Title:

  • Space Junkie

Genre:

  • Arcade

Developer:

  • Tuan Huynh

Publisher:

  • Tuan Huynh

Release Date:

  • 1993

System(s):

  • Mac

Systems Used:

  • Always a Mac

On Wikipedia:

  • Nope

This one was a little hard to write not because of emotional reasons but because there's so little information on it. It was included the meager shareware-style game collection that the family Performa 550 had (and later, the PowerWave) so I know I spent a lot of time in it even if it wasn't my favorite. Despite the program's incredibly small size (under 140k, making it possible to download on ancient modems), it's a shooter in the vein of Space Invaders and its derivatives like Galaga and Galaxian. Of course, as a kid, I didn't really know that: the mall arcade was a place that I don't remember ever going to, and the local place where kids went to ate pizza and play games, Gattiland, mostly had redemption games (though other features, like bumper cars, were a bigger draw). It does differ from those games that instead of having a "one shot at a time" limit, you can shoot however many you want provided you don't overheat, in which case you can't shoot for a few minutes as you go into a corner to recover.

The small enemy graphics usually move too fast to see.

Other than that there's not much to say, really. There's some cool patterns the aliens go in, but they never reach ground level (just back and forth), and while they do have interesting designs, most of the time they move too fast for you to admire them. I recall a few different versions, most specifically the difference between the version my grandfather had on his LC and our Performa, where the position of the "Quit" and the "New Game" buttons were switched (I have no idea which one the Mac Garden version is).

Supposedly, there was a version published commercially by a company called Pointware called Space Crazed, but so little information exists on the Internet about it I practically just told you all there is currently known about it.

January 10 2016

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