How to play Paratrooper on Mac

Game summary

Paratrooper is a single screen arcade action game where the player controls a stationary machine gun turret trying to shoot down all incoming enemies. The turret has unlimited ammo but a limited angle of fire (up to 90 degrees left and right). At first, helicopters start appearing from both sides of the screen's upper part. Paratroopers are jumping down from those helicopters; if four or more of them touch the ground, they will form a human ladder, climb up to the turret, and destroy it. To avoid that, the player has to shoot either the paratroopers themselves or their parachutes - for different effects but the same results. After the player has withstood several waves of helicopters, bomber planes start appearing. These planes shoot bombs directly at the turret, which do not miss and destroy it right away. To counter that, the player can either eliminate the plane before it has the chance to drop the bomb, or destroy the bomb itself in mid-air. Shooting bombs scores the most points (50). Surviving this stage effectively puts the game on an indefinite loop, with more helicopter and bomber plane stages alternating with increased difficulty. There are no continues and the player has to start over if the turret was destroyed.
First released: Dec 1982

Play Paratrooper on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Paratrooper 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).

Paratrooper 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 Paratrooper like you would on any PC.
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