun but not as obvious as the other games in terms of the skills it teaches. So in this game, you play as the aptly named Mr Prepper, and your job is to do just that prep along with following the story. Now the game takes place in the sarcastically titled Murricaville and is a more totalitarian version of the United States, where you have a government agent visiting your house once a week to do an inspection.

The interesting thing about this game is you must balance prepping but do it in a way that requires you not to get caught prepping.

This could include having too many buckets in your backyard or not having enough plastic containers in your kitchen because you broke them down in your workshop because you needed the plastic to make buckets.

The challenge of this game is that as the game continues, it gets harder and harder to survive as you will have challenges along the way from blackouts, water use being monitored by the government etc

What this game teaches are two things:

  1. Prepping Economics
  2. Ideas for different ways of prepping

Prepping Economics

So in the game, you have the postman mechanic, which means you can see what your neighbours around you are selling and what they would like to buy. So in this game, your source of income isn’t coming from, say, working a job it’s by selling things to other members of the community for money, but here’s the catch.

What people want for sale changes every day, and different people want different things, so I’ll give you an idea of how my progression went. So at the beginning of the game, I barely had any money, and I needed to make some, so I started exploring the forest as it was pretty much the only other place I could visit at that point, and I found logs as I was going through the forest.

I then took those logs home and turned them into the wood, and then used that wood to build chairs, tables, and bookshelves to sell for income. Later, I dug out a tunnel from the bowels of my house and then grew fruit and vegetables as well as sunflowers to eat them (not the sunflowers, of course) but also to sell for profit.

So, for example, you can sell fruit and vegetables directly but what you can also do is upgrade, say, your cooking skills to get access to more recipes and then, say use the cucumber you are growing in your basement (so to speak) to make pickles with salt, glass, water, and cucumber or use salt, glass, water, and cabbage to make kimchi.

Now the interesting thing is that one kimchi sells for way more than two cabbage used to make it and pickles sell for way more than the cucumber used to create them, and selling sunflowers is like printing gold.

Why I call this prepper economics is that in the game, different people want different things like the gourmet sells salt and spices but will buy kimchi and pickles for a good price. So part of making money in this game is getting an understanding of what everyone wants and making the products they want to buy.

Also, as you trade more, you unlock more traders, so your network of potential buyers and sellers increases, for instance, allowing you to buy the stone that you can put in a furnace that runs on wood to make glass which you can also get by buying lamps from other sellers and dissembling them in the workshop.

The game doesn’t really shoehorn you into any way of making money but eases into it and gives you more and more options as you get further into the game.

Ideas for different ways of prepping

Segueing from the previous point is that rather than teaching you about particular skills, which the other games in this list do, this game teaches you about the different tools at your disposal for prepping.

For instance, the idea of growing food underground with UV lamps or increasing your power generation by building electrical generators that run on wood and others on fuel, such as later in the game, changing oil into fuel to run generators to building a water machine that auto irrigates your crops being grown underground to making traps for trapping animals in the forest for food.

This game gives you a wealth of ideas and really helps to make you think of how you can be more self-sufficient. Just to reiterate, I am not saying that you should follow exactly what the game does as in terms of power generation, I think adding solar panels to your property is better than having underground generators as they are potentially a fire risk but just for ideas of how you can become more self-sufficient.

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Legal Disclaimer

I probably want to finish for legal reasons by saying that this guide is to be used for entertainment purposes only and none of these games will make you a certified electrician, pc repairer or mechanic and that all electrical work should be done by a licensed electrician and that also my company will bear no liability in regards to anything you have gleaned or misinterpreted from this guide.