space

John Carmack Plans Space Fishbowl

6:20AM Stuart Houghton | Lord British may have reached for the stars – and given us a cryptic message in space runes – but to do so he had to splurge millions of his hard earned Gold and train for months with Russian cosmonauts. If another Gaming Legend has his way, however, taking in the view from orbit might become a little easier – if slightly crazier looking. More »

Space Combat In Star Trek Online

12:40AM Mike Fahey | Cryptic Studios’ latest installment of Ask Cryptic on the Star Trek Online website neatly puts to rest one of my biggest worries about the game – how space combat is handled. I’ve spent far too many years battling starships both in video game and miniatures game form to have the experience reduced to a simple point and click affair. Players will definitely be given full control. A large portion of starship combat in Star Trek Online is tactical – manoeuvring your ship into position so you protect your vital systems as you attack your opponent’s weakest side. You need to be “in control” of your ship in order for that to work well and be fun. More »

Richard Garriott Sends Cryptic Message From Space

11:20AM Stuart Houghton | You know, they say sometimes people go CRAZY on these long trips. They get the, eh… SPACE MADNESS. Not plucky Lord British, though. No, the good lord is safe in his heaven and has found the time to transmit a coded message of hope to us earth-bound types. The multisquillionaire held up a card containing the message shortly after reaching orbit – the message is encoded in Logos Elements – the fictional runic system used in Garriott’s game Tabula Rasa. Fans of the game have now decoded the runes and found it to be a quote – hit the jump to see what Lord British thinks we ought to know. More »

Crecente’s DNA Reaches Orbit

4:00AM Owen Good | Game designer Richard “Lord British” Garriott and his “immortality drive” — containing Crecente’s genetic material – is officially in orbit now. Sorry I missed this earlier, but Garriott rode the candle out of Baikonur early Sunday, and his Soyuz craft will dock with the International Space Station on Tuesday to begin a 10-day span of experiments. More »

No Choice, Richard Garriott, You Must Learn Russian

7:00PM Brian Ashcraft | Wired has a nice feature up on Ultima Richard Garriott and his cosmonaut training in Russia’s Star City. Written by Masters of Doom author David Krushner, here’s a sample: It’s one thing to adjust to life in Star City–but quite another to endure the confounding, confining, and sometimes just plain goofy training regimen. The first challenge is the language. Garriott is an autodidact wunderkind who persuaded his high school teachers that learning Basic code counted as fulfiling his foreign-language requirement. He won’t be as fortunate at Star City. All of the instructions, instrumentation, and communications in space will be in Russian. So, for four hours a day, Garriott and Halik slave over fat, dusty language books in class, then tote them back to the Prophy to study more at night. Great stuff. Click below to check out the full piece. Going to Space? [Wired] More »