Drawn to lifeless

By Rebelstar without a cause

Genre: Game designer

You would be forgiven for thinking that Rebelstar has just cobbled a UDG designer together with one of his entries from last year’s CGC: Ski or don’t.  Rebelstar assures me this is not the case however, so we must believe the lying get.

The game itself is rather good fun (the Hi-Score challenge starts at 170) and uses the BASIC scroll function to quite good effect.  The landscape sometimes generates an impossible, or at least near impossible, route but that’s down to the player to be especially vigilant.

If that was all DTL had to offer then I would wrap things up here and say it’s a nice little game that could have appeared on the Cassette50 itself.  But Rebelstar has added a feature (but fails to call it ‘advanced’) to enable you to create your own game graphics.  And as UDG designers go this is quite a nice one, there’s certainly nothing wrong with it anyway.

 

So in one bound we go from being some nonce skiing endlessly skiing down a slope avoiding trees to a world of infinite possibility.  No longer are you John Smith who works in an office, or Tracy the hairdresser – you are Spectros, creator of worlds.

 Please have a bash yourself and share the results with me.

Tipshack: Objects are not drawn the far right column, so if you can get there safely then you have a free ride!  (this has been fixed in Chuntey Force below).

Download here.

And if you fancy, I had a go with theh designer myself, download Chuntey Force here.

 

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.