If you thought people screamed a lot in space when there was a small alien beastie exploding out of a crew member's stomach, you want to hear the yelling and shrieking noises our shuttle co-pilot made as we attempted to judge our descent back into the Earth's atmosphere with the correct angle of attack. Actually, to be fair, we did a lot of shouting ourselves when playing this double pack of space simulations, because it was a beyond frustrating experience.

The curse words that echoed around the cockpit of the Atlantis shuttle were also accompanied by an avalanche of questions which all began with one simple word: why? For instance, we cried out: Why are the instructions to this game a few flimsy web pages of help text, replete with bad explanations and spelling mistakes? While it isn't an overly technical game, it's somewhat tricky to get to grips with, and it doesn't help when initially you have no idea what the OMS is and does, and the instructions have no intention of telling you (it's the Orbital Manoeuvring System, we found out using a search engine).

Why do the tutorial missions come with absolutely no help or guidance? Why does one of the three tutorials consist of a black screen, with nothing whatsoever happening? Maybe that's simply a space acclimatisation program, where you have to stare into the dark void for ten solid minutes without going insane. Why are there no sound effects on board your shuttle, save for the noise of your OMS thrusters which sound like someone spraying an air freshener around the cabin? There are no ambient effects, little bleeps from the control consoles, nothing.

Why is the Earth not round? As you ascend from the big green and blue orb into space, it soon becomes clear that our world isn't spherical, rather it has ruddy great jagged edges which make it look like some manner of giant octagon. The sun above flickers like a light bulb that's about to die, and the cloud layer is just a flat line in the sky (we should probably just be grateful the Earth isn't rendered as flat). The environmental graphics are terrible, although at least the shuttle itself is modelled in a passable fashion.

Back to the questions: Why are there only two missions? One asks you to rendezvous with Hubble, and the other to fly up to the ISS to install a module using the shuttle's robot arm. However, we had great trouble plotting our course to the space station, and with no proper instructions to figure out where we were going wrong, the only real option was to switch on all the autopilot functions. But then the game becomes even more dull, as you're hardly doing anything, merely watching space fly by.

And to top it all off, Space Shuttle Simulator kept on cutting to a black screen in the middle of missions. The game hadn't crashed, as the mission timer was still ticking. We hadn't crashed the shuttle either (a red "game over" message is displayed if you plant Atlantis in the sea in an attempt to find its namesake sunken city). We've no idea why this happened, and it was a glitch that occurred a number of times. The final question could simply be summed up as this: Space Shuttle Simulator - why?

After that was uninstalled, with a solemn promise to our hard drive that it would never darken its platters again, we fired up Apollo Simulator and hoped for something better. How naïve. Apollo allows you to control the astronauts via a first-person perspective on the launch pad, taking the elevator up to the top of the rocket and boarding. However, the lift stopped out of alignment with the top walkway, meaning we couldn't enter the rocket. Luckily there's a hot-key to skip straight to launch, although we don't think we'd be getting in any rocket if the engineers and technicians couldn't even get the launch pad lift functioning correctly.

Once up in space, it's a similar story to Space Shuttle Simulator; poor and very dated looking graphics, along with some awful corrupted patches across the sky. Again, there's a lack of depth and clarity to the online instructions, although the controls are more simple here. Irritations still abound, however. For example, on take off the instrument readings don't make it clear how much thrust you're applying, which is a crucial part of achieving the correct trajectory for the moon.

Once you're finally in space, matters don't get any better. Trying our hand at the moon landing itself, we watched as the docking module we were released from collided smack-bang into our lander with no apparent ill effects. Applying some thrust, a few seconds later we were suddenly on the moon's surface. A successful mission completed, we were informed, even though we hadn't really done anything, and despite the fact that our landing must have been heavier than Eamonn Holmes.

Next we attempted the lunar module preparation, the process prior to the landing (you can pick missions in any order you like, or try the whole trip in one go if you dare). This proved to be the exact opposite to the landing in terms of difficulty. Once again, we found the instructions pathetically lacking, and the actual process of lining up to dock with the module a seemingly impossible task with the given controls. That frustration was the end of the line for our patience, and incidentally when we failed the mission, we were presented with a dialogue box full of German telling us off. Not that we had a clue what we'd done wrong, being unable to speak the language.

To be quite frank, we'd rather be ejected into space itself with no suit on than be forced to sit bumbling around with this double pack and its bewildering lack of instruction, poor and often corrupted graphics, bugs, ridiculous interface, random spouting of German and just plain clunkiness. Oh, and a complete lack of Tribbles.

Verdict
The box artwork looks quite nice, but the contents are an unearthly plague of horrors which a more youthful Sigourney Weaver couldn't even begin to imagine, never mind slimy extra-terrestrial killers. Avoid like a fart in an airlock.

Company: Excalibur

Tags: space shuttle atlantis space shuttle internationalspacestation nasa launch pad sts-135 douglas g. hurley kennedy space center