Tech Blog

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Back in the day on the PC, Mac, and even Amiga was a cool and sarcastic little exploraton and exploitation game called Spaceward Ho!

To quote the developers:

Spaceward Ho! is a strategic game of awesome scope. You control the entire military and economy of a spacefaring race. Your goal: explore and colonize the galaxy.

Unfortunately, you are not alone. Alien enemies bent on galactic conquest will oppose your expansion. You fight them by developing new technologies and expanding your empire, or you can ally with them to turn enemies into friends.

Terraform newly discovered worlds or mine their natural resources. Maneuver your starship fleets, both in defense of your own systems and in offensive strikes against the evil aliens. Your strategic decisions will determine the fate of the galaxy.

Today, you can download free versions of a Mac and Palm OS build of the game from the developer's site, which is cool if you've got those platforms. But what if your portable gaming device is an iPhone?

Though it seems that Ho! developers are porting it to iPhone, if you want to play now, then there's one game I'd suggest you take a look at.

Enter the Galcon, destroyer of worlds
Galcon, suitable to the iPhone and iPod touch -- though there are versions available for PC Mac and Linux as well as a browser version.

Gameplay is simple. Planets create ships. The larger the planet, the more ships it produces. Launch your ships at enemy planets to eliminate their ships and take control of their planets.



The 'lite' version of Galcon for iPhone offers a lot of single player action. The full version is much, um, fuller with different single player gaming modes, as well as a cool multi-player mode that pits you against three other live players.

Sorry, it's not the sarcastic, bombastic and complex game that Spaceward Ho! is, but then again, Galcon is here now for the iPhone and Ho! is still in our future. Carpe Diem - and capture the planets