This game wasn’t very popular, but I loved it. It made a great change from SimCity. Its very similar to most sim games, but being on the moon has a whole new angle. You have to cope with starting a colony on the moon, making sure you can accommodate the right number of workers and tourists, as well as produce all the elements to sell on the markets. It’s a real management kind of sim game.

Like most sim games you start off with a certain amount of money, and every year you are given more money from NASA. But as you progress, you grow, and produce products to sell on the market such as LLOX, electronics, materials etc. That’s how you make money, therefore its good to keep an eye on the stock market and know when to buy and when to sell (hence the management type sim game).

When you are erecting the buildings all over the Moon, you have to make sure that everything is connected to both power and heating (must get quite cold there). You can have roads etc, and the moon colony soon turns into a big massive galactic city.

Here are some quotes I found from the back cover of the game (thanks to some fanatic’s Moonbase site):

“Select and clear a site for the Lunar colony … build landing pads … erect habitat modules … set up power stations and grids … create mining and processing facilities … supply essential life-support services to the colonists. Comprehensive socio- and economic models from KDT Industries – a NASA contractor – animate and enliven you base.”

“Explore the lunar surface for new mining sites. Process the raw materials you find into oxygen, water and helium-3, then use then internally or sell them to Mars missions. Build hotels for fat cats from Earth.”

Moonbase is a really fun game; it’s a shame it doesn’t work too well on modern PC’s. It won’t work on my Pentium 3, but I sometimes get lucky with my p200. It’s a very unstable game, so be careful! It dies at the stupidest times. I’d still give it a shot however, it’s a great challenge and you would enjoy it. It’s a good game for getting the feel of those really involved sim games.

Warning: Save your cash, you WILL run out of cash.

Important DO NOT attempt to run this game in pure DOS or allow it to create a DOS shortcut, it can seriously screw up your computer.

This game was released a few years later as Lunar Command, which will run on a modern PC. I recommend downloading this version instead.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related Links

• MobyGames: Moonbase
  Read all about it on MobyGames.
• Wikipedia: Moonbase
  Read all about it on Wikipedia.