Kerbal Space Program recently entered beta, marking another step towards the stars for its mixture of spaceship construction, physics simulation and space agency management. The game has advanced lightyears since its early releases, where all you got was a quick tutorial that prodded you in the right direction (up) then left you to your own devices. While sandbox mode remains available for people who just want to build rockets in a physics playground, for over a year the actual game has been found in either career or science mode.

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Kerbal Space Program has been floating through the inky black of game development for years now, edging closer towards the ultimate goal of being a structured space program management sim. It’s now in orbit above that target, having moved from alpha to beta and added new features like base building, refined features like ship construction, and a lot more. There’s a trailer introducing the changes below.

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I spent half my evenings this week advancing through Advanced Warfare. Call of Duty games are uniformly about forward progression, but some of their most memorable moments comes from points of scripted failure: missing your chance to grab a gun as a Russian soldier in the first Call of Duty, or the nuclear blast in Modern Warfare 1. You learn something about the realities of those scenarios in both moments.

Advanced Warfare squanders its one point of necessary failure: the first mission’s unfortunate end incites action from both the player and from Kevin Spacey, but there’s little that’s real about it. You lose an arm, you gain a robot arm. As a player, you learn nothing. Failure in videogames can be so much more, both as a way of generating interesting play experiences and in making less abstract the knowledge we hold about the world around us.

Here are some games that I think do failure better, and what those failures taught me.

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You might think yourself a real Top Gun, the next Dan Dare, or a veritable Buck Rogers. Kerbal Space Program has been out long enough for you, oh mighty pilot, to master space flight and possibly get a bit cocky. Don’t worry, the latest update has added new things to cock up. Your space centre is destructible now, for starters. It also bulks out the Career Mode a little with new strategies that might help you but can backfire, like unpaid interns. KSP’s on sale for a few days to celebrate.

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What a scientific utopia Kerbin once was! Seemingly the entire world came together in the spirit of exploration and discover, endeavouring to reach the skies, then out into space, and to the Mun and beyond, simply because they could. Eventually. With a little trial and error. A space-plane could smear across the runway or a rocket tumble from orbit and the Kerbals would still happily start building on another. Discovery was its own reward.

Now the grim spectre of capitalism rises over Kerbin, as Kerbal Space Program developers Squad are preparing to roll out key parts of its career mode, adding funds, contracts, and reputation. Come have a look at a video with the first few contracts, amounting to taking off without exploding.

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In its ongoing mission to tag the solar system with flags like a bunch of billion-dollar badboys, NASA plans to rocket off to an asteroid then drag it back over to Earth so we can have a good poke around. It’ll be years before that happens though, so for now we’ll have to settle for recreating the mission in the world’s most realistic space simulator. In collaboration with NASA, Kerbal Space Program has launched an update with missions to capture asteroids and oodles of new spaceship bits to help achieve that.

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I know, I know – ‘pop cultural thing painstakingly recreated in sandbox indie game’ is so> 2010. But I have a great weakness despite my built-up resistance to covering Del Boy’s Robin Reliant in Minecraft or a Terraria screenshot that looks like Michael Bolton’s hair. Monkey see Transformers, monkey post about Transformers. In this case, it’s duplicitous Decepticon seeker Starscream- or, at least, a robot that can transform into a jet and which is openly inspired by him – recreated in Kerbal Space Program. This is not bad comedy: it actually transforms! It actually flies! Er, briefly.

Sadly it lacks Starscream’s traditional white, red and blue colouring. And also hands. In fact it looks more like Machine Wars Thundercracker than any version of Starscream, but I’m trying to fight my nerd-rage here cos… snurk> no no noaaaaargh> WHY DID THEY GIVE GRIMLOCK HORNS IN THE TRANSFORMERS 4 TRAILER NNNNG aaargh breathebreathebreathe>. Breathe. Cos the point is it’s an actual, transforming transformer, and just look at it:

Sadly it’s apparently about as aerodynamic as a teachest and crashes to the ground a few seconds after take-off, but like the appearance that’s not really the point, is it? More of this sort of thing, please. By which I mean we need Astrotrain, as a fully-functioning triple-changer.

Via PCGamesN.>

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…)