The Russians were the bad guys. Don Johnson was cool. We listened to Rush, Duran Duran, and Grandmaster Flash on our Sony Walkmans. There was a new cable station called MTV that played nothing but music videos. We were actually suprised to find out Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. And we knew what the definitions of "is" and "mission accomplished" were.

And by God, we knew what video games were for and we were playing them. Mowing down waves of unending mutant invaders from another galaxy, in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to... well, the plot lines back then were a little sketchy, but it didn't stop us from sticking billions of quarters into oddly painted cabinets in dim, smoky arcades.

I wrote Cosmic Assault as my little homage to my coming of age in the early 1980s. It started life as one of the tutorials supplied for teaching programmers the fundamentals of pygame and I used that tutorial to hack together a little shoot-em-up game to see how all the components worked together.

One thing led to another, and the program was built on many layers of "Wouldn't it be neat if...", "I wonder what this does..." or "How do I do this..." As a result, this game is no paean to modern software engineering practices. Even though it uses classes, inheritance, and aggregation, the OO misfeatures are so numerous that it is guaranteed to make enterprise Java developers openly weep in their Gang of Four books.

But, in spite of all that (or likely because of it), this game is addictive, mindless fun. Your job is to fly your spacecraft into the unknown and mow down hordes of ruthless enemies in a noble effort to... Oh hell, quit listening to me babble, look at the screenshots, and download and play this bad boy already.