Comments on: The Outward Urge: Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space

By: VLADIMIRPUTIN

VLADIMIRPUTIN — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:54:40 +0000

Playing as the Soviets has been much more successful, although I still have horrible luck with flybys.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:28:45 +0000

I usually played as the Soviets. :D

By: Serondal

Serondal — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:23:50 +0000

Am I the only one that gets a diffrent kind of outward urge whenever Buzz Aldrin is mentioned?

By: tmp

tmp — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:25:38 +0000

re: space station building and such, there seems to be similar but more modern version of it at http://www.spacestationsim.com/

By: VLADIMIRPUTIN

VLADIMIRPUTIN — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:26:07 +0000

For some reason gravity hates all of my satellites. And the Apollo program started failing so badly, that I was about to give up when the russians beat me to the moon.

Must try again.

By: Talorc

Talorc — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:31:14 +0000

I didn’t play this game, but I did highly enjoy the similarly themed “Project: Space Station” on the C64 around 1985.

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D2002

It was awesome fun to design your little space station, schedule all the launches to actually get the damn thing up into space and then a little EVA mission to put it all together up in space.

I was managed to get a monstrosity of a space station built, but then fell down on actually getting any decent research done. I suspect my little 12 year old mind was seriously overbuilding on space station requirements.

By: T. Slothrop

T. Slothrop — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:16:21 +0000

Oh and here I thought we were going to see some scandalous photos of Marlene Dietrich in photoshopped spacesuit of some kind… or being mounted by the lunar rover. Disappointed.

By: TC

TC — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:47:41 +0000

Was playing this again last night (thank you RPS!), 1969 is still pretty much impossible IMO unless you play the perfect game, survive lots of low safety margin launches and dont have any astronaughts throwing hissy fits and breaking flight crews.

A couple of gameplay tips come to mind after a 1972 Direct Ascent victory:

You have to always be thinking 2 turns ahead as crews will need to be in place for one turn in the flight crew you assign them to before they will be available for missions.

Also buy all the hardware you need for your fall missions in the spring turn so you wont get caught short by lack of funds.

By: megaman

megaman — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:22:07 +0000

Great game, although it took me ages to find out how to purchase the docking module. I read the manual and knew where it should appear, but it never did .. until I was smart enough to try it in purchase mode. Darn, they should just show it in R&D mode and grey it out or something.
Except for this small detail and the fickle astronaut’s crews I had a ton of fun.

By: Kurt Lennon

Kurt Lennon — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:21:06 +0000

“I can’t figure out how to send a manned mission anywhere.”

Neither could NASA. Hooray for Hollywood and global gullibility!

By: tmp

tmp — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:29:41 +0000

In order to be able to plan (and subsequently launch on next turn) a manned flight you need to form at least two crews for the program and then leave them sitting there idle for either 1 or 2 turns (can’t remember) so they can familiarize themselves with hardware or whatever.

By: ghableska

ghableska — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:23:03 +0000

If any RPS’ers are interested in a realistic space simulator, I’d suggest Orbiter:
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html
It’s a freeware game with a highly active modding community and it wouldn’t hurt to at least give it a shot.