How to play Pleiads on Mac

Game summary

Pleiads is a multi-stage space shoot 'em up in which enemy ships fly at the player in waves in a similar fashion to games like Galaxian and Phoenix. Ships emerge from a mothership at the top of the screen and swoop downwards in a series of patterns which players must anticipate as they shoot the ships and avoid being obliterated by the Martian onslaught. There are four stages in the game. In the first stage the Earth space ship must defend the space station from Martian invaders who have the ability to transform from flying invaders, to walking invaders who build walls across the Earth city; these barriers must be destroyed. At the end of stage one the Earth space ship flies to the top of the screen to prepare to meet stage two. In the second stage the player encounters eight space monsters who must be hit directly on center to be destroyed before moving onto stage three. In this stage invaders emerge form a space ship at the top of the screen and swoop down on the player in sweeping attacks. In the final wave the player has to navigate through parked spaceships to dock on a landing pad as the screen scrolls downwards. Extra points can be gained in this stage by collecting flags as the player moves towards the landing corridor.

Play Pleiads on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Pleiads 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).

Pleiads 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 Pleiads like you would on any PC.
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