Enlarge / The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985. (credit: NASA)

Taylor Wang was deeply despondent.

A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade as an American scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had come crashing down around him.

Wang was the principal investigator of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. He had largely built the experiment, and he then effectively won a lottery ticket when NASA selected him to fly on the 17th flight of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-51-B mission. Wang, along with six other crew members, launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1985.

Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it's also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)

Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.

DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.

In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate, which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.

Enlarge / Gillian Anderson's likeness has been promoting Star Citizen since 2015. (credit: Cloud Imperium Games)

Eleven years ago, Wing Commander designer Chris Roberts announced Star Citizen, an online multiplayer game that he said would "change the way people perceive games for the PC." Roberts told Ars' Kyle Orland soon after that he didn't enjoy the four-year development of another hit, Freelancer, because "spending that many years disconnected from your audience, sort of working off by yourself, wasn't creatively fun for me." With Star Citizen, Roberts said he could keep development from dragging on by engaging fans and using a pre-built engine, as opposed to what Roberts said would be "two years" building his own.

Roberts has definitely engaged his audience in Star Citizen, to the tune of $616 million raised from more than 4.8 million "Star Citizens." It has just taken a bit longer than two years to give them a true release.

Roughly 11 years after Star Citizen's initial announcement that included it, then nine years after its first potential release date, Squadron 42, the single-player campaign, is now "feature complete" and has "entered its polish phase." Roberts announced this in a video released Sunday as part of an annual CitizenCon for backers, along with footage from the game and details on its development.