Video: When video games got space really, really right
Plus more videos from Outside Xbox.
On account of being a whole bunch of almost nothing, real space is quiet, cold and frictionless. This makes it excitingly dangerous and inconveniently uncinematic, often at the same time, so that popular fiction has a tough time with accurate depictions of space.
Games such as Kerbal Space Program, Mass Effect and Alien: Isolation, however, give authentic spaciness a good go in their own ways, as we find in the video below. We make allowances for noisy space explosions because we are space pedants, not dead inside.
From scientific accuracy to the historic kind, here is Shadow of Mordor DLC The Bright Lord, set millennia before the events of the main game in Middle-Earth's Second Age, where ring-having elf lord Celebrimbor hacks up Uruk warchiefs.
In the video below, we three Tolkien scholars retrace the history of the One Ring, filling its One Ring power meter to activate One Ring mode, much as Frodo would go on to do thousands of years later in his own jewellery-based adventure.
Finally, Show of the Week welcomes rollercoaster sim Screamride to Xbox One with a salute to gaming's most dangerous theme park rides. It's hard to believe anyone takes their kids to an amusement park when they can expect carousels of horse corpses, rollercoasters packed with zombies and ferris wheels full of fighty drunks.
That's this week's pick of Outside Xbox videos, but if you could stand even more, come to us at outsidexbox.com. See you there, Eurogamers!