Everyone has to like something, and I like Space Shooter. It is a very stupid, inane game–basically a knock-off of the old Galaga game that I grew up with. It’s a simple, reliable way to kill a few minutes of dead time on your phone when there’s nothing else to do. I like it because there are a lot of different ways to play the game so you don’t get bored.

But like anything you love, it can annoy the living hell out of you.

The purpose of this post, God help me, is not to help you play the game better, or to help you decide what to do with your in-game resources. It is to address two specific issues, as follows:

The people who run this stupid, addictive, irritating game are in Vietnam. And that’s fine! I have nothing against Vietnam or the Vietnamese, and if someone could make me some pho and bring it over here I would be happy to enjoy it. But their English is not so great. If you play the game long enough (God help you) you will run across an ad that says something like, “This ship harnesses the power of Malificent, a powerful fairy that lives in the moon,” and God knows what that is supposed to mean. The in-game support is resoundingly unhelpful. What that means is that there is kind of a knowledge gap in some areas, which this article is designed to address.One of the things you have to do to accrue the resources you need to play the game effectively is to join the Facebook group. The reasons for this are explained below. But the Facebook group… good Lord God… is filled to the absolute brim with stupid people. Bless their hearts, but they ask the same God-damned questions all the God-damned time and I am sick and tired of it. This article is designed to answer some of the most basic questions that get raised.What is that stupid round power-up that doesn’t do anything?

This stupid-looking thing to the left. When you play the game, and kill the enemy ships or bugs or whatever they are, one of the power-ups is this stupid round thing that looks like an alien face or a bug’s head or whatever you think it is. The other power-ups are:

Chevrons, which boost your ship’s performancePOW symbols, which temporarily give you wings and get you to max performanceCoins, which only give you a hundred coins when you need millions of coins to progress in the game and are a waste of timeDifferent kinds of ships, which are more-or-less useful

And then there’s this stupid thing, which doesn’t seem to do anything. What is it? Why is it there?

The answer is that there are these occasional things called “events,” and more about them later because they’re important. When you play the event, you are trying to collect a specific item, whatever it is–the Thanksgiving game had a turkey leg, that kind of thing. Those are very valuable. For every one of those items you get, you also get an alien-head, which determines your ranking in the event. The more of the alien-head thingies you get, you get higher in ranking, and you can get resources periodically. Any alien-heads you get in any other non-event game mode get added to your tally.

Here’s the thing. If you win a round in the event, you get a hundred and fifty items, and a hundred and fifty alien-heads. It’s much easier and simpler to play the event game to get alien-heads than it is to play the other game modes, where you might pick up two or three.

So the answer is that the stupid alien-heads are not, strictly speaking, useless, but they might as well be.

Where is the annoying Facebook group and why should I join it?

The Facebook group – this is the official one, there are others – serves exactly one purpose. Every Thursday, the developers release the gift code for the week. (Sometimes there will be other codes released at other times, it depends). You click on the menu (a little blue icon with three horizontal white lines, it’s on the left-hand side of your screen), choose “GIFT CODE,” and type it in to get resources. Usually you get Unicards, which are the best way to level-up your ship. But you also get coins and gems and bombs and what have you.

The Unicard is the red one with the eagle’s wings.

Okay, got it? The Facebook group also lets you know about events, more about those later. The only reason not to join the Facebook group, is that every week God sends, there are ten or twenty posts from simpletons, asking what the gift code is. And they’re already in the Facebook group! They should know, but they don’t, because they are sad and pathetic people looking for attention, or else they’re just idjits. Anyway.

You can also join a guild, and if it’s a good guild, they will put the gift code on the main guild page, and then you don’t need to put up with this horse crap.

I just got a thousand stars, why can’t I merge my ships?

This is the single most annoying thing about the game, and it’s not explained anywhere.

The main game – the “campaign,” the game mode that you go into when you hit the gold “play” button at the bottom left – gives you a star for every level that you win. You can get up to three stars per level, one for the easy mode, one for the medium mode, and one for the hard mode. When you get a thousand stars–which takes some time–you are told that you can merge ships.

The game gives you three ships to start off with, and lets you acquire some others (including mini-ships, which are their own thing). As I am writing this–it’s probably going to be a work-in-progress–I might have stuff to say about the ships, don’t know. But some of the ships are good, and some of them are worthless. Merging ships means that you are trading in two of your crummy ships for a better ship. Sounds easy, right? Right?

It is not.

Getting a thousand stars means that you have the threshold ability to merge ships. It does not mean that you can, because I guarantee you that you cannot do so at that level.

This is what you need to do to merge ships:

You need to have two ships that can be merged. Each ship has only one other ship that it can be merged with. If you have Vulture, you need Pioneer. If you have Thunder, you need Paladin, etc. Both ships have to be six-star ships. If you start out with a one-star ship, you have to spend coins or gems to level it up twenty-five times. Then you have to spend ship cards and gems to level it up to the two-star level, and do that again and again until you get a six-star ship at level 25. Needless to say, this takes a very long time. I am trying to get my six-star Thunder up to level 25, and it costs over a million coins for each level. It is a very slow process and you have to farm a lot of coins.Both ships have to be fully skilled. Each ship has four skills, and you have to use medals to upgrade those skills to level 25 for all four skills.You have to have a thousand gems and 40 hero badges to merge as well.

Once that’s done, you get a merged ship, and then you have to spend even more resources to get that up to a decent level.

How do you get to where you can merge ships more quickly? Money. You see people all the time on the Facebook page whining that they’ve spent over a thousand dollars on this stupid game. Which you can very easily do. I am not here to tell you how much or how little you want to spend. There are plenty of ways to get resources without spending money (i.e. watching ads). But it’s much faster and more convenient to spend money.

The post Your Super-Helpful Guide to the Space Shooter Game for Reasonable Adults first appeared on Curtis Edmonds.