Spaceward Ho!

I remember playing this on my Mac Classic back in the 90s, and was thrilled to see it rebooted for iOS. Clever, minimalist graphics, and a subtle sense of humor make this a charming strategy game. Unfortunately, AI wasn’t really a thing in the 90s, and it still isn’t with this app: As with many games of the era, such as Civilization II, the challenge doesn’t come from facing an clever opponent, but rather one who controls the board. Beyond a skill level of 53 or so, the game just plain cheats: It knows exactly how many ships you have, where they are, and what strength. By fiddling with a tool that allows one to save and replay a game (something not actually allowed for in the game), I was able to determine that it will actually shift defenses from one planet to another AFTER the battle has started. So it’s basically impossible to beat beyond level ~53. Still, three stars for clever visuals and some nice nostalgia. It would be interesting to see what competent programmers could do with this code base, and add in true AI tools instead of being lazy and cheating. Maybe someday.

This app hasn’t been updated in nearly a decade, but it still runs nearly perfectly on a modern iPad, and even on a Mac. It handles being resized just fine, although in a perfect world it would return to the Mac (the proper Mac version is PPC only so hasn’t been usable in decades) with a more flexible layout designed for a bigger screen. The game plays exactly like I loved it back in the 90s, feels completely natural on a touchscreen—probably better than with a mouse!—and even includes the Easter eggs like special hats that appear on holidays. The only bugs I’ve ever encountered are very rare and only annoyances—inability to tap on things—and quickly solved by restarting the app. For old-schools have noticed only two differences, one good and two negative but cosmetic. The good is that if you set a fleet to scrap at the same time as evacuating a planet, it no longer dumps the metal on the abandoned planet, which never made sense. The bad is that aging ships no longer start to look rusty and old. The other negative one is more a UI change than problem; zooming in and out are super fluid and natural, but while the old desktop version. Would eventually shrink the planet icons down to mini sizes at distant zoom, the min icon size here is relatively large so with big galaxies the “big picture” view looks cluttered and confusing instead of expansive. It’d be nice to have it continue to zoom out instead. The one thing I miss is save-scumming; if you’re doing a massive galaxy a game can take many hours to complete, and there are two issues: One, if I make a stupid UI mistake like forget to set a colony ship to delayed arrival, it can literally end a tight game I’m 3 hours into, with absolutely no takebacks. That is, frankly, not fun, especially since the delayed arrival controls are a bit finicky. And two, sometimes I get an interesting situation but make some bad decision early on that ends up with a loss, and I’m always REALLY curious if the game was winnable had I taken a different strategy, but there’s now no way to find out. I really miss that.