Review: Ad Lunam (& Plus)

AD LUNAM (& PLUS)

There are two versions of this game: Ad Lunam and Ad Lunam Plus. The former is a 48K BASIC game submitted to the Bytemaniacos competition (another potential winner), and the latter is an enhanced 128K version.

It's a management game with the humble goal of winning the space race. You need to get a human on the moon and return them safely to earth before the 'other side'. Your first decision is to choose your country. Do you want to be a capitalist pimp for the USA, or one of the USSR's communist androids? The choice dictates your game strategy, as each country's hardware has differences in reliability and power. There is a lot to this game, and it's clear that Alessandro has great interest and knowledge of the subject. You have to fund research and development and meet various milestones before you can (successfully) send a human payload. These milestone go from satellites to manned orbit to the final goal of planting feet on lunar dust.

Ad Lunam is a game which, unfortunately for some of us, requires a lot from the player. These days our already short attention spans are being dragged in so many directions, and we seem to have less time to really apply ourselves to one game. You probably need to make it your primary bit of fun for a couple of weeks. Many of us will fail to do this game justice (me included), which is a sad indictment of these leg-jiggling times. My best effort was as the USSR where I had some initial unmanned success, but when Yuri Gagarin was killed during a botched launch was where things deviated from history (fortunately for Yuri). I don't think my work would have gone down terribly well with the politburo...

NATIONAL HERO GAGARIN DIES

A DAY OF MOURNING HAS BEEN DECLARED IN THE MEMORY OF COMRADE GAGARIN. ROCKET ENGINEER COMRADE HUGHES HAS DECIDED TO TAKE A SABBATICAL CHOPPING WOOD IN SIBERIA.