For this review, I ran SPACE SIMULATOR on a 386/25 with 4 meg ram,
MS-DOS 6.2, witha Microsoft mouse, Virtual Pilot joystick, and a
Soundblaster Pro sound card. Americans were tromping around on the moon
when I was a little kid. When I watch documentaries about those events
now, they talk about the public apathy in the later missions. But I never
knew it. That was a fine time to be a kid--it seemed like the country
was space crazy. The missions were on tv--guys in white suits driving
around the lunar surface in dune buggies and planting flags that didn't

flap in the wind. Tang had little lunar rovers as prizes. There were all
kinds of toys featuring astronauts, space suits, capsules, lunar modules,
rayguns. STAR TREK went into syndication and began its journey into a media
cash-cow beyond anyone's dreams.

I was space crazy too. If it had a space ship in it, I read it, watched
it, or played with it. I dreamt of great adventures in far off regions
of the universe. I looked at the news and the world around me, and I never
thought (nor did I think most others) that twenty-five years later, the
marvels of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY would be just as far away as they were
then.

Twenty-five years passed. I grew up and got cynical. I realize that we
are doing some of the fundamental, unglamorous data-gathering work
that has to be done. But like many,  want all the glamour. It seems
like by now we ought to have a space station, a moon ase, a lunar
observatory, and unmanned dune buggies driving across the Martian
landscape.What did we get instead? ALF. And Marina Sirtis in tight clothes.

Until now. BAO finally got around to taking their famous flight
simulator, and turned ropellers into rocket engines. The result is
MICROSOFT SPACE SIMULATOR (SPACESIM)--flight simulator for the rest of
the universe.

Where to begin? Where to begin...
 
First off, there are three fundamentally different ways to run the
game. The first is ree-flight--you do what you want to do, go where
you want to go. No critters to fry. No sales to make. Then there are
the missions, where you're given assignments to fulfill. See this, do
that. No aliens to kill, though. This isn't WING COMMANDER. Finally,
there's observatory, where you can look at the heavens from various
locations throughout the universe. If you're a stargazer, this may
be the part to check out first.
 
But Free Flight is the meat of the program. You chose what to do, where
to go, and how to get there.  What to do: launching, transit,
orbiting, docking, landing.
In other words, exploration. If you aren't interested in space
exploration, don't buy SPACE SIMULATOR. Unless you're interested in
going places and seeing things, SPACESIM won't offer much to do.
Go pay WING COMMANDER instead.

Where to go: all the planets in the solar system, about 30 moons,
several comets and asteroids, various heavenly bodies, and three
space stations.
 
How to get there: via several spacecraft both real and imagined,
including theApollo craft (both the command module and the lunar
module), the space shuttle, a Bussard ram-jet, an all-terrain lander, a
manned maneuvering unit (for EVA work), and deep-space explorers.
 
CONTROL

Space flight appears (to a layman) to be scientifically accurate. It
works on Newtonian physics--stopping the ship requires you to swing
the engines around 180-degrees and perform a burn that will properly
counteract the ship's momentum. But gravitational forces (called gravity
wells) weigh in as well--you will have to fight (or use, if you're
smart) these forces as well. You can use gravity forces to slingshot
your ship around just as real spacecraft do.

There are several ways to pilot the ship. First is manually, using
both the big engines (certain ships can get close to the speed of light)
and the little engines for critical maneuvers. Second is by slewing,
which turns off the laws of physics and your engines and allows you to
move your ship anywhere you want. There's a location fix, so you can
just place yourself anywhere that's on the location list. And lastly
there is the auto pilot and flight computer, which takes all the
mundane work off your hands.

One of the things that surprises me about the program is the lack of
real data on object location and movement. In real life, if you want to
plan a mission from Earth orbit to Mars orbit, you would calculate the
position of Earth at launch and the position of Mars at arrival, and set
the course that way. With SPACESIM you target in on Mars and chase it,
because Mars doesn't stand still. SPACESIM is smart enough to keep Mars
moving in its orbit. But not smart enough to let you plot an efficient
flight plan to intercept it. So pick a ship with plenty of fuel.

As to how the game plays--it's quirky but once I got used to it I've grown
to like it.  There are a lot of commands to learn at first, and I am
still in the learning process, but I am getting to where the ship does
what I want, where I can read and understand the instrument panel, and
why things don't work the way I anticipated. SPACESIM is not really
complicated. Most everything boils down to control over the ship's
movement or the external views.
 
GOOFY STUFF
One big drawback to SPACE SIMULATOR is that it does not render the planet
surfaces in detail. Landing on most of them is like landing on a rock.
There are no craters, fissures, valleys, hills, or mountains. You can't
land on them and explore much. And there is no simulated atmosphere.
I landed on the surface of Jupiter, and was treated to an orange
ground and bright blue skies. I also landed on the surface of the
sun (couldn't get back off it though). It was even less spectacular.

And if it isn't on the location list, it isn't out there. I patched myself
into the Andromeda Galaxy, which just put me next to a poster of the
galaxy that was fun to look at, but it wasn't like I could go in there and
explore it. I'm not complaining-- having SPACESIM build up billions of
stars and planets to create a true, explorable universe would probably
have been infinitely more difficult. But I mention this because it is
important to understand--SPACESIM has a very finite universe. If it isn't
on the location list, you can't go there (well, you can go there if you
can figure out how to get there. But you won't find anything to look
at when you arrive). SPACESIM is much better at the local area than
it is at deep space. I do hope BAO plans to sell add-ons with more stars
and objects-- particularly space stations.

 
GRAPHICS

SPACESIM has three graphic level settings--VGA (320x400 at 256 colors),
SVGA with 512K memory (640x400 at 256) and SVGA with 1meg memory (800x600
at 256). I started out with vga on my lowly 386 and then changed to svga
graphics. Both are acceptable quality but svga looks much better and the
frame rate doesn't seem to suffer that much.

At each graphics level you can also tinker with how the scenery works.
Objects can be faceted or smoothed (faceted images are quicker to draw),
the shading can be dithered and smoothed, and the scenery complexity can
be simple or complex. You can also choose what objects can be displayed,
so if you don't want to see the milky way clouds, turn them off.
If you don't want to see so many stars, turn down the magnitude level.
There are a number of choices that control the scenery.

That said, I should remark that in my own non-scientific tests, I've
found that I can have most of the goodies turned on and still get
acceptable frame rates (the program has a built-in frame-rate counter
that tells the animation speed). An important thing to realize is
that much of SPACESIM's scenery objects are so far away and so small
that the computer doesn't have to kill itself calculating and
displaying rapidly changing objects. And since much of space flight
is not the rapid, seat of the pants kind of maneuvering of an airplane
in FLIGHT SIMULATOR, the program does not need the same kind of constant
hands-on control. The result is that frame rates that are completely
unplayable in an action program like FLIGHT SIMULATOR are quite tolerable
on SPACESIM. Also, it seems that I don't really see a useful difference
in frame rates using sparse, easy graphics modes than when I use
the complex, pretty ones. So I use the good looking stuff.
 
The graphics are very nice. None of it is going to be confused with
NASA photographs, but there are some nice looking graphics once you get
used to it. I was sightseeing the planets and looked at what I thought
were great sunrises. That's an important part of the simulation--the
light is point- source from the sun so depending on where you are,
you may see an object in light or in shadow. Watching a planet as
it goes from shadow to light to shadow again is a beautiful thing.
 
In an experiment to see if SPACESIM models time dilation (it doesn't),
I flew from the Andromeda Galaxy to Earth (at the speed of light,
it took 2.2 million years on the ship's clock). The view on full-screen
was great-- watching Andromeda fade away, then switching over to watch
the Milky Way arrive. On autopilot it only took about 10 minutes.
It's a voyage I recommend for sight-seers.
 
Seeing all this stuff is one of the harder parts of SPACESIM. There are
two kinds of views--panning and tracking. Panning lets you stand at a p
articular point and look up and down or side to side. Tracking aims
the view at a particular object, and then you can vary the position of
the camera to see it from all sides. Sounds simple enough, but the
location of the camera can be from the cockpit of the spaceship,
from a chase (behind the spaceship) position, or from some other
assigned point. And two different view screens can be on at the same
time. And then there's the reference object and the tracking object in
each view. People who can't set the clocks on their vcr's are
going to have problems with this.
 
But for those who do get a handle on it, the reward is a huge measure
of control over what you see on the screen. You tell the computer
what you want, instead of getting what the computer feels like giving
you. It's a refreshing change.
 
SOUND

Sound doesn't travel through space, so there doesn't seem to be much
to hear. Even with the sound on I have not heard much in the way of
sound effects--no beeps or bops or screeches. That suits me fine since
I usually turn the sound off on most games anyway, but
there some things I would like to hear--like the auto pilot
shutting off.
 
The game offers classical music selections that play in the background,
giving the game a bit of a 2001 feeling. You can select the music
(a feature more products should incorporate). On my Soundblaster
it sounds like typical computer versions--all bleeps and boops, and
after a few minutes I turned it off and fired up my audio gear and put
on music I preferred.
 
IMAGINE THERE'S A HEAVEN 

At this beginning of this review I talked about being a little kid
when space flight seemed to be more a part of popular culture. I
had my astronaut figures (girls play with dolls. Guys had action
figures) and their spaceships. For anyone who grew up playing with
cars and action figures, think about how they were used. The figure
walked along the floor or the bed or a bookshelf, but in my imagination
it was the moon's surface or some alien city. As I held my spacecraft
in my hand and waved it in midair, I imagined my bedroom was outer space.
The figures inside pushed buttons and talked. They had all kinds of
adventures using just a few familiar objects that my imagination
transformed into a plethora of things.

SPACESIM works the same way. For the literal minded, SPACESIM is a
good educational toy--it's a great way to show people the mechanics
of starflight and the application of forces on objects in space. For
the gamers, though, imagination is required or the game gets dull quick.
Just like FLIGHT SIMULATOR, you have to make up your own motivation
for going places and doing things--be it making critical repairs, or
being first in a race around Pluto and back, or being the first to
arrive at Alpha Centuri in search of gold. Without imagination there
really isn't much to do--it's just go here and go there and look at that.
With imagination it's go here for this reason, and play like you're
doing that. If you like to set your own goals and make your own
storylines, then SPACESIM can be great fun. Otherwise SPACESIM will
quickly become a dust collector on the bookshelf.

by J. Ollinger (c) 1994