PixlBit

I'm going to listen to a lot of music from 1969. I figured I might as well extend that to books, so I'm going to read Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. I saw the movie and thought it was great. What about the video games?  Well, there were several space flight sim computer games made on mainframes, which makes sense because this was the year of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I tried to play them and then any others I could find. The results are recorded below.

The first game was Lunar, or as it became known, Lunar Lander. It was a text based game by Jim Storer. Later it was translated into BASIC, and later still, Atari made the popular graphical version of it for arcades and consoles. I looked around for the text version, but none was available. Guess I have to buy the BASIC Computer Games book and type in the code myself. Yeah right. 

The second was Space Travel by Ken Thompson, a graphical space sim game where you try and land on the planets and moons of our solar system. This was written while Ken was at Bell Labs and led to the creation of the UNIX operating system. There doesn't seem to be any version of this on the web, or even footage on youtube of the gameplay. It wasn't translated to any other OS, apparently. Oh well. Here's a screen shot at least. 

                     

So then I looked for more recent space flight sim games. There were plenty to buy for PC, but what for free? I found Orbiter Space Flight Simulator. This looks amazing and it's free, but requires a download. I don't want to do that right now. I want to play in my browser. So no go there. 

So what about the Play DOS website where you can play DOS games in your browser? I found a bunch:

Here's Lunar: A Space Flight Simulator from 1986. Lots of flicker on my PC. What are the controls? Can't seem to do anything in it. Whatevs. 

How about Apollo 18: Mission to the Moon from 1988. Can't seem to figure out the controls here either. No flicker though.

Shuttle: The Space Flight Simulator from 1992? I actually got to mess with the control panel of the space shuttle! Cool! I have no idea what I'm doing. Onward. 

1994's Microsoft Space Simulator. Cool! Still don't know what the heck I'm doing. I like the graphical view of my space ships from the top part of the screen though. 

Boy these sims are tricky to just pick up and play. Guess that's why they're sims. 

How about space flight sims for consoles? I've played Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space for Atari 2600. That was ok. You launch the space shuttle and control it realistically, but not too much. It's on Atari 2600 after all. Here's some footage.

                     

How about No Man's Sky? I could pick it up again for $20 and play it some more, but it's not a true simulation. It's more an adventure game with space combat. 

I ended up buying Kerbal Space Program, downloadable on XBO and PS4. It's a rocket building, space flight sim with some cartoony characters. Here's the trailer.

                     

I played this today for several hours. It's cartoony characters and rather plain graphics deceive you into thinking this will be a quick and easy game. This is a very deep sim with realistic rocket science. I played through half of the tutorials and it took me a while. I learned how to build rockets of various types and launch a few. Rocket flight controls are complex and require delicate handling. This is no arcade rocket raceway. I learned a lot about rockets and flight navigation in only my first few hours. Rocket science is definitely up to it's reputation. 

So I was enjoying it, but I started the "campaign" and there was no mission objectives that I could see. I was just left on my own to figure out how to run this operation and launch rockets. I felt at a loss and so took a break to play some Zoo Tycoon and Borderlands 2. 

I'll come back to Kerbal Space Program regularly over the month of March, finish the tutorials and try and figure out how to do actual missions. You're supposed to be able to fly to the moon and planets. I can only imagine how complex that will be. I only built a four stage rocket and had to figure out how parachutes worked and that was some work. 

May the space flight sim be with you.