NASA Launches Moonbase Alpha 230
Several readers have sent word that today NASA launched Moonbase Alpha, an online game with single- and multi-player capability that "allows participants to step into the role of an exploration team member in a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement." The game is available now through Steam for free. Moonbase Alpha was built as a precursor to an upcoming NASA MMO called Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond, and they hope it will be "a proof of concept to show how NASA content can be combined with a cutting-edge game engine to inspire, engage and educate students about agency technologies, job opportunities and the future of space exploration."
Moonbase Alpha BBS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone remember Moonbase Alpha BBS -- 471-4547 -- (I doubt it as it would be a minuscule number of people)?
VR jobs of the future (Score:3, Interesting)
8 second lag is pretty bad, but this can be viewed as a precursor to jobs of the future where basement dwellers driver loaders on the moon.
Re:Steam (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not? As far as DRM goes, Steam is the least evil. It has offline mode, so it works even if you can't access the net. It doesn't encrypt things that have been released, so you can access the game data files if you wish. It has a massive install base, so it's not going away anytime soon. I haven't heard of any major security flaws, although it is a major target for social engineering scams. It uses it's powers for good, letting you store game saves and configs in the cloud, and doesn't tie itself to a specific machine at all. It lets you opt out from any data collection. It's much more stable than it was at release, especially since it switched from the IE renderer to WebKit. It's been ported to the Mac, and may be coming to Linux.
Really, if you're complaining about Steam, you probably don't trust Windows not to be spying on you. And if you're an active gamer, you come to realize that Steam's DRM is actually very lenient, compared to other recent games. Since almost no games get released sans DRM of some type, you may as well get over it, and choose the one that's the least evil.
Re:Please... (Score:3, Interesting)
And just reading the comments section of your referenced article, it looks like the Examiner's readership downright hates Obama.
I don't know anything about the fairly new owners of the paper (Clarity Media Group) though, to know if that's the paper's objective or not. It certainly comes across that way, glancing at some other headlines.