How to play Astro Wars on Mac
Game summary
Astro Wars was an electronic table top game made in Great Britain in 1981 by Grandstand under licence from Epoch Co., who sold the game in Japan under the title Super Galaxian (スーパーギャラクシアン).[1][2] There were two versions of Astro Wars - an earlier version had the Astro Wars motif printed in red and a later version printed in white (as shown in the photograph).
Gameplay[edit]
In concept Astro Wars has similar themes to arcade games Galaxians or Gorf in as much as the player controls a ship (called earth ship) at the bottom of the screen and fires up at rows of ships. Players can select from four difficulty ratings and the controls are a simple digital joystick to move right or left and a fire button. Individual enemy ships can descend the screen to attack the player's ship. The player has to fight through a number of variations of the enemy.
The four skill levels are:
Level 1 - Alien fighters attack one at a time
Level 2 - Alien fighters attack one at a time but combat speed is faster
Level 3 - Alien fighters attack two at a time
Level 4 - Alien fighters attack two at a time but combat speed is faster
The game ends once either the player loses five ships or exceeds 9,999 points when a special electronic victory tune was played.
Play Astro Wars on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)
The easiest way to play Astro Wars on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.
Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.
Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).
Astro Wars installation steps for Mac
Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Astro Wars like you would on any PC.
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