The back-of-the-box description of Space, a game from Edu-Ware Services, Inc, describes it as "a multi-faceted simulation of human life in an interstellar environment...designed to represent many of the decisions which would be faced by a member of interstellar society interacting with his complex and demanding environment." That sounds pretty exciting! So I load up the game and am greeted with this:

Hmm. I guess the future environment to someone in 1979 looked a lot like looking out of your window if your window displayed only four colours. And it was Version 2.5.

The game is divided into six sections. Five of those sections are simulations of different types of adventures your character can go on and the other section is Character Creation.

To play any of the other sections, the player must first create a character. This is actually a simulation in itself and often ends with your character being killed in training or the game trying to declare that your character is inferior and you might as well start over. This isn't helped at all by the way your character can start off deaf or blind or severely brain damaged or with a bad heart or unhealthy muscular system or poor lungs or a brittle skeleton. Besides having to risk all of these defects of the body, your character can also have a psychological problem that keeps him from being the best military person he can be. And you also have to realize that your attributes might randomly end up too low to do you any good once you go on the separate adventures.

Creating a character is so random that even the first choice you make where you get to pick which section of the military you want to join often gives you a message saying you're unfit for that branch and they force you into another branch. The rest of character creation lets you spend a number of years of your life adding one point per year to a variety of skills, many of which the game will tell you you're too crazy or too weak to add a point to that skill.

After four years, you're allowed to choose to re-enlist or retire. But even this is an illusory choice as often you are told that the galaxy is at war and you can't retire or when you try to re-enlist, sometimes you're told that you've suffered some sort of medical breakdown and are medically discharged. And, of course, sometimes you die during training.

Character creation is really just a big gamble to see how much money you can earn as quickly as possible while raising some key skills and statistics that might help you out in a later adventure, although I really don't know what skills help you in which areas. Vacuum Suit? Rafting? Gambling? Forgery?

Once you've been kicked out of Character Creation (or chosen to retire yourself and allowed to retire when you choose), you have the opportunity to adventure as a civilian! You can choose First Blood where you fight to the death against a single opponent and then earn all of their loot. You can Defend a planet from alien invasion through a series of changing shield and weapon energy amounts through guess work and intuition. You can Explore uncharted planets to earn your fortune. You can become a space Trader. Or you can play the High Finance market.

Your best bet is to explore so that you can earn enough money to become a trader or play the markets. First Blood involves too many random factors and your character might not even be up to physical combat due to the randomness of character creation. Defend might be worth doing if you can figure out exactly how to manipulate your energy reserves to the correct shields and weapons placements. Usually, I would run out of energy and then the entire population would get slaughtered. If you do choose to explore (which you should!), it seems the planets don't change too much when you explore them. I suggest exploring planet K5170U!

Once you earn enough money through planet exploration, you can buy a ship and start trading. Trading seems fairly straightforward. You get a couple of choices of cargo with the prices you can purchase them and the prices they seem to be selling for at your destination. Make a few calculations to see which is the better cargo, fill your hold with it, and set off! Be sure to always buy enough gas (usually the recommended amount) and head off!