Computer Spacegames

Computer Spacegames is a book containing the following type-in games:

• Starship Takeoff: the player is trying to take off from a strange planet in an alien ship. The game tells the planet's gravity and the player has to guess the force necessary to take off successfully in 10 tries;
• Intergalactic Games: working for New Century TV, the player has to launch a satellite choosing the right angle and speed to transmit the Intergalactic Games;
• Evil Alien: Elron, the Evil Alien, is invisible and the player has to defeat him with one of last 4 bombs. To do so, the player has to enter the X, Y and Distance position where Elron is thought to be and shoot;
• Beat the Bug Eyes: space bugs represented by "OO" at the screen appear in four different places. To beat them, the player has to press the corresponding key (1 to 4) whenever they appear;
• Moonlander: in order to land a lunar module the player has to input how much fuel the computer should waste to slow the module down. The computer tells the player how high the lunar module still is, how fast it goes and how much fuel there is left;
• Monsters of Galacticon: as 4 different types of monsters appear, the player has to choose one of the 3 weapons available to blast them;
• Alien Snipers: alien sniper ships are jamming the player's radar making it give false readings of their positions. The radar gives the player a letter (the false position) and a number (a code) and the player has to think what letter to press to shoot a laser in the correct position the alien sniper is;
• Asteroid Belt: the player has to destroy asteroids by pressing the key corresponding to the number of stars which are shown on screen;
• Trip into the Future: traveling in a spaceship nearly as fast as light, the player has to calculate how many light years must be spent traveling and how fast the ship has to travel in order to match a given number of years must elapse before he or she returns;
• Death Valley: the player has to fly along the death valley as it twists and turns, avoiding to hit its walls and disintegrate;
• Space Mines: this is a management game. The player must make the colony survive for 10 years by buying food, selling ore and buying and selling mines, keeping the people satisfied;
• Space Rescue: In this game the player must program his or her ship to travel while he or she is put in a deep sleep. If everything goes right in the trip, when awake the player will have to program the expenditure of the remaining energy to land the ship;
• Touchdown: the only game in this collection to use proper graphics, this is an adaptation of Lunar Lander.

The book has educational value as it explains how the game program works, shows ways of modifying the code and proposes problems to be solved in each game, such as altering the game's difficulty.