Spaceward Ho! was the baddest game that ever made it onto my Mac LCIII. Well, I’m going to exclude Civilization, because only Derek played that (on my computer), and I’m going to exclude that game where you were “God” and people continuously dropped from the top of the screen and you could bomb them, run them down with rolling wheels, light them on fire, etc. That game was pretty bad-ass too.

Anyway, the concept of the game is that you are the leader of your own burgeoning empire in outer space! This is something that I often fantasize about (Note: Heidi Klum is involved too, BTW), but what a crazy idea to let you act on those fantasies in a game! You get to start out on a “home planet” and make money and shit. When you get enough goods, you can start building spaceships that explore the planets around you! WOW! Some of these planets have stuff that you can use to build more spaceships and shit! SWEET!

After a while, you have a bunch of planets, spaceships and shit. But the more planets you have, the more work this game is. Like really, who wants to check out what’s going on at every planet each turn? The turns get longer and longer, and you have to manage everything. Why can’t I put someone else in charge? I’m master of the frigging universe? Anyway, there is an upside: you have these scientist, nerd guys that advance your technology and make your spaceships look totally cool! You can name them whatever you want to, so I loaded ’em up with more and more guns. I made:

• The Baddest I
• The Baddest II
• Totally the Baddest
• Baddy Boy
• Baddy-Baddy Bing-Bong

But you have to be careful, because some of the planets are crappy. There can be a bunch of Mars’ for every Earth. If the planets around you suck, then you don’t get to build the good spaceships and shit. If I get a couple of bum planets right away, I just start the game over.

Now, here is where the game kinda SUCKS. So it turns out that there are other people living in the universe, but you can’t see ’em until you discover their planets. WHAT? And get this, they have been developing their own shit too! Not only that, but they have also been building defenses that totally blew the crap out all of my Baddy-Baddy Bing Bongs! What did I ever do to them? Then, these jerks (who I don’t even know!) went and systematically blew up all of my planets. Really, what was the point of my making them anyway? I was perfectly happy on my own home planet with Heidi Klum!

So you can put a lot into this game, and it will just break your heart. But the graphics are still way better than Lode Runner. Plus, I never even mentioned the sweet sound effects. Yeeeeeee-Hah!