Apollo 18: The Moon Missions - Part 2: Mission Disk

Would you care to take this NEW Saturn V vehicle for a test drive?

The second CD, the "Taurus Littrow Mission Disk", is where the real meat of this program is. When you boot up the game, you're greeted with the Project Two Interactive logo, followed by a CGI flythrough of a cheap KSC model. They just casually have a Saturn V and launch tower out on the parking lot. You take a little elevator ride to the top and zoom right in... then the main menu appears. "Welcome to the Apollo Manned Spacecraft Center (weren't we already here?). To attempt a Saturn V launch, press '(Start) New Game', enter your name, and select the 'Lift-Off!' button on this screen." Get used to that, as you have to repeat this sequence every time you exit out of a simulator or flight. You can skip the FMV, of course, but... you know.

    After doing what the narrator just said, the window that follows asks whether you want to practice a simulator you've passed, or continue to the next one. At this point only the latter is available, so just hit OK.
    (Note: in this playthrough I use a previous handle of mine, which I chiefly used to avoid detection early on, though since I ended up associating my accounts elsewhere with this same handle, it seems kind of redundant. It's me playing this game, you gotta trust me on this.)

    After an introductory paragraph reiterating the training process, you are immediately faced with a true-or-false test. Yes. For each of these you are required to get at least 17 correct answers to pass. Thanks to my education over the last hour or so (and indeed over several years), I only manage to get one wrong. Can you spot which one that is?

    Then you enter the Apollo flight simulator for the first time. You are surrounded, as before, with rows of big yellow buttons, some already switched on. Don't touch any of them now, just click the box marked "AOS" and type "go" when the test conductor calls your name. The launch director guides you through switching on the individual systems as the mission clock counts down to launch. And with that, I've already described most of "Apollo 18"'s gameplay: you press buttons. A line from Apollo 13 might aptly define it: "Three hours of boredom followed by seven seconds of sheer terror." Those seven seconds of terror being either a rather fastidious arcade minigame, or a breakdown on board ship which you're expected to know how to fix.

Panel CSM-3. Note that the "Exit" button doesn't appear in the sim.

At T-3 minutes, the flight director gives you an item to follow in lieu of the launch director, while indicating the time to launch in the same breath. Wait, why is he giving an order at this point if the launch director is controlling... the launch? Was this a last-minute addition? Or did they just forget to record that line with Jim and Allan had to fill in?

    Here, you are also given your first set of gimbal rates to copy down into the computer. There are twelve sets of gimbal angles to copy in the entire game, selected at random during your flight. At this point I flub the input - I was told "X=0.15" and tried typing in "X=0.015", only realising when I tried to type the 5 in that I screwed up. Somehow I managed to gloss over my blunder by typing "X" again followed by the correct number, then proceeding as normal.

    I should point out here that in the simulator, the computer stops you from pressing buttons irrelevant to the task at hand. If you keep on pressing the wrong buttons - you're allowed to make four mistakes - you're ejected from the sim and have to start the test over.

    After your imaginary ship reaches orbit, the test ends and you are permitted to continue to the next one: this time at the other end of the mission, the re-entry simulation. As well as pressing buttons, you also take control of the RCS engines during the re-entry interface. On the monitor, there are two circles. The white circle spins around erratically. This represents your "angle of attack". Using the two arrows on the data display, you have to get the white circle to linger within the dark blue circle. There's a red line attached to the white circle too, I'm not sure what that indicates. There are a few other statistics as well, but just keep the white circle in the dark blue circle; that, I find, always works.

Panel CSM-2 during the re-entry interface.

And just to wind up everybody with OCD, the "Water Pack Beacon" button moves several pixels away from its original position when pressed.

    Then comes the second true-or-false test. This time, I manage to get two wrong, but am still one over the passing grade. This is followed by the docking sim. After pressing more buttons, you switch on the "ALIGN SIGHT" and are greeted with a view of the docking window. The LM nested in the S-IVB can be seen outside at the very left. Using the directional buttons at the bottom of the screen, you fire the RCS engines so that the LM is within the docking reticule, and push "FWD" to bring it within range. It always moves down and to the right as you approach. That, and it gets less crusty.

Docking, part one

 As you close in on the LM, the view switches to the outside, looking at the CSM and S-IVB from the side. As before, the D-pad on the screen is used to move your craft. On the bottom right, a radar with a dot shows where you’re pointing in relation to your target. You have to get that dot right in the centre. No easy feat when one press of the left or right button sends you careening off in that direction. With up or down it's fine. It’s probably a CPU thing. I wouldn't be surprised.

Docking, part two. The CSM is the most accurate looking thing on this screen.

Anyway, this sequence is completed when you manoeuvre the CSM to the centre of your target with a minimal Z velocity. You pass as soon as you make probe contact. You can reverse the CSM to pull the LM out, but for the purpose of this test, it doesn't matter.

    Then comes the Lunar Liftoff sim. More button pressing. More gimbal setting.

    After the last true-or-false quiz, things start to get interesting. The Lunar Landing sim starts without the usual preliminary speech from the test conductor, placing you directly before pitchover. Switching the "ALIGN SIGHT" on, you are faced with a radar display showing a line rendering of the lunar surface. Your position is marked with a yellow line. You are instructed to proceed to X:133, Y:93. It is always these coordinates to which you are sent every flight, so don't worry about memorizing the lunar map. Here's where it's easy to mess up: you start out flying forward, or rather north on the map. You eventually need to slow down before you overshoot your target. You have to use the "FWD" and "REV" buttons. If you use the up and down arrows, you go up or down in altitude. The first time, you’re probably using the down arrow to slow down only to realise too late that you're sailing down for a landing in the middle of nowhere!

Lunar landing, part one

Arriving at X:133, Y:93, your target is marked with a red line. Position yourself on top of the red line and start descending. You can reduce your thrust, but that usually sends you plummeting with little room to correct yourself. As the map grows, you find that you're still slightly outside the target zone and have to move south a touch. Using the "REV" and down arrow is easier.

As soon as you pass below 5,000 feet, the screen changes to an outside view similar to the docking sequence. The LM is falling toward the ground and draining fuel rapidly. At this rate you have mere seconds to correct yourself and land in front of the previous landing site. Landing near it is not enough - you have to be right on the mark. Even the manual can't decide how close is enough.

If the real NASA was this indecisive, we'd be in so much trouble.

And again, you're heading toward the ground at an alarming rate of knots. You have to slow down FAST - a descent velocity over 10 ft/sec will smash your lander to pieces. You could try to raise the main engine thrust to control it, but your fuel drains that much faster, and before you know it, you're crashing anyway. I found that setting the engine to 20% is a good start. Even then the RCS is pretty powerful: one burst of the upper RCS will push your lander 40 ft/sec in that direction, so most of the time I'd try over-correcting myself only to crash the LM.

Lunar landing, part two

Figuring that the VM's CPU was too fast for this game, I decided I should find a program that could slow it down enough so that someone of my reflexes could land the LM in "Apollo 18". I settled on using Cpukiller 3. Not perfect, but the only one that VMware could handle. Since the shareware trial version was limited to 20 minutes per session, I ended up making a keyboard shortcut I could use to boot Cpukiller during the actual flight, when I needed it. It's the cheap-ass solution, but it worked for me.

    By the by, the bottom right camera window is supposed to be the view from the lunar rover. It just duplicates the scene from the LM's position. I honestly have no idea what this is for.

    Anyway, after no less than 16 attempts, I finally landed the LM in a satisfactory way. After MCC confirms touchdown, a message box tells you to "Stand by for high clearance message."

    It's an FMV briefing from the US Department of Defense. Dr. Mary Hanson (Director of NASA Special Projects) issues background information in regards to the upcoming Apollo 18. Apparently, the last three Apollo missions each deployed a surface deep space radio telescope, all working in conjunction with one another, presumably in a triangular pattern over the southernmost part of the Sea of Serenity. 18 months after Apollo 17, the telescopes received a strong signal from a nearby galaxy, before dying completely. The National Security Agency, along with NASA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared a report to the President outlining a secret mission to retrieve the Radio Telescope Transmitter 301 (hereafter the RTT-301)'s hard drive. They believe that the hard drive contains an alien message.

Classified information.

General Knapp, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is here today to brief you on your mission. Interestingly, General Knapp is played by William Frederick Knight, who you may know as a voice actor in a lot of anime dubs, including the Pioneer/Animaze version of Akira. You might know him as the English voice of Daisuke Aramaki from the Ghost in the Shell franchise, or Danzō Shimura from the Naruto series. He was also, apparently, one of the crewmen in the Star Trek episode "The Naked Time", among other things. So, he was an actor and vocal artist of some renown. Sadly, with his passing in 2022, the stories of his involvement in the "Moon Missions" series are likely lost forever.

William Knight as General Knapp

Thanks to your high security clearance and your training, you've been selected to fly Apollo 18, probably alone. In lieu of an actual EVA outing, you'll retrieve the RTT-301 with a remote arm mounted on the descent stage. Wouldn't that require you to go outside and pick it up? Or does it somehow bring the RTT into a collection chamber inside the ascent stage? Who knows?

    "Now I need to remind you that this is a top-secret DoD mission - our cover story is that we're launching a routine resupply mission for Skylab."

    Unfortunately, the cover story has enough holes for people to see through it. There's nobody on Skylab to resupply to; it's been abandoned since February 1974. If Skylab 5 had launched, it would only have been a 20-day mission, so still nobody would be on board at the time "Apollo 18" takes place. And if it was a Skylab mission, wouldn't they use a Saturn IB to propel the CSM into orbit? The use of a whole Saturn V would imply something... much bigger.

    (Yes, I know Skylab was still in use at this point in For All Mankind, but that's another story.)

    So, in all likelihood, it doesn't take very long for the public to twig that another lunar mission is taking place. Apollo 18 is on!

    (The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project may be a little late...)

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We join Apollo 18 on the launchpad at six minutes to liftoff. Now that you can hear MCC working in the background, and you get actual feedback from your button presses, things start to feel a little more alive. If you've seen the movie Alien, you may recognise some of the sounds as being recorded from the Nostromo computer (aka Mother).

    This time the stakes are for keeps. Your job is to launch from Cape Canaveral, make the journey to the moon and land, then come back, all in one go. No save states either. Well... not on a real machine, but you get the picture. If you die out there, you'll have to do the whole thing all over again. Not the training, of course, that’s for games like TFX, the more hardcore flight sims.

    So don't go clicking that big "Exit" button on Panel CSM-3, either. That's just one way to abort the whole mission, and send a billion dollars in taxpayer's money down the drain.

    Unlike a real Apollo lunar mission, which can take at least 8 days, Apollo 18 here only takes about an hour to complete. This is probably thanks to the rocket and spacecraft being powered by nuclear fusion; they just didn't want to divulge more classified information, that's all.
    (Ok, that's never stated, but how else are we gonna explain how it takes 30 seconds for this ship to make a full orbit around the Earth? Seriously!)

Apollo 18 plays out as follows.

    After listening carefully to the launch director, pressing buttons and setting up the spacecraft, you hear Jack King repeat the countdown as heard during the Apollo 11 launch. The Saturn V rocket lifts off and pitches toward the east. It only takes about three seconds to clear the tower (the actual Saturn V took ten). The noise is ear-splitting; the screen is vibrating.

    We are treated to a brief view of the rocket flying through the air. It doesn't look too bad for early 90s CGI.

Apollo 18 lifts off

The first stage, S-IC, is jettisoned by the pilot at T+1:45. It is seen falling from the rest of the craft and exploding a short distance away. Considering that the empty parts of the rocket are just going to fall into the Atlantic anyway, self-destructing them seems kind of superfluous... although it does mean there's less trash ending up in the ocean.

Were all the stages rigged to explode whether they were jettisoned or not?

The second stage (S-II) is ignited and propels the rocket onward into the atmosphere. At this point during the launch, the pilot jettisons the Launch Escape System. If a failure were to occur after this point, a nominal abort and return to Earth can be achieved. Incidentally, the adapter skirt underneath the S-II is also jettisoned, but this little detail is omitted.

    In turn, at around T+3:05, the S-II is manually jettisoned and also self-destructs. The rest of the craft is seen carrying on into low-earth orbit. The Launch Escape Tower is still visible, despite it being jettisoned moments ago.

    When about three quarters of the S-IVB's fuel is burnt, the engine shuts off. At this point, your vehicle is already approaching the Canary Islands fast, and somehow speeding up.

    After two short orbits, and properly configuring the spacecraft, the S-IVB is fired once more, burning the rest of its fuel and catapulting the launch vehicle out of Earth orbit. Be sure to type in the gimbal angles correctly! A wrong angle will send you on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri.

    Now that 18 is well on its way, the crew manually jettisons the final stage of the Saturn V rocket. Note how the fairing is depicted in the FMV as a flat grey rather than the white cone it actually is. Immediately following this, you switch the "ALIGN SIGHT" on and go into the two-part docking minigame, as described before. This time, the CSM is spinning slightly in a clockwise direction. After correcting this spin, you move in towards the LM.

    At this point, be sure not to fly so fast. If you make the approach at a close rate of -5, for example, the CSM not only crashes and burns, but it resembles a completely different spacecraft. I'm not even joking. And then management has the gall to request your dead atoms to return to the flight simulators! The nerve of some people!

I've just smashed myself to pieces, and still you ask more of me?

The second half of the docking sequence takes place as before. This manoeuvre is time and fuel critical: you only have two minutes to complete it. If you fail, your life is forfeit. I wish I was kidding. I learned that the hard way when recording my "FIRST LOOK" video, although I never showed you the cutscene afterwards.

    You know, it's so easy to die in this game, and every time you die, you have to see the message the General sends to your estranged family. Like they want it to sink in: just the fact that you couldn't perform what should be a simple docking maneuvre means that your life is forfeit!

    But if you do perform a successful Lunar Module docking, you now are confronted with something they didn't teach you at school: operating the STAR FINDER. "Align star map and lock coordinates for IMU burn data."

    Looking through the docking window as before, the crosshair in the docking reticule is replaced with three circles. Using the RCS thrusters, you find a trio of stars that match the position of the circles in the reticule, and click "STAR FINDER" to lock in the position. Simple enough. After setting up the gimbals and engine thrust, the first course correction burn occurs. Now do the STAR FINDER and gimbals again for the second burn.

    After these two burns, you briefly lose signal from Mission Control for a bit. When they come back, you are cleared to enter the LM for power-up. Using the button to move you into the LM, you are guided through pressing more buttons, setting gimbals and thrust again, etc. The CSM and LM will then automatically undock.

    After a go/no-go, the PDI burn starts. The screen starts shaking again. The LM is at hi-gate... then at lo-gate... then at pitchover... finally you're instructed to turn the ALIGN SIGHT on, and the two-part lunar landing minigame starts. At this point, I started pressing the keybinds I set to turn Cpukiller on so as not to make the second half nigh impossible. You can see the big red label flashing in the top left in the video. The moment I switched to the surface view, the tension started to ratchet up considerably. As one can imagine, a utility like this does not guarantee success. There was every chance I'd still crash and have to do the whole thing over (if not for save states, that is). I was not immune to over-correcting myself when I was close to the target point. I even ran out of RCS fuel and had to hope I didn't just blow it. But it was enough. The LM came to a soft landing, right on target.

    This triumph is followed by two FMVs of the Lunar Module descending on and settling on the lunar surface.

The Bagel has landed.

Don't get comfortable here; right away you deploy the robot arm, a dirty great thing which picks up the RTT (which looks nothing like what they showed me in the briefing!), and then it's on to setting up for the ascent phase. After proper spacecraft ascent configuration, and a go/no-go, the ascent engine burns, thrusting the crew off the lunar surface. The computer subsequently guides the Lunar Module into low lunar orbit, coasting toward a rendezvous with the Command Module.

    Here comes the docking minigame again, this time from the LM perspective. The Lunar Module uses its remaining RCS propellant to gently dock with the Command Module. Not me, however - I bounce off the CSM on the first approach. I ended up having to translate my ship a bit more for it to count the second time.

    (You know, there is every possibility that I was just doing this wrong when I played this in VirtualBox.)

    After returning to the CM and setting up the gimbals once more, the Lunar Module is jettisoned for a crash landing on the moon. The CSM looks completely different in the FMV. The Service Propulsion engine is fired once again, placing a spacecraft into a return trajectory to Earth.

    The return flight takes place over two more rounds of STAR FINDER and gimbal settings. The Command Module then begins to enter the Earth's atmosphere in the re-entry interface. As the screen judders and the angle of attack spins as I try to correct it, the alarms for "NAV FAULT" and "FUEL LOW" come on. I realise I must be doing something wrong. Even the display says "Entry Corridor Error". I must've been doing it wrong. But somehow, it didn't matter. Mission Control came back on the radio, directing me toward deploying the parachutes. The three chutes gently land the Command Module at the recovery site, and concludes the mission with one last FMV. The CM floats toward the sea as a Sea King helicopter flies overhead... then you get a message on screen.

 

Again, did anyone actually get any of these patches? Without any proof of success, it appears easy to order one anyway, whether you deserved it or not. Come to think of it, this is another one of those things that wasn't set in stone. The manual and the help file offer somewhat different sets of mission patches. But the kicker is that aimgames.com (viewed via the Wayback Machine) has NO information on any patches for sale whatsoever, which makes me suspect they made all this up and never followed through on it.

How did they plan so much so far ahead and still fall short?

    The real end screen is just a single button that says "I actually made it!" which takes you back to the menu, ending the game on a flat note.

    By the way... you don't even need to capture the RTT to get this win screen. Even if you have to abort the mission, just making it to the moon and back is sufficient.

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Now, what are the odds of you pulling this whole thing off without some kind of hitch somewhere along the line? I can’t give you an exact number.

    In recording footage of this game, I used several save states, and did manage to catch a couple of failures, including one at launch that required me to use the LET to abort. If I tried to find and record all of them, not only would I not have finished the videos, I would probably have picked up a number of repeats, which would get boring even for you. Most would boil down to you needing to fix the problem within a matter of second. If you fail, your ship invariably explodes. Imagine if your radio system failed, you neglect to recycle it, and your whole ship bursts into a fireball.

    Looking at the FMVs on the disk (via the Motion Pixels player), it looks like there are also a few other ways to die that I haven't discovered. The LM supposedly can fall down a mountain, or into a crater. No idea how these can be triggered, and I’m not sure if they can. Other cutscenes that go unused include the not-CSM from the docking crash FMV actually performing the dock correctly and extracting the LM from the not-S-IVB, as well as the docking crash with the vehicles swapped. You’d think that would’ve played in the appropriate spot, but no, of course not.

    In fact, there's a lot of content on the disk that is unused. Not just swathes of images, but a good deal of Visual Basic code and output logs too. I wrote a bunch of pages on The Cutting Room Floor to document it all, or at least what I could find, but I'm afraid I've only just scratched the surface.

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This could have been a decent game. A full-fledged Apollo flight simulation is not an unheard-of concept. Others do it with much more realism and accuracy, like NASSP for Orbiter, and, most recently, "Reentry: An Orbital Simulator". These rely on official NASA data. So does "Apollo 18", apparently, for what the box purports. The front touts that technical assistance was courtesy of NASA's Public Affairs Office, and several staff members at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center are credited in the manual. And yet for all they did, it just feels like something I'd churn out when I was in my college days, if I had the drive. It's just a very unpolished game.

    This is the kind of game that has its own feel, its own identity. You do get the feeling that you're controlling a spaceship to the moon, just not the Apollo one, as such. It's much more simplified than is let on. There's no DSKY computer anywhere to be found. If you could look out of a window every once in a while, that would be something. There’s a "CAMERA" button on the CSM, but it's not quite the same. It all feels sort of impersonal.

    I know I'm being picky, but compare this to something like "Shuttle: The Space Flight Simulator". Not only did that also come on two disks and had a large manual, it also had everything else most other flight simulators have - realistic controls, realistic timeframe, cameras, a variety of missions, and it holds up well today despite the advances that were made in the Space Shuttle program afterwards. And that was several years before "Apollo 18", so something of this calibre is worth investing in. Something like "Shuttle" but with Apollo hardware would've blown me away as a kid fiddling with DOS games. For now, however, I have more modern programs to play with.

    This leads me to another point: did anything that was planned for this game come to any kind of fruition? According to producer Allan Kuskowski's website, "Apollo 19" was produced, but aside from a brief video, there is no proof of its existence that I could find anywhere. Although in fact it is shown under a different publisher, TekStar Games - another publisher that’s shrouded in mystery.

    Incidentally, his showreel on YouTube (below) shows an earlier build of "Apollo 18" which appears to be less story-driven and more styled like a simulator, with specific landing types listed for play.

The data gathered by Apollo 18 and 19 apparently point toward a manned mission to Mars. Henceforth came the follow-up, simply titled "Mars Mission Simulation", from iiRE Productions. This game got its own website, several demos were up for download... but the game was never commercially released. I did get in touch with Stephen Russell (who did the AVI processing on "Apollo 18") at iiRE well over ten years ago now, and he did prove its existence. Foolishly, I neglected to ask him why it was never released, but it stands to reason that if "MMS" never came out, then it’s highly unlikely that "Apollo 19" did, either.

    However, developer AIM Software DID release two other spaceflight-related titles: "NASA Museum" and "U.S. Spaceflight". Both are more encyclopaedic in nature, and I'll be diving into them at a later date.

    But "Apollo 18" will always be a classic that may never improve with age. Most people will probably never go back to it, but I have, and I probably will again. That's just who I am. I look at old things that nobody else does. I reach into the dark depths of the software library of my youth, whether it be something I've owned for as long as I can remember, or something I learned about in passing that I decided to track down. They'll always be a treasure to me in some form or another. As long as nobody else has heard of it, you'll always find it here at WiWSOFT.

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By the way, I also tried playing it on a W95 VM in PCem v17, and it works good until the audio starts stuttering, which slows your whole game down and gets incredibly grating. Fortunately, it's not constant; it seems that it stutters worse on some screens than on others. The strange thing is that it runs beautifully when the screen is vibrating, though I can't imagine why that would help. Also, the FMVs play improperly, with artifact stripes running down the picture. They play normally in a window, just not in full screen. Undoubtedly it depends on the configuration of the VM itself, but since I use PCem for other things, I don't dare change anything. Regardless, I can still play a full game on this; I just couldn't get a good video from it. (If only I could do the docking right...)

    Another emulation I tried is DOSBox-X, where the FMVs play as they should, as does the gameplay - mostly - but the sound is choppy when moving from screen to screen, and you end up not hearing a command in full. Have the UPDATE screen ready for this one.

    Simply going back to VirtualBox is out of the question. Since version 7, support for Windows 9x is very limited. More critically, I simply cannot get the sound to work on a new Win95 VM. It just doesn't work. I tried; the audio just refuses to play. You can't play this game with the sound off. On top of that, the Motion Pixels codec doesn't work either. I suppose I could go back to an earlier VirtualBox version, but I just don’t have the patience for that now.

    I also attempted to build a VM in 86box and play the game in that, and it started out fine at first, but then the entire thing slowed to a crawl. My inveterate fiddling just made it worse. I'm sure there's an optimal configuration for this game in this emulator, but I'm no expert on old PC building. If you think you can do it better than me, you can give it a try - I uploaded the CD-ROMs to the Internet Archive long ago. By this point they're also on MyAbandonware too, if you prefer to download it from them.

    If I have any luck, or find anything new, I'll post an update. I'll probably put together a video of me blowing myself up in a number of ways, just to show those FMVs. They were uploaded to YouTube long ago, but the compression has not been kind to them. There's a few I don’t think are used, actually. Take a look.