Shadow Tactics is such a good real-time tactics stealth strategy game that it rejuvenated the genre. There's a chance you already own the sneaky samurai sim, however, and much less of a chance that you own its standalone expansion, Aiko's Choice. It's the latter that is currently being given away for free over on the Epic Games Store.
Space flight simulation sequel Kerbal Space Program 2 will finally get to take off in early access on PC on February 24th, 2023, devs Intercept Games have announced. The early access version of the game will allow you to fully travel around the Kerbolar system - can’t quite believe I typed that - which has been given a major overhaul since the first game. There’ll also be more than 350 new parts to build your spacecraft with. You can watch a lengthy chat with the Kerbal team about their early access mission below.
]]>Kerbal Space Program update 1.12.2 is live. It's a relatively minor set of fixes, but it marks the completion of the 1.12 update - and, in turn, the end of "sustained development" of KSP. It's been a fun ten years, but its development team are now turning their full attention to work on Kerbal Space Program 2.
]]>This is delightful. Most games struggle through the tangled thorns of PR, marketing, and that one dude who spots errors from seven miles away, before getting a single screenshot to you. But this little glimpse into Kerbal Space Program 2’s progress is via their show and tell sessions on the official forums, where the team gathers up what they’ve been working on and shares it with the community. In April and May, the clouds got fluffier, the terrain more specular, and the Mun really embraced its impact craters.
]]>Space knower and Iain M. Banks reader (check his bookshelf) Scott Manley says Kerbal Space Program is a "gateway drug to physics", which I sort of agree with. For me, the rocket sim was an education in things like "apoapsis" and "periapsis", and I felt slightly more informed for having played it. But it’s not a good teacher, really, which is one of the things Kerbal Space Program 2 hopes to remedy. The game will still be tough, the processes still hugely complex, but you’ll hopefully be able to play it without needing to consult a smart friend or a YouTube playlist.
]]>Space is all the rage nowadays. We have nice cars on Mars, and the eye on Jupiter has been winking coquettishly and telling me to open my pod bay doors. There’s never been a better time to get back into Kerbal Space Program, the cute game that hides a ridiculously complicated space program underneath its charming facade.
]]>Happy Star Wars: Squadrons day, internet. I have nothing to offer but the sneer of a veteran Elite Dangerous pilot. A disdainful scoff as you vroomify your engines in the docking bay, click-clacking your flight checks in the seat of some dusty Y-wing, some classless X-Wing, some bogus B-wing. Who do you think you are? Sitting there in the pilot’s seat of that garish tin can. Only an exponent of the foulest incorrectitudes would indulge a shipyard with all the basic-ass nomenclature of an episode of Sesame Street. Here, you fripperist, you child, gaze upon the true list of the 9 best spaceships in games.
]]>Science, the most difficult of the arts. We are trained from toddlerhood to respect and fear the products of scientific advancement, such as the selfie sticks or mechanical pencil. The unsurpassed boffins who create such devices are worthy of admiration. But there is one realm in which science is not such a gentle guardian of the people. That’s right, it’s videogames. In games, scientists are treacherous, evil, stupid, murderous or some genetic concoction of all the above. Here are the 9 worst scientists in PC games.
]]>An obscenely rich teenager throws his VR controller across the room in a fit of blind panic while playing Half-Life: Alyx. It leaves the window of his bedroom at 5m/s. It falls 10m vertically and hits his neighbour’s greenhouse, smashing the glass. How many metres did the controller travel horizontally before coming to a stop in the tomatoes? Use a kinematic formula to determine your answer and show your wor--
UGH, physics. Here are 10 games where physics is not boring, but good.
]]>Video games are great at transporting us to different worlds, but none capture that feeling quite so perfectly as intergalactic space games - and 2023 looks set to be one of the biggest years for space games yet, with the launch of Starfield, Homeworld 3 and more all on the horizon. But what games have gone before them and staked their claim already on the dusty planet surface known as 'Best Space Games'? We reveal all below, with our carefully curated list of all the best space games you can play on PC right now. Whether you're a budding space cruiser captain, a wannabe space conqueror or an intrepid space-faring explorer, there's a space game for you.
]]>Having slipped the surly bonds of Kerbin, Kerbal Space Program’s former lead developer Felipe Falanghe has been quietly working on a new-but-similar flying craft creator, Balsa Model Flight Simulator. It shares some of Kerbal’s DNA, letting the player build and fly model aircraft, but adds multiplayer and combat to the formula.
]]>Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It's called ImageNet Roulette, and it's basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it's probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.
]]>Kerbal Space Program 2 was not an announcement that we expected to appear with this year's Gamescom Opening Night Live event, but it's certainly one that caught everyone's eye. This sequel to the much-beloved spaceflight simulator looks to improve upon its predecessor in a great many ways, from multiplayer support to colonisation and interstellar travel.
We'll go through everything we know about the upcoming Kerbal Space Program 2 below, from release date information to in-depth trailer analysis, confirmed new gameplay features, and more.
]]>A sequel is coming for silly-yet-serious space build-o-exploration sim Kerbal Space Program. Blasting off next year, Kerbal Space Program 2 will add fancy and far-flung features including interstellar travel, space colonies, and official multiplayer support. This announcement seemed sudden to me until I remembered that the first game officially left early access in 2015. Four years ago! Goodness me. Come watch the sequel's announcement trailer below.
]]>For a game about spaceships, Kerbal Space Program's latest expansion has a curiously terrestrial focus not to mention name: Breaking Ground. Out now, it doesn't do much for spaceflight but does give more to do once you've actually landed somewher eout there. Along with new ground-based deployable scientific research gadgets, it adds surface formations to study and, most importantly, robotic pistons and joints and things. Remember: robotics components are for serious scientific expeditions only. Don't get any ideas about building a giant mechanical tarantula to skitter around mission control. And if you're using a mod to add multiplayer, don't you and your pals have any ideas about starting a Robot Wars on the Mun. Science only, okay.
]]>There's more Kerbal Space Program DLC on the way, and the next expansion for Squad's jokey-but-actually-serious scientific sandbox is bulking up all things planetary. Breaking Ground is due out on May 30th, and is set to add more research sites across the solar system, with strange crystal formations, frozen volcanoes and other stellar curiosities to poke with sticks. Very big metal sticks, at that, as there's a whole range of new components designed for planetside operations, including advanced robotics, ideal for carrying around new deployable scientific equipment.
]]>During my brief love affair with DIY rocket sim Kerbal Space Program, I visited the London Science Museum and came out having learnt genuinely useful lessons about when to use my second stage rocket boosters. I could have looked that up online (and yeah, I did that too), but isn't that fantastic? I can't say for sure that I wouldn't have wound up in the museum anyway, but Kerbal had to have been on my mind when I was deciding whether to visit. Nice one, video games.
I'd sort of forgotten Kerbal existed since then, but today's launch of its first expansion has blasted it back onto my radar. Making History is free for anyone who bought the game before April 2013, and adds a new mission builder that lets you devise fiendish tasks for yourself and other players. That's the Making part: the History part lets you reenact landmark moments "from spacewalking to crash landing on the Mun".
]]>Space catastrophe simulator Kerbal Space Program will launch its first expansion on March 13th, the developers announced today. 'Making History' is a clever little name combining the expansion's two big features: a Mission Builder to make your own missions; and a load of spaceship pieces and missions inspired by real-world historical space exploration. I can't imagine what those might be, given that Kerbal's sandbox already leads to replicating most of the human history of space travel and the little it doesn't mostly involves dead animals, but sometimes it is nice to have someone lay out a goal for you. As promised, the expansion will be given free to players who bought Kerbal early enough.
]]>Reminding us all that the term 'indie' is meaningless, Take-Two Interactive--the multi-billion-dollar owners of GTA devs Rockstar Games, Civ and XCOM studio Firaxis, and 2K--have launched an indie publishing label. It's named Private Division and that combined with the logo ↑ makes me think: Twin Peaks-themed porn site. But they have gathered a fair number of big names for their initial lineup, including Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey from the new studio of Assassin's Creed creative director Patrice Désilet, a yet-unannounced RPG from Tim Cain and his Fallout cohorts at Obsidian Entertainment, games from fellas who worked on Battlefields and Halos, and Kerbal Space Program (which Take-Two now own). Hey, if leads to good games getting made, wank yourselves wild with your indie fantasies.
]]>Take-Two Interactive Software, the owners of 2K Games and studios including Firaxis and Rockstar, have bought Kerbal Space Program [official site]. Unlike when Microsoft bought Minecraft gang Mojang, Take-Two are only buying the game and not the studio who make it, Squad. However, Squad will continue to work on the splendid spaceship-building sandbox game and its upcoming expansion. This acquisition is announced barely a week after Valve confirmed that several former KSP developers had joined them for something mysterious. Interesting times.
]]>The big boys at Valve have hired an unknown number of folks behind the space sim Kerbal Space Program [official site], RPS fanzine PC Gamer is reporting. A former Valve developer said as much in an interview on the podcast Game Dev Unchained and a current Valve spokesperson confirmed it to the mag, saying “We’ll be announcing more soon”. Good work, everyone, I’ve had to do absolutely no digging of my own.
]]>A mission editor is coming Kerbal Space Program [official site] as part of a paid expansion pack, developers Squad have announced. 'Making History' is its name, and recreating history is its game. The expansion will come with a set of missions inspired by real-world historical jaunts from the early days of spaceflights, along with tools to create your own missions or download missions other players have made. A little more purpose for the spaceship-building sandbox does sound good.
]]>"Beep beep beep beep," said Leonard Nimoy, imitating his favourite piece of space hardware. But what is one voice in the vast night sky? You want yourself a satellite network, Len my son. That's the focus of update 1.2 for Kerbal Space Program [official site], which launched last night. It lets players link satellites and other hardware to bounce and boost signals all over, and also use satellites to map terrain. Oh, and the update makes your wheeled vehicles and flying vehicles more stable, less prone to wonky physics explosions - unless that's what you really want, of course.
]]>It's hardly a secret that Star Wars fans and Trekkies don't see eye to eye, and, depending on who you ask, the mere thought of a crossover is considered the highest form of blasphemy. Would it be awesome, though? Or would it cause the world to implode? Maybe it'd look like this?
Luckily, sci-fi followings are known to get along a wee bit better in Videogameland (sometimes), not least Kerbal Space Program [official site] and Stellaris [official site]. With this in mind, one inventive modder has brought Kerbal's race of green explorers to Paradox's grand strategy-meets-4X-a-thon.
]]>One thing I love about spaceflight simulator Kerbal Space Program [official site] is that I'm yet to find two players who've shared identical experiences. I've only ever played in short bursts myself, but mastering takeoff still heads my to do list. Others I've chatted with speak of grand space voyages and interesting discoveries. Heck, Adam even prefers the game as a spectator sport, which speaks volumes for its wide-reaching appeal.
Which is why it's a surprise to learn that lead developer Felipe Falanghe has announced his departure from Kerbal Space Program after five and a half years of service.
]]>One thing which makes Kerbal Space Program [official site] different from most, if not all, other space games is failure. In the short bursts I've played our Best Space Game of 2015, I've not saved the world or fought off alien invasions; I've struggled to assemble the most basic of rocket ships and have fumbled more take offs than I care to admit. My fleeting moments of success, though, have been great fun. The game's "Turbo Charged" 1.1 update introduces a range of new features aimed to help amateurs like myself along, while also upping the challenge for those space veterans among us.
]]>We've been drawing up our end of year list here at RPS and in trawling through 2015's releases, I found a fair few that I hadn't played and feel like I really should have done. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been catching up. Here are the games I missed. Until now.
]]>What is the best space game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today's door is...
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Most films and books about actual human space exploration are about triumph. There are challenges and accidents along the way, but they're stories of humans overcoming incredible odds in the noble pursuit of knowledge and exploration. Kerbal Space Program [official site] is different because it's a game about the failures along the way, rather than the success that comes at the end.
]]>Kerbal Space Program [official site] is a game about exploration, vehicular design and physics. It involves triumph and tragedy, careful meticulous planning and improvised catastrophe. We asked Brendan to suit up and go forth, in the name of science.
]]>We've known that Kerbal Space Program [official site] was moving towards its 1.0 launch since January, but there are now just seven days left until the physicsy-sandbox space sim leaves beta. Developers Squad are marking each day with short, teasing videos introducing some of the new features, and the first is below with the first glimpse of women Kerbals.
]]>Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Scenario Generator is a tool that creates random restrictions, goals and startup settings for a variety of games, and it's the reason I've become happily lost in Crusader Kings II [official site] and Civ V [official site] again. Reinvent an old favourite with the click of a button, as you find out precisely how often you can commit Unprovoked Murder.
]]>Long ago, before the seduction of fast food and motorized vehicles, there resided vikings in the land of Kerbin. It was not an easy time. These fearsome Kerbals lived and died with their colossal ships, which spat flame like the behinds of dragons. But like their eventual descendants, they persisted and grew from strength to strength. Their endless quest for naval perfection was known as the Viking Space Program and it was, like everything else in Kerbin, kinda cool.
]]>Kerbal Space Program is leaving beta with the next update.
KSP [official site] will continue to be a work-in-progress – the developers say as much – so what does leaving beta actually mean in this situation?
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>"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.
]]>As you probably know by now, Kerbal Space Program is a game about getting tiny alien people into the heavens. It comes with calamities and accidents. It comes with great victories and visions of orbital accomplishment. They've announced a new demo. That means you should download and play it if you haven't already. Gameplay video belooooooooooow. And you can read the developers explain themselves here.
]]>There's something wonderful about Kerbal Space Program, the sandbox game where you try to lob a race of cute aliens into their own space age. It's the kind of thing that only gets made by a very specific type of developer, with a very specific sort of love for what they are making. That developer is called Squad, and we had a few questions for them.
]]>So I just wanted to remind everyone that this exists. I totally get that some of you guys don't want to pretend to design rockets and then run your own private space program, and that's fine. You keep on lining up three zombies until they disappear or whatever it is you are into. For everyone with their head in orbit there's still Kerbal Space Program, which continues to develop apace, and remains a gem of physics-based experimentation. I've posted the trailer for not quite the most recent update below, but I am keenly aware that its sensible breakdown of the new features is not what is most appealing about this game, which is actually the breakdown of, well, everything else. I've added in a video for that, too.
]]>Watching the final shuttle launch last week had me thinking about how I would have to look for a game about managing a space program, so that I could post relevantly here on RPS. I never got around to looking for one, but it turned up in my inbox from a dozen sources anyway. The game is called Kerbal Space Program and it's about building rockets (in a Spore-like rocket-building editor) and trying to get aliens called "Kerbals" into space. The game comes with a full SDK and even though it's only been out for a few weeks, people are already modding in new bits and pieces to play with. Right now the game features a host of rocket-building systems, along with a 600km planet to try and get into orbit from. Try being the significant part of that sentence: because failure is part of the fun. Long term, the team are planning moon landings, bases on other worlds, and a detailed astronaut recruitment and training management subgame. It's certainly promising stuff.
You can download it, and also watch amusing illustrative videos below.
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