Game

It should not surprise you to learn I immediately jumped on playing this game.

Lunar lander style games are way way WAY out of style, but they were really big on PCs in the late 80s. It’s a pretty simple concept. You aim your ship and fire to thrust in that direction, and try to fly around objects and terrain while not letting gravity slam you into everything it can. Most of those games involve you landing softly on something, though this is a bit different.

Game

Transball is a game by Santiago Ontañón Villar, some MSX homebrew from 2016. Your goal is to collect the transball and then escape the top of the screen. Sometimes this is easy. A lot of the times it very much is not. Your ship controls like most lunar lander sim games, unless you have the ball, where it KINDA feels like Knuckles Chaotix, and can influence your movement, and you can influence it. The best strategy I found is very slow pulses to move you and the ball forward.

There are only 16 stages, but it’ll still take you an hour to two hours to beat this. It’s challenging but rewarding to master. There’s really not a lot to it, it IS MSX homebrew, but it’s expertly made and worth a glance if you’re messing with the MSX.