Either way is fun, and to get to the really tantalizing targets you’ll need to excel at both. Maybe you’ll attack the problem by trying to build better rockets, or maybe you’ll try to solve it with tricky slingshot orbital maneuvers. It’s a creative puzzle game where you figure out how to get from A to B without running out of energy. There’s an entire game packaged in the rules of real-world space travel. Would players really want to learn all of this stuff about the mechanics of orbiting? Would that be fun? Wouldn’t it be safer to focus on the ship-building stuff and abstract away all the Delta-V and gravity assist?Īs it turns out, this orbiting business is a lot of fun. If you had proposed Kerbal Space Program to me in its current form, I would have been very, very hesitant to make a game with this fidelity of simulation. This may or may not be fun, but the team at Maxis wanted to make Sim City, not Sim Zoning Laws, so the entire system of land usage was abstracted down to the hilariously simplistic system of drawing blue and green rectangles. You can have them arbitrate thousands of edge-cases of what constitutes a “residence” and what is a “business”, like the guy shipping tons of mail-order goods from his home or the woman living in the back room of her tanning salon. You could have this super-deep simulation where the player has to balance the few against the many and minimize the damage of negative press. Sure, you could add a whole new layer onto Sim City 2000 that models stuff like zoning, property classifications, issuing permits, arbitrating land-use disputes, the ramifications of seizing property through eminent domain, the burden that zoning puts on the court system, and the friction that complex zoning puts on small business. If you’re designing a simulation game the most important step is figuring out what you’re going to simulate and what you’re going to approximate. Sometimes one of your rockets might fail to explode and you’ll find yourself in space. They’re still cheering when they’re crushed under a hundred tons of burning fuel and steel as the rest of the rocket lands on top of them. Miraculously, the crew survives the impact. The rocket rises up, then the command module breaks loose and falls back to the ground.The rocket rises a hundred meters, goes into a violent spin, and the crew lives just long enough to puke all over themselves.Now it stands up properly on the launchpad and doesn’t explode at all until you turn it on. You design a rocket, which falls over and explodes on the launchpad, killing all three of the brave Kerbanauts aboard.There are legends that some players have landed on other planets and then brought the Kerbals back again. Put a group of them on the other, smaller moon. I don’t even think I accomplished that much. I played the demo on Saturday, bought the game on Sunday, and the next thing I knew it was Friday and I was eyebrow-deep in orbital mechanics and rocket theory. Orbit the planet? Go to the moon? Throw a kerbanaut into the sun? Build a space-jet? Make a giant tower of fuel tanks and blow them up? Whatever. You’re given rocket parts, a space center, a solar system of planets and moons, and you’re left to find your own fun. Kerbal Space Program is kind of like a… Sim? Sim NASA? That’s as close as I can come to describing it using pigeonhole genre labels. It’s been a long time since I found a game this instantly engrossing.
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