SPM and Liftoff

Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager (SPM) Road to the Moon is the ultimate game of space exploration.

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bumble410
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SPM and Liftoff

Post by bumble410 »

I have been playing and enjoying BASPM lately and it got me to thinking about the old Task Force Games board game "Liftoff", which I use to have a copy of and remember playing. As I recall, there are a lot of similarities between Liftoff and SPM, and so I am asking if anyone else out there remembers playing Liftoff and how it compares to SPM and I also wonder if any of the game designers may have used ideas from the old game in the making of SPM. BTW, love the game and kudos to the designers!!!
nico7550
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by nico7550 »

Liftoff was the original board game who inspire BARIS.
BASPM is inspired from BARIS not from Liftoff
bumble410
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by bumble410 »

Sorry for my stupidity, I was not familiar with BARIS and did not know that it was the off shoot of Liftoff. I have only been into computer war gaming for about a year now and am unfamiliar with many of the older games discussed in the numerous forums that I follow.
sevensterre
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by sevensterre »

Liftoff and BARIS were produced by the same man. Fritz Bonner.
BARIS is a video game conversion of Liftoff by the same designer Fritz Bronner (the boardgame came first).

The video game added more missions, more equipment, training and morale of astronauts. The cost and way missions were accelerated and their rewards was slightly different. The one thing it cut back on was number of players, only 2 in BARIS but 4 in Liftoff. There are some interesting different optional rules in Liftoff (rescue missions etc) which require a bit of house rules to work.

I own both and still enjoy them.

Note that BARIS is now available as freeware open source as the renamed Race into Space (http://www.raceintospace.org/) and continues to be developed and discussed.
This is from a thread on board game geek. I still have liftoff and it was published in 1989. BARIS was out between 1993 and 1995. If I remember right there were two major versions of BARIS, the first on floppy disks and the second came out on CD.

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peyre
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by peyre »

Fritz Bronner, yes.

Correct, BARIS was released on floppy in 1983. It had a couple of patches, then it came out on CD in 1984 with much better movies and some better music, plus assorted other improvements.
N_Molson
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by N_Molson »

Hello Peyre,

First thanks for the work you did on Race Into Space, I played it a lot (and I mean a lot !).

About the dates, I'd say it was 1993 and 1994, am I correct ? I'm not sure that PCs with CD-drive were very common in '84 :wink:

I bought (well, my father bought for me !) the CD version in 1994, I was 11. So yeah, I played it a lot, and thanks to your work, I'm still able to make it run flawlessly on 21th century computers 8)
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peyre
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by peyre »

N_Molson wrote:Hello Peyre,

First thanks for the work you did on Race Into Space, I played it a lot (and I mean a lot !).

About the dates, I'd say it was 1993 and 1994, am I correct ? I'm not sure that PCs with CD-drive were very common in '84 :wink:

I bought (well, my father bought for me !) the CD version in 1994, I was 11. So yeah, I played it a lot, and thanks to your work, I'm still able to make it run flawlessly on 21th century computers 8)
Sorry for the delay responding!

You're very welcome. Working on RIS has been (was?) a labor of love, really. Unfortunately all the programmers on the project disappeared halfway through a major revamp to the game, so development is stuck until someone joins again and finishes the conversions: from CVS to GIT, and converting the data files from hex to plaintext.

Yes, the CD version of BARIS came out in 1994--On May 26, I think. The floppy release and the patches for it all came out in 1993.
peyre
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Re: SPM and Liftoff

Post by peyre »

Incidentally, another notable difference between Liftoff and BARIS was that some of the names of hardware were different, especially for the Soviets, since Liftoff was released in 1989, when the Soviet space program was still secret. BARIS took advantage of some of the early information that came out starting in 1991, though it didn't get everything right. For example, the Soviet 1-person lunar module was named "Razvedchik" in Liftoff--basically a speculative guess at what a lunar lander might have been called. In time for BARIS they learned that the name "L-3" was associated with it, so in BARIS the lander is called L-3. However now we know that L-3 was the name of their lunar landing program as a whole, and the lander itself was called the LK...so in RIS the Soviet one-person lander is now called the LK.
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