I suppose that video games and space themes go together so well because for a long time they were both somewhat futuristic. This might be because it was easy to make weird things in video games and attribute them to aliens or some kind of mysterious Future Technology.
One of the results of this pairing is a game called Starpost. Starpost is an exceedingly simple game. you control an outpost out among the stars. Who owns the outpost and for what purpose? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, though.
What does matter is that evil aliens are out to destroy your precious Starpost by crashing their ships into it, the curs. Your Starpost looks like four dice stacked on top of each other in a column. Its only defense is shooting a laser from either the left or right side of each section. You choose which laser will fire by pushing down the joystick: right will make the selector move clockwise, and left will make it move counterclockwise. Pushing the fire button makes the beam deadly. Your goal is to last for the duration of the time limit by destroying the rogue ships before they can crash into your post and disable the laser on that side (too many get destroyed and you lose).
Sounds hard, and it is for a while, until I hit upon an almost fool-proof strategy. If you hold down one of the directions on your joystick (doesn’t really matter which one) so that the targeting reticle rotates around the base, and only fire when it crosses over an enemy ship. Once I adopted this strategy, I was able to play long enough that I am now permanently bored with this game.