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Warning: If you are sarcastically impaired, read no further!
Attention: Barf Dader is a known moron and masticator!
Achtung!: Wenn Sie Englisch nicht lesen kšnnen, bitte mir erotische Fotos auf dir schicken.
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If you've been reading comic books or playing video games since you were a child, you may have noticed how such little details as scientific or historical accuracy (or fun) don't always seem to play much of a role in the design of a game or a comic book character (El Dorado, oooh he was cool...) That pisses me off, because many games try/claim to be scientifically realistic simulations of a possible future. They go to great lengths to present the player with a "realistic" environment and the mental challenge of creating solutions based on purportedly plausible future technologies. They almost invariably become pseudo-scientific conglomerations of fantasy and half-fact, and this insults the player a little and also prevents the game from being unique.

Target of this rant: Space sims

Now, honestly, wtf are they thinking when they call it a "space sim" anyway? It's not like you play BattleCruiser3000AD and think it's anything like the living pages of an astronaut's diary... even a thousand years in the future. Actually, if humanity survives a thousand more years, and the most devastating weapons we can come up with in space are missiles, then I'm going to defect to the aliens' side. We have missiles today! We have hydrogen bombs on missiles at this very moment all over Earth, and any one of those missiles would kick a BC3000AD missile's ass. At least the Star Trek people had the sense to call them "photon torpedoes" and not "missiles". The term "photon torpedo" is vague enough to make you just a little unsure of exactly what it is, and if you go to a Trekkie website or buy one of those Trek simulator/ship spec games you can find a pseudo-scientific explanation that is high enough on the confusing BS scale to give you a plausible idea of what a photon torpedo isn't.

The utter lack of any creative thought in the space sim genre really bugs me. Have you noticed that in every one of those games so far, there has been nothing more than Newtonian space to worry about. ("But there are wormholes!!!" cries a young moron. Yeah, wormholes my ass. The wormhole entrance looks like a warped 2D funnel... in space this would be a sphere, not a funnel-shaped portal... and full of clouds and spinning? Spinning relative to what?) The ships are all based on Western naval design, not any practical idea of what would really make sense in space. The weapons are totally prosaic compared to whatever new and creative ways we will really invent to kill each other in the next thousand years. The medical technology is absolutely never explained, but sometimes highlighted in the game's advertising pitch. The aliens are strangely humanoid... (and close enough to our genetic makeup that we can racially mix with them!!??) The alien technology, writing systems, thought patterns, computers, etc. are always strikingly close to our own. The space anomalies the player encounters are only ones that were discovered or hypothesized before 1920.

I could go on and on about how "space sim" games simulate space about as well as I simulate Carmen Elektra if I put a dress on (tip for the retarded: this means not at all); regardless of how sexy I may be in a dress, I still don't look like her, and if I took the dress off you would immediately notice I have the wrong genitalia and a hairy apeman chest. In this analogy, the words they stole from science and abused in the games are like the dress I am rumored to have worn last Saturday night. The sad, uncreative, anti-scientific almost-spacey-themed adventure-trader underneath all those science terms corresponds to the brutal, ugly, hairy reality that is Barf Dader underneath that ill-rumored dress.

Just to further make my point (insult the genre) and even provide a few solutions or recommendations (tell it like it should be), I'll attack each point I listed in Paragraph 4 in turn.

Think about how ridiculous this is. On a local or classical scale, the Universe can sometimes appear to be true Newtonian 3D. But on the interstellar scale, the curvature of space begins to play a role. This is very similar to the way that on a local scale we can treat the ground as flat, but over a span of several miles the curvature of the planet begins to play a role - the larger the span the more pronounced that curvature is.

This is not an issue when you're in tactical or flying/dogfighting mode in the game. But when you're doing diplomacy, looking for trade routes, looking at maps, etc., the curvature of space would be a serious issue. For instance, back on Earth, when we fly from Los Angeles to London, we don't go east-north-east as a Mercator projection would suggest. We go nearly due north, as a globe would suggest. Why? Because I said so, that's why (and the distance is shorter). This has a tremendous effect on the strategic aspect of the game. If you were playing a world conquest game with a 3D map of Earth (X-Com style) and you were sending transports from L.A. to London, you wouldn't have to worry about the Atlantic Unicorn Police attacking your transports, you would have to worry about the Yuko-Nova Scotian Anti-Ham Federation and find some way to make peace with the bloodthirsty Aleuts.

The curvature of space is also not taken into account when one encounters space anomalies. A black hole is the ultimate curvature of space. There should be tremendous gravity waves and other related perturbations radiating from one with the same frequency that the black hole is rotating (don't tell me you didn't know they rotate). In short, you wouldn't go anywhere near one for any reason because it would probably turn you and your ship inside out, and then suck you in and you'd die. You certainly wouldn't be flying into one on purpose, and it certainly wouldn't look like a funnel. In fact, you couldn't see it. It would be the definition of anti-luminescent. I've seen red, green and shiny gray-black holes in various games. That's retarded.

Have you noticed that each ship in every space sim game has horizontal, vertically stacked decks, a top and a bottom, a front and a back, and port and starboard sides? Does this make any sense at all in space? Why are we still keeping with the old Star Trek standard? The ships in the original show were so designed because it was the only way they could film the show on Earth with no CG assistance and no budget. The shows continued in this way because it wouldn't make Trekkie-logic to redesign them since the new Enterprise wouldn't look anything like the old Enterprise anymore...

In space there is no right, left, top or bottom. In fact, there is no reasonable sense to be made of forward and backward since there is zero atmospheric resistance (and no absolute frame of reference). What seems to make more sense to me and my panel of one expert is that the ships would look a lot more like the classic spinning space station, and would move in any direction they wanted to without changing their orientation. The fighters would probably be highly maneuverable spheres of some sort, or maybe a little bit like the classic flying saucer (the validity of fighters is a whole different argument best saved for the weapons section). The concept of a directionally oriented hull and a deck layout that mimics current naval designs is absurd in the least, and displays a complete lack of creativity and practical forethought.

Think about the great technological and conceptual leaps mankind has made in the last hundred years with regard to new and creative weapons. We've gone from shooting leaden balls and throwing canisters at each other to vulcan cannons, exploding bullets and M-64 fully automatic grenade launchers; from poisoning the enemy city's water supply and hoping for the best to inventing whole new viral diseases and sending them to the bad guys in precision-guided missiles; from throwing a burning ball of gooey oil and hay in a clay pot to dropping hydrogen bombs from space; from trusting the word of our hopefully unbribed spies and agents to listening to phone conversations and watching foreign leaders screw prostitutes in real time via spy satellite.

Now think about how different things will be by the time a thousand more years have passed and we're sailing between the stars on metal doughnuts. By that time either a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) will have been generally completed, or we'll have scrapped the current Standard Model and Big Bang theory and started looking in some other direction. Either way, we'll probably understand a lot more about how and why gravity works the way it does, and maybe even be able to manipulate it (isn't this the whole premise behind having horizontal decks in the space sims already?) If we can make artificial gravity in space, don't you think we could make ridiculously devastating gravity weapons? Why stop there? Why not make missiles that can jump into hyperspace and go nearly instantly to the target's side and detonate there? Why even have missiles when you can have energy weapons, or weapons that implode subatomic particles or just shoot blobs of anti-matter at the bad guys?

How much sense do fighters really make in this scenario? Why would we have individual pilots out there flying suspiciously fighter-jet-shaped spacecraft? Wtf is the point of having wings on the fighters in space? If we were fighting for the survival of our species (which is the premise in several space sims) then I doubt we would be risking highly intelligent and skilled personnel in senseless fighter attacks. Wouldn't these things be remotely controlled? With advanced holographic technologies, it seems to make more sense to have the pilot in a holodeck somewhere to fly the thing so he can further learn from his mistakes. Of course, in a thousand years, I think that computers could do a much better job of flying than Ace Wonderwing could.

How many times has a game gone into detail about how great the medical technology is? They have these awesome sickbays where they can even clone your dead crew members (complete with their memories intact up to the last time you saved their brain images!), regenerate lost limbs, physically sweep pathogens from your body, repair any type of tissue damage, and even enlarge your male member. Wow! What a great future! But how many times do your crew members still die from relatively minor causes? If we had this kind of medical technology, why couldn't you keep a crew member alive and vigorous for two hundred years or more? He'd be the most experienced guy around and he'd know exactly what to do in any situation. The people would all have brain augmentations, enhanced bodies, huge breasts, etc.

Everybody would be at least as powered up as Wolverine or Cyclopes... if not Superman himself. We could probably breathe in space and shoot laser beams out of our eyes; maybe even fly. If you could regenerate a lost limb, couldn't you regenerate a better limb than the original? If you could do that, you could probably also enhance existing human limbs. If so, then why were Commander Riker and that Klingon guy Worf complete pussies?

Ah... that brings me to my next point...

I can excuse white trash who pretend to have been abducted by aliens for being totally uncreative when they describe their alien assailants. I mean, they're white trash. It's a good thing the government doesn't let them learn how to read, or they might learn something about biology and decide to make up something plausible next time round.

I cannot excuse highly intelligent people who studied computer-science for four years or more and certainly had to take a biology course or two for being totally uncreative. If you remember even remedial biology then you would remember that life is thought to have been invented when the Titans killed Chaos and the giant black river began to swirl. Or you could take the mythological explanation that life began when some molecules were formed a certain way so that automatic self-replication was possible.

Now we don't know everything about Titans, Chaos or amino acids just yet... but then again, we don't know everything about chemistry, physics or Jesse Jackson either. So it is quite plausible that something other than a certain set of amino acids that were discovered prior to 2001 are capable of self-replication (there is an example of a naturally occurring self-replicating clay formation; weird but true). If that is so, it is quite possible that the alien version of DNA aren't even composed of the same four basic acids. If their DNA isn't even remotely similar to ours (and who says they have recognizable DNA anyway?) who's to say that their external bodies and internal organs are similar? I can think of animals here on Earth that are more exotic and original than any of the alien life forms I've ever seen in a space sim game.

What's even goofier is that in these games and even in such scientifically accurate TV shows as 'Star Trek: Voyager', people can successfully mate with the aliens and produce offspring. I share over 99% of my DNA with chimpanzees and Cher and I could never produce offspring with either one. Biologically speaking, I'm more closely related to Cher than rats are to mice, and look how completely different we are on the outside. So what's up with space sim aliens? Why do the aliens have two arms, two legs and a fish-face? Fish are from Earth too, and so are snakes, dogs, cats, and Michael Jackson. So stop giving the aliens human bodies and the head of one of the above-mentioned alternative Earthling life forms. That's uncreative and retarded.

I'll not even get into why all the aliens can speak American English... or why they vocalize thought in the first place instead of having evolved internal biochemical radios to think at each other...

If aliens aren't biologically related to us, why do they think, write, speak and build the same as us? You must have noticed the peculiar structural similarities between the Federation and Ferengi ships, for example. Or the way that all ships from every alien race have nearly identical photon torpedoes, energy weapons, tractor beams, cloaking devices, etc. The aliens even have similar culinary arts!

Probably the most biologically diverse story was Starship Troopers... and that was a pretty shallow story. Even those aliens were Earth-style bugs. But at least they didn't build vertically oriented decks in humanoid ships and invite us to a Klingon-style barbecue. And there was certainly no bug-human intermarriage.

For some reason, aliens (and even robots) in space sims have human-style emotions. Anger, fear, love, hate, etc. What is dumb in not just the existence of these emotions, but the things that prompt them. For instance, if we look to Earthling insectoid behavior, we notice that instead of falling in love, mating insects often murder and eat each other (even this is totally normal human interaction by the standards of behavioral pioneers such as Jeffrey Dahmer). Why don't Verdians do this? Why is the alien symbol for love and peace the Roman heart shape? Did they have a mythology that included Cupid as well?

Why do aliens write the same way we do? They all have characters that represent sounds or ideas. I live in Japan and I see more diverse writing systems than any that have ever been proposed in a space sim. Why not combinatorial ideographs? Superimposed symbolic syllabory or something weird like that? And again, why do they even talk in the first place?

Back to the physical space the player encounters... In these games the player encounters scientific-sounding anomalies. For instance, the player can fly near a black hole, use a worm hole to travel to other dimensions or to far-distant places, jump into hyperspace, find stars, planets, moons, asteroids and comets. That's nice, but it's not the half of what we now know to be out there in space. All of the previously mentioned anomalies have been popularized since the 1920s. Why not have some magnetic monopoles out there in space? Some rifts? Gravity distortions? There's lots of totally cool and weird stuff that could affect gameplay in a very positive way and even teach the players a little bit about astrophysics in the process. Unfortunately, the space sims have none of this, and all of the wonderful and unique space anomalies that are present in these games are old hat, standard space sim stock.

I've yet to see a truly original space game. I've yet to see a true space sim at all. I propose a new name for this genre of games: Space Fantasy. Because from a scientific point of view, these games are every bit as logical as Final Fantasy or Golden Eye.

To keep this bitch session short(ish), I'll just leave it at that. But use your brain a little and you can find countless other reasons why "space sims" aren't sims by any stretch of the imagination. Space sims are occasionally very fun to play, despite the wild inaccuracies and ridiculous sugar-coating of fantasy with physics terms (remember me in that dress?)

Like everyone else on the planet, I have a few dream games I have all worked out and for which I have even written up a few complete design documents, but have absolutely no way of producing. One of my dream games is a wildly inaccurate space sim that at least makes a shallow attempt to be a sim and not a space fantasy. It's too bad that I totally suck at coding and have next to no money/hardware to make my game... I mention this only to say that I have attempted to conceptually design a real space sim at least in theory, and I have found it to be not only possible, but intellectually stimulating to find realistic human solutions to science fantasy problems. I think the players would appreciate the added depth and originality, too. When you go to the store to buy a space sim, it's a lot like choosing between 3D shooters... because they're all the same.

Barf Dader