Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When the eventual 87-volume book series about my life is written, there will be four tomes and one young adult fiction romance spinoff about stories I chose to write entirely because of headline pun potential. BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: this won’t be one of them. Much as I adore (and gladly take) every opportunity to reference Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny’s final career-defining blazes of glory, not even Space Jam can match my love for, er, space. So it’s basically amazing to see NASA using games to draw more attention to space exploration – especially in light of the fact that people seem determined to ignore it even though it’s perhaps literally the most interesting, mysterious, compelling thing in existence.

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Look, I know I already posted about NASA’s Unity-powered Mars exploration sim not three weeks ago, but given those marvellous men and women and their remote-controlled flying machines have just managed to successfully land a nuclear-powered robot on the Red Planet, it seems entirely timely to flag it up again. Particlarly because the game/sim is being updated with the Curiosity rover’s progress and discoveries in something like real-time. Go look!
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That I’ll never get to visit another planet (or moon; hell, I’ll take moon) is one of the great sadnesses of my life. Maybe, if I’m very lucky, Richard Branson will buy RPS and give me a free ride in his spaceship one day, but he’s probably too busy picking up women. So, for now, I must settle with exploring a Unity-powered, browser-based, explorable recreation of Mars, courtesy of NASA.
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Following on from yesterday’s release of Moonbase Alpha (and Jim and my gleeful jumping around ON THE MOON!), we took the chance to ask some questions to Daniel Laughlin (Ph.D) of NASA Learning Technologies about the Moonbase Alpha…
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Hurrah! The previously covered Moonbase Alpha is available to play. You can go and get your copy, for free, on Steam (So has Steamworks supports for leaderboards and similar). Those interested in digging further will see NASA’s press-release here, and have more info on the game’s site and NASA’s portal. Anyway, Jim and I had a crack at the Beta last week, and had a chat about our time on our favourite lunar body…
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Picked up from Craig Pearson, but this excites my ever-over-excitable space-geek. You know that NASA are actually working on Astronaut: Moon, Mars And Beyond? A team-based hard-science space-MMO? Well, that’s not here yet – but Moonbase Alpha is. It’ll be hitting on Steam on July 6th, and seems to be one-small-step towards that larger vision. The site’s a place-holder at the moment, so literally all the information we have is watching the video and wondering…
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It seems to be space-walk week here on RPS. We started off swooping about in the Shattered Horizon free weekend, and now we’re performing difficult space-tasks on the international space station, thanks to NASA’s Station Spacewalk Game. If you ever wondered where all that spare money is going now that Obama cancelled the second trip to the moon, well, look no further!

We reported a while back that NASA had commissioned their own MMO, which is now called Astronaut: Moon Mars and Beyond. Anyway, it turns out that there will be a demo for this called “Moonbase Alpha” next month. This was apparently announced months ago, but the internet has only just noticed. But better late than never, thanks to Massively. There’s even a teaser video, which I’ve posted below. It’s worth taking into consideration that this is intended to be an educational game, rather than a shiny commercial product, when you subject it to your fizz ing neural soup of analysis. And keep an eye on the official site if this project interests you.
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Spore: even after all those troubling delays, it’s still quite possibly the most exciting game of the coming year. When we hear that Will Wright is even demonstrating it to the spaceheads at NASA, it sounds like we get to nod solemenly at its cleverness as well as clap for joy at its gloopy, many-legged wonders. Here’s a from-the-hip recording of his presentation, which, not unsurprisingly, focuses on the planetary exploration and colonisation aspect of the impending evolve ‘em up:

Image: NASA.

I heard a bunch of rumours about this last year, but it seems that this procurement document confirms the big space club’s interest in a multiplayer online gaming experience. This is the interesting bit:

NASA is in a position to develop an online game that functions as a persistent, synthetic environment supporting education as a laboratory, a massive visualization tool, and collaborative workspace while simultaneously drawing users into a challenging, game-play experience.

The NASA concept is pretty progressive: have it be a paid, playable game, but also being simulation enough to use in scientific work. Could we see the missions to the Moon and Mars played out by gamers decades before the actual missions kick off?