Warning: NASA game may encourage bad behaviour

the space agency looks like it will bypass the moon in favour of a trip to an asteroid.

But NASA hopes its space-themed videogame will inspire students to learn science, engineering and mathematics. It released the new game, called Moonbase Alpha on Tuesday, which can be downloaded here.

In the game, you play an astronaut charged with fixing the moon base's power system, which has been damaged by a meteorite impact. It's your task to figure out how to apply the various tools at hand to do this, learning about the architecture of the moon base and its power system along the way.

But playing the game I discovered it's much more fun to bail on your official duties and run amok in the virtual world.

Simply walking and jumping around (press the space bar) is a pleasant way to pass some time, since you get to virtually experience the otherworldly feeling of moving through a low-gravity environment.

Part of the base is spewing a toxic chemical of some sort, and if you stray too close to it you get a warning to keep away. Of course, this made me want to get as close as possible, but when I did, nothing happened. Maybe that's realistic - after all you are sealed inside a space suit with your own oxygen supply.

The most enjoyable thing to do is to drive like a maniac with one of the remote-control lunar rovers, especially on very hilly terrain. You may be tempted to see what happens when you drive into buildings and equipment at high speed, but disappointingly, you just bounce off harmlessly.

The lunar base and the tasks you can carry out are quite limited, so you quickly run out of things to do. But NASA says Moonbase Alpha is merely a proof of concept for a much more ambitious game it is working on called Astronaut: Moon, Mars, and Beyond.

That game will be set farther in the future - 2035 versus Moonbase Alpha's 2020 - and will allow you to play cooperatively with others online in different roles such as physicist, engineer or pilot.

If you have a keen interest in human space exploration, it's worth giving Moonbase Alpha a whirl to get a taste of what a future lunar outpost might be like. But if you have ambitions to become a real astronaut one day, try not to pick up any bad habits. Hopefully for the next version NASA will find a way to make constructive tasks more fun than being a menace to lunar society.