When a game gives you the option to sail the Titanic on the North Atlantic, you have to do it. The movies make it look so fascinating; a giant steamship dominating the seascape, pushing forward to America. What the movies hide is that as big as the Titanic is, the ocean is much, much bigger and there’s not much to do when you’re on it. You just point the ship in the right direction and try not to hit icebergs. Without Kate Winslet running around making eyes at you, the voyage is indescribably dull.

Not that all of Ship Simulator 2008 is indescribably dull. Most of the dullness can be described just fine. The question is whether this is dullness inherent in the game, and therefore the fault of the designers, or whether this is a game that targets a very specific audience, an audience that does not have me as a member, and therefore simply beyond my ken.

Ship Simulator has two modes – free roaming and missions. The former is a chance to sail the Seven Seas, at least if those Seven Seas were just a half dozen locations with five year old polygon models of buildings. Having never seen New York Harbor, I can’t be sure if there are that many pink houses in the neighborhood. But the free range mobility does give you the chance to experiment with your vessel, seeing how far you can go before you run out of map and how fast you can go.

You can customize your conditions in free roaming, which can be cool the first few times; navigating a foggy harbor, yachting under the stars in Thailand, even carrying out a rescue mission in a thunderstorm. Beyond visibility and aesthetics, there don’t seem to be many weather effects on your voyages. Jet-skiing in a downpour doesn’t feel that different from jet-skiing in perfect holiday conditions.

The missions are the meat and potatoes here, and they run the gamut from cargo pickup to sea rescues. This might sound like a lot of range, but it really isn’t since a large number of the missions are simply “drive to green circle and wait before driving to next green circle”; sometimes you don’t even have to wait. So saving a drowning sailor isn’t that different from ferrying passengers from one pier to the next, the chance of running over the drowning guy notwithstanding.

The range of maps is small, with one harbor looking pretty much like another, water depth excepted. Most of the ships handle in much the same way. And despite on-box promises of ships taking damage from collisions, you can often ram a cargo barge with your harbor skiff and suffer no ill effects besides a slight loss in speed and change of direction. Some missions will let you take damage, but most won’t.

Only the cargo missions require a distinct set of skills, using the crane to move loads from one place to another. It’s odd that in a game about simulating seamanship you have to also be a dockworker, but anything to break up the sameness of putt-putting around the docks of Rotterdam is fine with me. As far as loading and unloading goes, well, you load and unload. It isn’t very thrilling, but then it’s not supposed to be. A bigger problem is that the game doesn’t always register when you have picked up and dropped off a load – if you put a container in the wrong spot on a ship, even if off by only a smidge, you will have to reload the mission. As far as the game is concerned, that box doesn’t count.