After more than a decade of the game being on my radar and putting it off, I finally did it. I have become... Space Alert.

For those not in the know, Space Alert is a real time co-op where you have 10 minutes to program your actions as a group, and the rest of the game is simply resolving them and seeing whether you actually succeeded the mission, failed horribly, or merely survived by the skin of your teeth. Similar to Galaxy Trucker from just the year before in its setup-resolution game flow, but obviously entirely different in how it plays, being a co-op.

It is stressful. It is brutally limiting for an individual player, forcing you to coordinate right from the piss-easy tutorial missions. It has exactly zero output randomness, so if the red sector explodes, it's not because someone failed a dice roll, it's because someone fucked up and forgot to touch the ship computer and avoid the screensaver, delaying the actions of everyone on the ship. The game is also extremely quick, and for the stress induced by it you can take nice long breaks between matches and still knock out several games in an evening.

This immediately blasted to the top of my co-op games list. Fuck spirits, fuck H.P. Lovecraft, fuck anything with dice in it. My boy Vlaada shows everyone how it's done.