Astronomica: The Quest for the Edge of the Universe

Astronomica: The Quest for the Edge of the Universe is an educational game made by Hyper-Quest, Inc. in 1994 for Macintosh and Windows 3.x.[1][2] The game developers purposely made the game's main character a girl, explaining "Younger girls are often left out of multimedia games, so we made the main character in Astronomica a girl".[3]

Astronomica: The Quest for the Edge of the Universe
Developer(s)FX Media, Ringling Multimedia
Publisher(s)Hyper-Quest
Platform(s)Macintosh, Windows 3.x
Release
Genre(s)Action, Educational

Synopsis

Game play centers around the player searching for a missing employee SkyQuest AstroLab, an astronomer that was working on a supercomputer named Astronomica prior to his disappearance. Players must solve several puzzles based on space trivia to progress.

Reception

Critical reception for Astronomica has been mixed, with many outlets criticizing its difficulty of game play.[4] Entertainment Weekly rated the game a C+, writing "Ultimately, Astronomica does little more than familiarize players with basic space terms. Despite some sloppy production values (such as the director’s audible ”Action!”), the game does offer a reference encyclopedia and detailed planetary photographs science buffs will appreciate."[5] The Washington Post'' was also critical of the game, as they felt it was "low-budget programming and design, pure and simple".[6]

Computer Shopper was more positive, commenting "with some of the slickest photo-realistic 3-D images around, it's as much a feast for the eyes as for the brain."[7]

gollark: Hmm. I don't know how to Minoteaur the Minoteaurs.
gollark: Oh, right, the actual video: this is an amateur potatOS security researcher revealing a bug they found.
gollark: So the general and robust fix for this would be to stop doing I/O this way for anything but performance-sensitive and fairly robust (terminal, FS) I/O and API stuff, but PotatOS has so much legacy code that that would actually be very hard.
gollark: As it turns out, you can take a perfectly safe function with out of sandbox access and make it very not safe by controlling what responses it gets from HTTP requests and whatever.
gollark: And *another* Lua quirk more particular to CC is a heavy emphasis on event-driven I/O via coroutines.

References
  1. The Scientist, Volume 8. Institute for Scientific Information. 1994. p. 4. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
  2. Astronomica: The Quest for the Edge of the Universe – Box Scan, GameSpot, 4 June 2018
  3. Billboard May 13, 1995 (Edutainment). Billboard. 1995. p. 94. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
  4. Children's Software Revue, Volumes 1-4. Active Learning Associates. 1993. p. 17. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
  5. Neville, Ken. "Astronomica (review)". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
  6. Stolz, Craig (April 26, 1995). "The Shock of the Newbie". The Washington Post (subscription required). Archived from the original on April 15, 2016. Retrieved 19 June 2015.
  7. Keizer, Gregg (December 1, 1994). "Hot stuff for the holidays. (brief reviews of multimedia hardware and software products) (Hardware Review) (Multimedia Direct) (Evaluation)". Computer Shopper (subscription required). Archived from the original on April 14, 2016. Retrieved 19 June 2015.


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