Space Is Huge

I keep seeing people saying that a space game that has a ground game is like building two separate games, and although that might be the case in most of the things we've seen so far, where its like Frontier in Space and WoW on the ground, or something, that doesn't really make it true.

You can replace a spaceship with an animated guy in a spacesuit that wiggles his legs and not only would that be no big deal but he'd be able to fly around like a little jetpack man on the "ground" if he wanted to heh.

Member that little guy in Mechwarrior? Heh.

Or, if yer really old, the little guy that could parachute out of his sopwith camel and bomb bases in Corncob 3D?

And "spaceships" can roll around on the ground too, y'know, there ain't a non-space-flight simulator that doesn't have that bit innit heh.

You only get into that "two separate games" thing if you do it on purpose, its not that way at all by default.

Sure, it wouldn't be much fun to steer a little guy around in EVE Online with the control system they got, but actually it ain't that fun to steer a spaceship around in that game either heh.

Oh I'm just kidding y'know the thing you can do where you orbit stuff at different distances and shoot missiles is okay I guess ahaha.

Anyways its not a default for it to be two separate games, a spaceship is just a toon that can fly around, basically.

Just like a toon on a horse is really just one toon.

And a toon in a car, or two toons in a car, same thing, the toons sitting in the seats are just sorta like "clothes" for the car toon that you actually are in control of, really, right?

And looking at the cockpit controls is just like being able to look out the visor and see the inside of your warrior's purple helmet.

That thing where you can walk around inside your spaceship and look out the windows in SWG while its flying around and shooting at guys is a little different, but that was like, cutting edge Next Generation shit I never seen anything like before, so I have a hard time putting that into this kinda perspective, that's the same kinda thing as being able to run around inside the head of a giant robot or something, I mean, even though is was sorta like a trick with cameras and display screens, you actually could calculate whether or not a laser blast from an enemy ship penetrated the hull and cut your little toon in half and just keep the illusion going that way, if you wanted to.

Or you could make something where a toon could crawl around on the outside of a ship and fire his little laser handgun at enemy ships too, that's really no different than being stuck in a turret on the millenium falcon with your buddy in the pilot seat making it hard for you to shoot shit heh.

But the rest of it is like I was saying, the only difference between a spaceship and an elf is that the elf is usually more animated and they hardly ever let elves fly around 'cause elves would use it to do exploits ahaha.

Anyways why am I even talking about this?

I dunno, I fergot where I was orginally going with this, after all this goddam explanation heh.

I don't even really care about this junk, I'd be happy with a Frontier type game that just let us land on cool planets, like the kind we're discovering in our own solar system, insteada the lame ones from 1950s scifi junk, y'know, with the styrofoam rocks and a couple funny plants and everything.

There's moons around Saturn that rain gasoline, planets with liquid silver seas, planets with oceans under thirty miles of ice, planets with rings that you can see from the surface as gigantic arches that cut across the sky from horizon to horizon, planets with multiple suns that would change the lighting on the surface like that shit in Pitch Black, and all sorts of awesome artshouse crap like that, but we're sticking with the boring junk for some reason, y'know, deserts with caves fulla alien eggs and stuff heh.

I wanna game where my spacesuit tells me that its resisting radioactive seven hundred kilometer an hour cyanide winds and drink coffee in a research base where the Coke-a-Cola thermometer on the wall tells me that its five hundred degrees celsius outside and shit like that.

There's more interesting and imaginative and arthouse shit in space for real than there is in our science fiction shit, man, and you don't even need any goddam stupid cat-headed aliens in a game like that ahaha.

Why the hell am I talking about this now?

I dunno, I guess I just wanna play something COOL before I die, jeeze.

And its not like we really went as far as we could go with the Frontier style thing either, where you just deliver oxygen to space stations and stuff.

Y'know, 'cause you could make the space stations sorta come to life and operate better and hire new people and stuff and ramp up production if you helped them out by bringing 'em the supplies they needed.

They had that kinda simple shit in Starcon, man.

And then that could piss off a rival space station that wasn't doing so well and there'd be all this corporate intrigue and sorta cinematic half-randomly generated quest garbage and stuff with people getting hired to sabotage your ship and shit.

And how about going farther with ship upgrades and letting you design your own ship from bits of crap you salvaged from wrecks and space hulks and crap?

Or how about little kids having their own Robot Bodyguard that they could upgrade and stuff as a pet?

That's just like a ship having a "pet" drone.

Heck the robot could transform into the ship's pet drone when the kid got into the ship, that'd even save database space (AHAHA).

Manning the turrets at the research base as a swarm of alien bugs come pouring through the methane fog and attack the place 'cause some scientist stole a Queen Bug's Egg ain't no different than manning the turrets on the space station as a swarm of spaceships attack, 'specially if the bugs can fly heh.

We coulda done terraforming a million years ago with those moldy old fractal terrain generator thingies.

Goddang it just seems like we got stuck on the Event Horizon of a Black Hole of Suck or something when there's so much fun shit out there we could be doing that really isn't even all that innovative or anything heh.