Tuesday, 9 July 2013

Is that a snake or are you just pleased to see me?

By Rebelstar without a cause.

Genre: Arcade: ampersat eater

 (Rule 1 of this review is that I will not be doing any double entendres)

Rebelstar has broken from previous form here by providing a game that’s almost not crap.  Despite its less than catchy acronym, I.T.A.S.O.A.Y.J.P.T.S.M is a half decent BASIC snake game.  Use QAOP to move the snake around the erm, well let’s call it a maze, and eat the ‘at’ symbols (which I’ve learned are also called ampersats).  Each ampersat eaten gains you an extra link in your increasingly ungainly snake.


The game plays at a decent rate and has some appropriate sounds.  So what’s wrong?  Well not much, I was going to say the scoring was flawed because it increments every move so there is no incentive to eat the red ampersats.  But from looking at the code I can see that Rebelstar has already thought of this, and the score is related to snake length already.  It’s even got a bit of machine code to refresh data.  Ho hum.


Not only that but could I.T.A.S.O.A.Y.J.P.T.S.M be a comment on the psychology of the concept of a High Score?  The higher your score the longer your snake?  Probably not, and just as well because I’d like to start the challenge with 23691 and a snake length of 41.

 But I still say you should gauge your performance by the length of your snake, and quite predictably there goes rule 1.  Thankyou Rebelstar!

 Tipshack: Be especially vigilant around snake length ~35 as at this point the chuntey field is most likely to cause your attention to wander and make a mistake.

Download here.

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