I’ve seen plenty of movies and documentaries about humanity’s mad attempts to explore outerspace, but each one of those was a story of triumph, of humans overcoming ridiculous odds to achieve the impossible. When I play Kerbal Space Program, that’s not how things go. The indie game about building rockets out of blocks and executing your own space missions is about failure, exploding repeatedly on the launchpad in the face of ridiculous odds, and abandoning your Kerbals to a lifetime of drifting aimlessly around our solar system.

Today’s patch 0.22 is only going to make it harder, and there’s a new trailer below to mark the occasion. (more…)

Believe it or not, we’ve been coddled by super-cute and ultra-tough space-race simulator, Kerbal Space Program. Players who have a ring of dead Kerbals orbiting Kerbin, or who’ve left lonely craft to sink into the canyons of Eeloo because they forgot to add chutes, might beg to differ, but with upcoming update 0.22 more will be asked of you than ever before. No longer is it enough to just make it to orbit and beyond for the fun of space adventures. There will be science to be done when you’re up there. (more…)

There is nothing wrong in not being very good at Kerbal Space Program. Being bad at it is a state almost everyone will be in for a very long time indeed. Join me in admitting how tough it is. The elite rocketmen will sneeringly deride your honesty, saying: “It’s not rocket science”, but then you can point to the tube of metal and fuel that you’ve spent hours preparing, and then point to the sky, and it’ll dawn on them that it definitely is rocket science, and that everyone is in fact laughing at them.

Anyway, I’ve spent the day playing KSP and I’m not very good at it. > (more…)

You wait thirty years for a indie game project to be barraged by fans after saying they were going to charge for DLC and then changing their minds as a consequence, and then you forget how this sentence even began. In the case of Squad, who make the ship-building-and-flying space sim Kerbal Space Program, this occurred after fan misinterpretation of the promise that all “updates” would be free. For 3 Sprockets’ Cubeman 2, it was the use of in-game purchases in promotional material for the main game that caught players’ ire. Both have had diplomatic changes of heart.

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“Oh boy! I can finally get into prison early!” Oh videogames, don’t ever stop allowing me to create phrases of such ear-perking outlandishness that people could mistake me as ringleader of a merry band of elves. Other gems now possible thanks to Steam’s paid-alpha-centric Early Access program include “Hooray! Frighteningly authentic war’s happening even sooner than I thought” and “I wasn’t planning on being shipwrecked with no hope of escape today, but I certainly can’t complain.” But Prison Architect, Arma 3, and Under The Ocean are only three of the 12 inaugural games on offer. The rest – and perhaps even some freshly baked wordthinks – are after the break.

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