Mega Ski

By Shaun Bebbington

Genre: Insanity simulator

Okay….Mega Ski arrives in a zip file, and quite naturally I open it up.  Nothing too out of the ordinary there, then I see the file…

 

It’s a screengrab of a BASIC program.  A type in.  A.  TYPE.  IN.  (Deep breath count to ten).

Most of us will remember doing type ins back in the day, the listing would appear next to an all action picture that wayyyy overstated the quality of the actual finished game (in fact I’m sure we could have got them on the trade descriptions act), assuming the type in worked, you knew all the function keys, didn’t get bored or lose your work during typing.

 

With these horrible memories at the front of my mind I readied myself to get the job done.  In the spirit of the entry I decided to do it all as nature intended – on a real Spectrum.  I chose to do this on my less aesthetically pleasing, but reliable grey +2 as I recall my 48k having some wonky keys.  It will be done in 48k BASIC, naturally.

So: A dreich Saturday morning?  Check.  Cup of tea?  Check.  A steely resolve to play a half baked ASCII based BASIC  Ski-ing game?  Check.   TYPING HOooooooooooooooooooo!

(Here follows a stream of consciousness while typing in)

9am.  Now then, this type-in is full of VAL statements.  While this may be more efficient coding I can’t be arsed finding out where the VAL function key is so I just did the actual value each time.  Donketsoft?  Surely a BASIC program of this quality couldn’t contain a typo?  As such I can only assume that Shaun has created a new software house.  Great.  4 mistakes in the first line.  Shame each line is so long it takes agggesss to scroll through it all to fix it.  INT?  INT?  Where’s the function key for that?!  And PI!?  Have the key detection for CAPS and <> may be very diligent, but I can’t be arsed: it’s OP for me.  Hell bells!  How many OR statements can a line contain?!

9.30am.  Finished.  Didn’t take too long.  Time to save my work.

 

Now run it.  Aaaaaaannnnnnnnnnndddddd….

It doesn’t ****ing work!  The keys don’t work and it stops for no understandable reason.  The keys issue was my fault: change k$ to INKEY$.  The STOP was printing the score in white on white, changed.

Sort of works now.  I’m still not sure whether the game is working properly or is just crap?  Am I crap?  Why does the game stop?  Why do the trees converge?  Where’s the gin?  This project leaves me only with questions.

Shaun sent this to show the score to beat, I managed 1360.
 

Summary:  This is great fun and I’d recommend trying a type in (especially on real hardware).  There was a definite sense of excitement and anticipation as it came closer to RUNning it.  The game is crap, with the nicest touch being the ‘SCROLL’ statement that kept occurring during the game.  Thank you Shaun!

 

 

Tipshack:  Allow 1 hour to type in and test.  Take an opium suppository 30 minutes before typing in or playing the game.

HACK PACK: No scroll message: At the start of line 3 put POKE 23692,255

Download instructions and screengrab.  Snapshot will follow - Shaun requested a delay so people can have the err... joy of typing.