Rat Mole!

By Rebelstar without a cause

Genre: Pliagamaze

Hmmm.  Rat Mole!  Reminds me of something somehow* but I just can’t think what.  Anyway, have a look at this introscreen.  You might be forgiven if you thought the asymmetry of the R-Redefine keys was a mistake, but on closer inspection it’s obviously an ingenious way to offset the whole screen and give the game an anarchic feel.

It’s rare for a crap game to have a redefine keys option, and all I will say here is that Rat Mole! takes an….alternative approach to it.

The game starts and gives the appearance of a rather nice 1980s type in maze game.  The goal, I assume, is to shoot all the other udgs on the screen (you are the black one).  The first thing to notice is the speed, Rat Mole! is excruciatingly slow and the keys unresponsive.  In fact at one point I thought the code actually intentionally waited for the baddy to pass before allowing me to shoot at it!  There’s some interesting collision detection here, sometimes you can’t shoot the baddies in the backside, and it’s funny watching them collide with each other and spend a while stationary while deciding what to do next.  The AI involves changing direction on collision with a block or another baddy, so they spend more time on the outer reaches.

It took me a little while to work this out, but when you shoot the blue udg the game completes and gives you a ‘You Success!’ message (and caused me to unintentionally guffaw – quite an achievement).  So the aim of the game is more to ‘shoot the blue UDG’.  I had a poke about in the code but couldn’t see why this was, as it uses the DIMension command which I never got to grips with while learning BASIC (for shame).  There’s some pretty decent coding behind this, especially as it was coded very quickly and after bedtime!

Rat Mole!  has a lot of great features that makes it perfect Cassette 50 material: an inkling of an idea, some effort put in, not too shabby coding, but fundamentally flawed - So well done Rebelstar!

All in all a model entry, and with some sound effects, a few bugs fixed and played on an emulator cranked right up – I would actually enjoy this.

*My lawyers will be in touch

Tipshack: the sprites spend most of the time on the outer corridor, so stay in the middle and shoot from there.

HACK PACK: Immunity 606 LET tomato=255

Download here.

EDIT-Rebelstar downloaded a bugfixed (?!) version which can be downloaded here.