Starlite: Astronaut Rescue - Developed in Collaboration with NASA

Starlite: Astronaut Rescue is a 2002 tech demo for... oh wait. Nevermind. It's a "mini-adventure", sporting "Unity Terrain Mars Environment and Shadows, Futuristic advanced rover setting, advanced biosuit space suits, professional voice acting, realistic physics, original story and dialogue; and advanced robotic navigation". Every single one of the aforementioned features are over-exaggerated. This [i]cough[/i] game [i]cough[/i] is what you'd expect from one of those 100 Games on 1 Disc compilations for Windows 95. It's truly awful, but luckily it lasts only 15 minutes. My single positive for this title is that I encountered zero bugs/issues with my short experience. But, bugs/glitches are directly proportional to content, and so this is expected. In your short experience you'll control a rover and a human character. The looking action is awful, and movement is just as bad thanks to really terrible mouse acceleration. It feels as if the player is on ice. This problem is disguised as 'realistic physics'. It's annoying, plain and simple. Jumping and staying in the air for 2 seconds longer, and walking with longer strides is realistic physics. Not releasing the W key and waiting 2 more seconds for your character to come to a halt. Eugh. The story is a generic rescue mission, which is outlined in the title of the game. Going along as usual, someone had an accident, you have to find them by completing abstract tasks and finally you're rewarded by landing back at square one. There are a grand total of [b]three[/b] 6th grade maths problems that need to be solved, a 30 seconds crafting bit (with a cluttered interface) and then a short driving and positioning part with a rover. Oh and someone said some words at one point. Avoid.

The Linux port is a complete farce - mouselook has been bugged since launch, and when the devs made it sort of work (by having the user click and drag their view around the screen, of all things) it turned out to be impossible to use the crafting bench anyway, rendering the game uncompletable. For £2, it's usually hard to go wrong - but this game certainly provides a way to do so. Do not buy.

Get Moonbase Alpha. Its free and there is genuine peril.

This program presents itself as a game, and to be honest, it fits the definition, but it's definately not something you'd expect to see on Steam. It isn't terrible per se, but it can do with a LOT of improvement. For starters, the player moves around like a steady-cam; Everything is smoothed out, from the movement over hills down to the motion of the mouse. It feels unnatural to the point it seems you're playing a drone of sorts. Then there is the geometery; Terrain smoothing has been around for about a decade now, and it could have been used to some extent and look better than it does right now. Even with graphics set to the max I can see the edges a mile away. It is sloppy and it shouldn't have to be that way. And this doesn't go for just the terrain. The objects, entities and vehicles themselves look bad because of this. It is impossible to make a curved geometery that works on all hardware, but there are shaders and filters and all sorts of tricks that are very effective on that front. Texture quality; Well, there is some, just not a whole lot. This is again one of those points that would have been acceptable a decade ago. With an option 'Beautiful' I expect to see high resolution textures. This would all be acceptable in a simulator, which I suppose this falls under, if the actual simulation demanded high detail or amount of calculations that would justify sacrificing graphical fidelity. And that is probably what upsets me the most; It looks and feels quickly assembled in a Unity editor with little to no attention to detail or features. It looks and feels like a demo, which, at the time I bought it (a few years ago) was a bit more expensive than the 5 bucks (if not less) that's advertised these days. It does a good job as an educational tool, however, for both children who want to be astronauts and game developers alike (the latter probably isn't a complement though). It has some nice lessons in frequencies and stuff, but that's about the only thing it has going for it. Wel...it has the NASA logo up front, and it pained me to see the Gates Foundation in there as well, especially since it has the tendancy to crash when ALT+TABbing, but that may just be me. All in all I cannot recommend this for what it is. I love the idea, but there is no game here. What little simulation it has is completely on rails and there is no way to mess up or discover something that deviates from the main story, which plot also escapes me... I hope some developers got a lot of experience out of this, and I'm not sure about it's current price, but if you see this for anything over 50 cents, just leave it be. One final sidenote, this is an alpha test for Starlite: Astronaut Academy, to be released in 2014. That was a year ago. It has been sold (and still is) as seperate full-release title (There is no Steam Early Access disclaimer on the store page). These 2 things don't bother me as much as the fact that over the years there have been no updates, improvements or anything that indicates this being a work in progress or part of a bigger project which is still in progress (although I'm pretty sure that one's dead as well).

[h1]Starlite: Astronaut Rescue[/h1] Acho que considerando toda a história em volta desse jogo só valeria a pena jogar mesmo pela conquista que vc ganha ao completar, pois o que eles tinham em mente nesse projeto, não foi para frente e o que está sendo apresentado aqui não é muito interessante para recomendar, pra resumir você só tem duas missões para fazer que não são de lá muito interessante e pra piorar no meu caso durante minha gameplay meu jogo travou e eu tava pertinho do final, pq antes eu tinha marcado que queria jogar em tela cheia (ele vem desmarcado por padrão, mas ai eu acabei marcando já que tinha a opção), então sem querer dei um alt+tab e o jogo travou, junto com várias paradas do meu pc, dai beleza fui obrigado a fechar o jogo e dai quando voltei, tive que refazer tudo de novo. Um problema simples que foi deixado passar e acabou me fazendo repetir uma segunda vez a mesma gameplay. Acho que por conta desses fatores vou deixar um negativo.

My playthrough lasted exactly 19 minutes... As that's when I completed the darn game. Really. And I wasn't trying to play it fast. I think even kids who play this will finish in about 15 minutes. You're offered so much hand-holding in this game there's no sense of accomplishment. Boring.

Um side project onde você faz parte de uma missão fictícia de um resgate de astronauta em Marte. Starlite: Astronaut Rescue faz parte de um projeto maior, o Starlite: Astronaut Academy, um possível MMO sancionado pela digníssima NASA! ...cujo mesmo, infelizmente, não lançou e sumiu sem deixar nenhuma pista desde 2014. A ideia é interessante, porém o jogo é curto e se resume a fazer um cálculo ridículo de fácil e ir a alguns pontos x no mapa. A Badge do programa Open Badge da Mozilla não funciona também, apenas retorna um erro de conexão. Eu mesmo só comprei pra usar de referência no meu TCC, mas vou deixar como recomendado por conta de fazer parte de um projeto governamental realmente interessante, uma pena que não deu frutos.

Well its been a long time since I last playedd this game, actually went back and watched the blind play I recorded on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_He_ZAw-IA&feature=gp-n-y&google_comment_id=z13wjd4yqnecj5l4a04cjr14csqxs5daw14. I've not played it since that recording mostly because I hadn't seen any updates to it and even now going through and looking it seems like the game got canned because there are poeple who will write negative review about something if you don't end up getting to kill things because its 'not a game' in those cases. I for one enjoyed the game when it came out, and though math isn't my strongest skill didn't find it all that difficult to figure out the formula it gave you, I mean the calculator was right there and all it was was a division problem, not like we were trying to calculate the anti-sine cosine of a quadratic rectangular polygon or something. It felt like the game was ment for educational purposes and maybe be used in the class-room as a 'fun' way to teach kids maths and science. I could see that being the case if they added a few more scenarios/missions around that theme.

Math....you gotta love it....

This is a incredibly poor simulator of doing nothing on Mars.