Travel with PACMAN

By Lee Spoons

Genre: Arcade Corruption

 

This was originally written for the CGC 2006 but due to Lee’s intense perfectionism he didn’t feel it was quite ready for release.  Since then Lee has been slaving away working on his code to produce Travel with PACMAN.  Well…. actually that last bit is a teeny lie, Lee rediscovered this melange on an old hard drive that was never finished and couldn’t be arsed untangling the crap BASIC to finish it (I’m paraphrasing there), hence felt 2013 was the year to submit it!

Lee gave these instructions:

Pac-Man has escaped from the ghosts and has found some more dots in old Speccy games. Simply collect all the dots to complete the screen, however some parts of the screen are blocked off and watch out for the "killer square" which will cause you to lose a life. Controls: Q, A, O and P. Good luck!

I rather like the idea of this game, there are 12 levels in all that involve Pacman eating up dots scattered around various classic spectrum games, all of which are carefully designed to look like a kill screen.  On level one you move Pacman around the famous Chuckie Egg screen collecting the dots until all are gone – at which point nothing happens.  To progress in TWP you need to BREAK into the BASIC and change the level variable (see HACK SACK), and only then you can witness the treats of Exolon, Deathchase and Skool Daze to name a few.  Trouble is it is so bugged you can’t usually move (and that’s without the deadly invisible blocks), though I must doff my cap to Lee for cramming so many classic SCREEN$ into a game (which would explain the 4 minutes 12 seconds (custom) loading).

It’s clear Lee had big ideas for this game, as the code has more going on than meets the eye.  There is code for ghost collision for instance, but no UDGs for the actual ghosts!

In summary: this game is a bloody shambles .  Well done Lee!

Tipshack:             Lovingly caress your spectrum until you find the magic button, y’know, the one at the side that resets it.

HACK SACK: Incessant lives: Change line 4001 to REM pangolin.

                       You can see the various levels by changing 'ON' to VAL "x"  to the level number in LINE 4 (x = level number you desire).

Download here.