Can a game be famous and unknown at the same time?? How about! Such a game usually has its own wiki, enthusiasts rivet mods of all calibers to it, and distributions on trackers are never left without seeds. In the comments, everyone knows this game, and all similar games are called “clones”. But when you discover such a game, memorable and interesting, with all its fan forums and a mountain of accompanying materials, it’s time to ask yourself the question: “How is it that I’m hearing about all this for the first time??»
Usually, as a “Known Unknown Game” for an article, I choose one that has not yet been covered on stopgame. In case Space Station 13 there are as many as 7 reviews on the site! (It’s no less than eight, if you’re reading these lines). This is comparable to the number of regular players in the early years of the game’s existence. And even now, when the total online on all servers in the world is usually expressed in a three-digit value, the number of reviews and reviews on the Internet does not lag behind this figure. And all because, after playing Space Station 13, It’s simply impossible not to share your impressions.
Don’t be afraid of English, there are Russian servers. This picture is here only to show the full interface
The space research station is bustling with life. Researchers are researching, loaders are loading, chemists are chemicalizing. A security guard neutralizes a miner who was chasing a clown, who took the pickaxe from the miner, with which the clown hit the cook for poisoning the clown with a suspicious jelly. All these heroes will soon be picked up by an urgent team of doctors led by the head physician (all except the security guard, who slipped on the wet floor and flew into the wide open airlock through the efforts of a secret Syndicate agent secretly working as a cleaner at the station). Each character is controlled by a player who must play the chosen role. Therefore, an ordinary lawyer will not be eager to fight with lightsabers, and the head of staff cannot independently develop a vaccine against a deadly virus. More precisely, they can, but they will not do this if they do not want to incur the wrath of the server administrators.
The captain is about to depart. He sees toxins burning. Walked into them and burned.
Flammable gas researchers blew up their department. Again. Cap noticed the fire and decided to deal with it – he’s in charge here! No one explained to the captain under what pressure the burning gases were locked in the compartment.
Space Station 13 – exclusively online game. In principle, there cannot be computer players here (until a full-fledged artificial intelligence is created in the world). Roleplaying (roleplay) in itself makes the game very diverse. That’s a nasty old caretaker. Here’s a goofball nerd. But a bespectacled researcher, terribly afraid of aliens, women and management. Even the onboard intelligence of the ship is played out by a person. You’ll never guess what idea someone will come up with to implement this time. While somewhere, under the leadership of the head of the research department, they are testing a set of means for surviving in a vacuum without a spacesuit, some assistant sneaks into the room with the sleeping captain and leaves him in handcuffs and with a box on his head.
I thought being a test subject for cutting-edge genetic research was a good idea. The first doubts crept in when the geneticist dragged a loudly swearing bald brute, glowing from within, out of the modifier. He immediately went into convulsions and soon lost consciousness. The geneticist calmly dragged him into a cage with laboratory monkeys and invited me to take a place in the modifier.
The first thing a geneticist does in his job is to turn a laboratory monkey into a human. Then, manipulating her genes, he looks at the resulting result. Seizures and spontaneous swearing are a side mutation, Tourette’s syndrome.
But Space Station 13 wouldn’t https://wager6casino.co.uk/ be half as interesting if it were based solely on the ingenuity of the players in this sandbox. The fact is that the game takes place in separate rounds, and almost every round something dangerous and unusual happens. For example, a deadly virus begins to spread throughout the station. Or strangers. Or a riot. Or the ship’s AI goes crazy and tries to kill all the people. An attack by a special squad of the Syndicate, a conspiracy of mysterious cultists, the devouring of the station by a mysterious super-creature – there are many different kinds of disasters, I will not list them all, most of them end the same way: chaos, panic, mass evacuation and a lot, a lot of drama (pretended tragedy, real fun). In addition, when you enter the game, you may find that you have the role of a traitor (traitor). In this case, you have specific tasks (kill player Alan Nevelly and steal the station blueprints, for example) and a set of cool spy gadgets. With a couple of traitors on the team, any disaster becomes even more epic. Although even having coped with the destructive circumstances, the team will certainly bring itself to problems: either the singularity will break free from the engine, or poisonous gas will enter the atmosphere. Usually the round ends when the evacuation shuttle rescues the survivors who managed to reach it. A round lasts approximately 20 minutes to 2 hours.
One of my friends escaped from a prison satellite with the help of gloves, a screwdriver and such-and-such a mother. Unfortunately, he died while talking about this in a bar over a glass of an experimental cocktail with sulfuric acid.
Many people died from this cocktail. Someone just added an extra zero to the drink recipe on the wiki for Space Station 13. (And one of my friends actually escaped from prison somehow like this)
All this fun is watched by moderators and server administrators. They carefully look out for players who violate the rules of conduct. And at the same time they add a little destruction if the next disaster does not seem impressive enough to them. Sometimes, instead of the usual troubles, they arrange unusual events. For example, you may need to temporarily shelter a girl with superpowers, or explore a mysterious alien artifact. Or maybe a bored admin will just give everyone a laser gun and say “Fight”.
– Professor Gorski, do you have the results of the victim’s autopsy??
– Yes, detective, just finished. A deep scan of the body revealed that the victim died as a result of injuries received from 74 blows from a small blunt object, believed to be an oxygen tank.
SICK, in short. Anyone can kill with a canister or a toolbox, but you will need to click the mouse many, many times.
Unfortunately, the game also features monstrous graphics, hellish controls and endless lag. Space Station 13 was written by many people independently of each other on a very non-standard social gaming platform BYOND (Build Your Own Network Dream). The game was essentially created by fans. Space Station 13 somewhat similar to a pile of amateur mods for itself. Sometimes individual parts do not interact well with each other, especially new ones. To explain why everything is so deplorable, I will have to immerse the reader in the difficult history of the creation of this creation.
A security guard was on his way to a botanist to arrest him for growing narcotic weed. I looked into the compartment, and there they were chewing tomatoes. Well, he reported to the boss and moved on. Just think – in hydroponics, tomatoes chew the body of a botanist.
One of the varieties of tomatoes that can be bred is killer tomatoes. These stupid and dangerous creatures are almost impossible to destroy: they are protected by the crookedness of the coder who invented them.
Story
Birth Space Station 13 hidden by fog. I had to conduct a whole investigation to more or less trace the development of the game. So, it all started with a certain person under the nickname exadv1. It’s hard to say how much he did. There are rumors that he was simply preparing some independent work on the distribution of gases for the university. I looked into the game code and am inclined to believe this rumor – the part responsible for the atmosphere is completely different from everything else and is more suitable for illustrating a scientific project than for a game. Nevertheless, he released it to the cursed coders BYOND at the beginning of 2003, and several unknown people were doing something on a single server. The source code was constantly changing hands and changing. Over time, it even really became like a game, acquired a large map, and about a dozen players sometimes gathered together on it. By 2005, a lot had been implemented: basic professions, trainers, plasma and other features. And then the source code was lost. exadv1 didn’t know where he was, and then he didn’t care anymore.
Fortunately, a certain heroic person (I couldn’t find a nickname) restored the game almost in full. Either he was grabbing resources by playing on a server that was still active, or he simply asked nicely for data from Tom Hair, author BYOND. In 2007, the game became interesting on the Something Awful forums, but you will need registration and access to the archives in order to try to find the first topics about Space Station 13. The unusual concept attracted many players. Development went neither shaky nor slow, until someone thought of publishing the source code on sourceforge.net for free modification in 2008. From that moment on, the game began to develop at the speed of a cancerous tumor (and in approximately the same direction). Innovations were added in a mad flow of ideas, discarded, rewritten. Servers Goonstation (or Gibbed) perfectly reflected the essence and style of Something Awful itself: there you could throw feces, rape aliens and the like. Developers have come and gone, leaving a legacy of pieces of code powered by gum, commas, and imagination.
It’s a miracle. It’s a fucking miracle that the game even compiled.
— Tom Hehre, creator of the BYOND engine
These were approximately Tom’s first words in the community Goonstation.
Around 2010, the anonymous people from 4chan decided to set up their own station. But it wasn’t ordinary residents of Forchan’s sewer that took up the implementation, but role players. They added roleplaying and tidied up everything they could get their hands on. 4chan one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and development /tg/station was carried out even faster, although it’s hard to imagine. The code was rewritten by a third almost monthly. Soon they broke away Baystation 12 with very strict roleplaying and a three-story station. Together with Goonstation, the development of which also did not stand still, these three forks are the pillars of the game. They constantly mix, steal each other’s features and are transferred by banned players. Countless other game implementations originate from these servers. It is unlikely that any of them now have anything in common with the first version from exadv1.
According to the background on the servers Goonstation And /tg/station, artificial gravity at the station is maintained by clowns. The very fact of their existence.
Most security chiefs on servers Goonstation And /tg/station believe that all clowns commit crimes. The very fact of their existence.
The clown is a professional troll and griefer. He has every opportunity to hurt someone with his “pranks”. It is useless to explain why they are needed from a plot point of view – they are needed only for extreme fans.
Of special note is the gaming community, which has absorbed everything the best worst features of anonymous communication. Players in Space Station 13 hate each other. Absurd frenzy and total contempt permeate all communication, from the usual discussion of someone’s mothers on forums, to the distribution of lifelong bans by admins. Against this background, the large Russian community Animus Station 13 does not stand out much. There are also smaller Soviet Station and Nanotrasen Station (where does the link lead, lol), but who cares about them? Newbie assistants are not liked for stupid questions and lack of roleplaying, old role-players are disliked for being closed in their circle of famous players, and the rest are not liked just like that. In advance.
The assistant heard cries for help from the depths of the church compartment. The ship’s priest was locked in a cramped niche behind a glass partition. He asked to press the button that opens the door. The assistant pressed. A second later, he was already watching the screaming priest, who was carried out into outer space through a hole that suddenly opened behind his back.
This “niche” was intended for the ceremonial departure of the dead on their last journey. Well, the assistant didn’t know that the door opened with a different button.
I hope I haven’t scared the reader too much, because despite all the difficulties, Space Station 13 it’s worth hanging in there for a long time. No two rounds are the same. SS13 – like an endless collection of epic stories. After several games it is impossible to shake off the desire to tell someone about your adventures. But here’s an important piece of advice: to quickly and easily get into the gameplay, read the manuals and wiki first.
P. S. When playing, I usually don’t stay on one game for long, “sucking” all the possibilities to the bottom over a dozen busy days. IN Space Station 13 I played for almost a year in total. And this is the best possible recommendation I can give to the game.