Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space

Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space, frequently abbreviated BARIS, is a 1993 space simulation and strategy game for MS-DOS. The player takes the role of Administrator of NASA or head of the Soviet space program with the ultimate goal of being the first nation to conduct a successful manned moon landing. A creator-approved open version (titled simply Race Into Space) has since been released, adding support for Macintosh and Linux.

It is Nintendo Hard.


 * Anyone Can Die: Don't get too attached to your astronauts. A small fault in the rocket can send them on a one-way trip to Arlington Cemetery (or the Kremlin Wall, if you're Russian).
 * Cold War
 * Copy Protection: If you fail to input the correct answer (from the Feelies, or downloaded from some site), the game will let you keep playing... but any manned mission will suffer a catastrophic rocket failure.
 * Luck-Based Mission: Missions are fire-and-forget, though you can up the odds by doing all of your research before launching the mission.
 * The Many Deaths of You: There are a lot of ways to kill the crew members. One of the more obscure ways is having an astronaut on the moon trip and break his visor.
 * Nintendo Hard: Because of the mechanics of the mission failure system, there is a fairly high chance of failing a mission, especially the more complex missions like the Moon landing, even under ideal circumstances. Since mission failure is harshly punished, especially if it involves crew death, this means that it is not unlikely to have significant setbacks even very late in the game.
 * One Stat to Rule Them All: Capsule piloting is the most important stat by far, especially in the early game, since it provides the largest bonus to mission success. Conversely, Endurance is the most useless, with even some of the programmers not sure if it actually does anything!
 * The Space Race