Space Station Sim – The Tiny Tutorial

I’ll try to keep up the pace but I have to get some themes I picked out weeks ago up here at some point.That cool song “Mission Control” in the opening movie is by one Julia Othmer. It might be the second song that comes up once you enter her site. Was for me, twice.

There is quite brief tutorial in Space Station Sim? After that the narrator recommends going off to the Components Desk and told to follow the instructions there. Other than that, looks like the mysteries of the game are left for the player to disover on their own. The main in-game control screen is a depiction of Mission Control, with each desk reperesenting a different aspect of the mission. Erring on the side of inclusion it looks like the game makers have been a bit generous on gender and age diversity; there’re significantly more women than you’d expect and the age scale skews way way young. Good for marketing demographics, we suppose, but  not very simulating.

NASA Space Shuttle Mission Control

Space Station Sim Mission Control Screen

In the tutorial you’ll learn how to move around the station to view it from all angles and how to open it into the cutaway view to look inside. Once in there you’ll learn how to assign tasks to the crew and about the various indicators of both crew and station health.

When it ends be sure to listen closely to the two items it mentions you’ll need to build in the recommended next step. If not then you’ll have to sit through the whole astronaut tutorial again.

Unless you’re reading this post, that is.  What the guide says is “toru” and “exercise bike”. If you don’t know what a toru is then you may not think you heard right and your brain is likely to go blank. This led to the question of whether there is a central database of information, a Space Station Simopedia of general knoweldge, for the game and so for the real thing as well. So far we see no evidence of one.

On the computery side, it looks like the SS Sim takes over the presentation resources of your computer completely. You cannot ALT-TAB the PC between it and other running applications. Annoying for the reviewer-blogger, yes, but perhaps a turn off as well for those who enjoy letting games run in the background while doing work or surfing the news. Nope, if this sim is running it demands your total attention. Not a good aspect in this multitasking day-and-age. Some may not turn oit back on. The only way to switch away via the Windows Task Manager. Not quite the same.

We’ll pick up tomorrow at the the Components Desk.