Day: December 8, 2012

Kerbal Space Program demo

Posted on by Nimgimli

I need to thank Tipa over at WestKarana for calling my attention to this one.

Kerbal Space Program is a rocket simulation. In the demo version I’m playing, you build rockets by stacking stages together, then shoot them into space. Your goal? Well you make your own goals, really. My first goal is just to see how high I can get and still land safely. Rockets basically ‘snap together’ in the Assembly Plant — that part of the game is purely intellectual. But once you lift off you can try to pilot your ship, which I found out wasn’t all that easy:

That rocket had an SAS system (a computer-operated stabilization system) but I forgot to activate it. /facepalm I tried a few more times with that design and did better but didn’t get out of the atmosphere, so I decided to bulk things up a bit:

This rocket has a triple solid engine first stage, a single solid engine second stage, and then a liquid fuel third stage. I flew with the SAS system on but during the initial flight you can see the fins on my rocket starting to move; it was almost too much thrust, I think. At any point you can hit the space bar to detach a stage. Solid boosters are fire and forget but the liquid fuel engine has a throttle. You can see fuel levels going down at the bottom left of the screen.

A lot of gamers will watch these videos and be bored. That’s ok, this is definitely a niche product. You can fast forward a bit through the dull parts and you’ll want to do so. You can also see that I started playing with the camera as my attention drifted.

I’m not sure what the full (paid for) game adds; it’s listed as still in active development and I’m going to watch the site to see if that’s true before I spend money. I’ve been burned by buying ‘alpha’ software recently and it has me a little gunshy.

But if you’re a space/rocket nerd, there’s not much else like this on the market and you have to at least snag the demo and give it a go.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles – And I’m stuck

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK this is more like it! This is what I remember playing adventure games feels like…

So I made it to Chapter 2 of The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles. Chapter two switches focus to the Critter who doesn’t speak English (though some of his friends do). While I do have what’s essentially a ‘quest’ so I know what to do, I’m finding playing as the Critter a lot less entertaining than playing as Nate Bonnett. His constant gibberish gets on my nerves a bit, honestly. That might be the frustration talking, though. He’s animated well and is oddly cute in a Muppet kind of way. Mostly it’s the voice that bugs me.

I know what I need to do, and I even know basically how to do it, but I’m missing one link in the chain. The first thing Critter has to do is pick up an object that is protected by another character. The steps for doing this are long and random and this is when I started to lose interest. I did get past that though, mostly by just futzing with things until something totally unexpected happened, allowing me to get said object. I know my next goal, and I know the parts that I need to use to get it done — there’s some logic to this puzzle — but there’s just this one step I’m stumped on. I feel like I’ve gone everywhere I can go, tried using everything on everything else, “talked” to everyone until they’re repeating themselves… I’m just stuck.

I’ve started solving, I assume, the next puzzle since I’ve jammed random things together and done things that I can’t undo. I’m hoping the game doesn’t support ‘dead ends’ that require a re-load because I haven’t been saving except at the end of a session.


I think I need to put the game away and come back to it in a few days. Sad though, since I so enjoyed my first evening of playing and aside from 1 hint I looked up, I solved Chapter 1 quickly enough that it never felt like the game was dragging. But now I just feel like I’m running around in circles and I really want to get back to Bonnett and his dilemma.

This shouldn’t be seen as a knock on the game, which still seems to be a solid adventure. I just felt like I needed to share this in case other adventure-wary gamers read my first post and thought maybe this game would be a great ‘starter’ adventure, but so far Chapter 2 isn’t as easy (for me at least) as Chapter 1 was.

[Update: Right after finishing this post, I fired the game up again and found the one object I hadn’t tried using on the one hotspot, and got moving forward again. So that’s typical, right? As soon as you complain about a problem, it goes away. Like taking your car to the shop because it’s constantly stalling but when you get it there it runs perfectly!]