How to play Planet Smashers on Mac

Game summary

Planet Smashers finally delivered an original 2D Shooter to the Pro System late in its life. Your spaceship, which oddly looks like an airplane, has the grave task of defending Earth from an alien armada. Planet Smashers has some nice features like level warp codes, laser upgrades, cloaking devices, and interesting bosses. You even have the burden of defending Earth's shield from asteroids and alien ships. The back of the box boasts, "awesome sound effects", but the main laser noise is mind-numbingly irritating. After you defeat the game, you are treated to a text ending commanding you to play Alien Brigade, which makes little sense since you just defeated the alien mothership.
First released: Dec 1990

Play Planet Smashers on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Planet Smashers 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).

Planet Smashers 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 Planet Smashers like you would on any PC.
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