Advent

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Christmas Cack

"What's for Christmas Ma?"
"CARP!"

Picture the scene – it is December 1983 and you scamper down the stairs 4 at a time in your dressing gown to open the next door on the advent calendar.  What delights may it contain? A prayer? A nice picture of a festive scene?  A captured dream?  Mostly though one hoped for a chocolate to have on the bus to school.  But while chomping on this low quality confection you may have wondered, “is it possible? could the excitement of the advent calendar really be captured on my ZX-Spectrum?”

Well you probably didn’t wonder that, but Steve has created it anyway.  Here we have a computer version of the advent calendar, each day giving a new treat (or UDG if you prefer, and speaking as a UDG addict it is actually a treat for me).  Steve admits this is a quick one by his usual standards, though he still couldn’t avoid it being a charming little erm, utility?  Perhaps if released during the 80’s it would have set the world alight (and I dare say a few Christmas trees, as youngsters left their Spectrums on overnight to save time in the morning…).

 

I think some mornings would be less disappointing than others though, as I can’t even tell what the bloody hell the 22^nd is meant to be.

It’s more compact than Steve’s other 24 entries, and if I didn’t know better I’d say it was a shameless attempt to bump his total entries for the year to a round 25.

Thankyou Steve!

Download here

The Half Ashes

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Sport: fine legs and silly sods.

Oh wow, I’m so pleased my excessive bleating about there being too many football games has paid off – this year’s CGC finally has a cricket game.  It’s an especially well timed one too, because at the time of writing England are about to launch the most heroic sporting comeback resulting in them winning the 2013/14 ashes 3-2.  The Half Ashes is here to help us celebrate this historic victory to come.

Programmed in C, and like so many of Steve’s other CGC games, this has so much to it.  Going by most people’s standards T.H.A. is a crap game, mainly as the graphics are simple but I would say the spectrum’s palette was heaven sent for a cricket game.

You take control of the fielding side, and unsurprisingly have to bowl out 10 batsmen within 30 (rather unorthodox) overs.  At first glance the keys appear a little unwieldy but bearing in mind you need to control 11 men they are actually excellent once you get to grips with them.  Once you have set (your ideally unorthodox) field you get to the task of bowling, the speed and aim of the ball can be regulated by bowler position and the rate you toggle keys ‘C’ and ‘M’.  It is possible to get a batsman out in the usual ways, run outs being most common, then being bowled, followed by catching least.

Cricket is not everyone’s cup of tea, so for those people The Half Ashes will be just as tedious as the long Wednesday afternoons spent standing around playing pocket billiards on the boundary during P.E.  But for people who enjoy such a profound game as cricket it’s a real treat.  As said, there is so much to it – setting fields, getting the ball right, stopping the ball hitting the boundary.  Absolutely fascinating, and I will keep returning to this game.

At least I would, if it was a bit more stable.  I managed to make it return to BASIC (Out of Memory Error) and crash over about 1 hours play.  So Steve has just about saved face with these rather irritating flaws.  But if he sorts the bugs and gives it a bit more polish (starting with a nice wicket clattering noise), this would probably be the best cricket game for the Spectrum ever!

Thank you Steve, and as Geoffrey Boycott so often says:

“My Grandmother coulda programmed that wi' a stick o' Rhubarb.”

Download TAP here.
Download support files(remote link)
Download my RZX playing it,until the unfortunate ending.

Dearest Urinals

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Text: typing pirates

Garrrr!  Come ‘ere Jim laaaad, come sit on Cap’n Long John Silver’s knee, I ahhzz a deal for ye.  See this in my chest me hearty?  That be a ZX-Spectrum, the finest booty I’ve ever swagged during my sweet trade, from a bald pated lubber while aaat port o’ Cambridge.  Let’s be playing a grand game, called dearest urinals – that be an anagram of the finest story evarrrr told me hearty.  This cassette I be holding here has but one and twenty kilobytes of text from it, some fine graphics to boot and makes fine use of the F, the Z and the X.

 

Now then matey, here’s what we do.  Said Speccy be quoted a passage from said book and you must unjumble them there letters as quick aaaazz you can, the longer you wait the further me and my gen’lmen o’ fortune go.  First one to treasure island wins, or rather Jim laaad, if the jolly roger gets thaaar first, the squiffies aboard your swaggy will experience a keelhauling they’ll never forget.

Thankyou Steve!  (Now pass the grog)

Download here.

EDIT - reading that back I realise at some point I lost 'Pirate' and took on 'Cornish'

Maggie Thatcher: Milk Snatcher

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arcade: Rickets

Firstly, congratulations to Steve on his world record 22^nd entry to the CGC.

This entry takes us all the way back to 1971, and you are a primary school teacher trying to evade the milk snatching talons of Margaret Thatcher.

It’s actually a pretty nice maze game, the object of which is to run around the school desks collecting milk and giving it to the pupil most in need.  Instead of the traditional symptoms of malnutrition, this game demonstrates need for milk by the sprite flashing on and off!  Once delivered, another carton appears elsewhere in the maze (you can only carry one at a time naturally) and you continue until you’ve done 12 pints or Maggie gets you.  The further you progress in this maze Maggie seems to become better at chasing you, to the point that it does get pretty frantic toward the end of each level (Steve informs me Maggie uses A* pathfinding!).

MT:MS has plenty of crap qualities but I must confess to being disappointed to have completed it so quickly, so it can’t be that bad eh?

 The game is silent, apart from when Maggie does catch you, and you hear her utter those terrifying words… “I want milk”.

(either that or ‘I like pomme frites’, I can’t quite tell).

Thankyou Steve!  There’ll be an appropriate prize with your name on it at the end of the year.

Download here.

Dr Who Adventure

Dr Who Adventure

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Text Lords

 
Oh No!  The tardis has spun after control after a heavy session of Galiferian whistling angel juice, or something.  Unlike Steve’s other games this one is programmed in C and despite being probably impossible without reading the tips/walkthrough it is rather good (I say probably impossible, but that might just be because I’m rubbish at text adventures).

 You don’t have to be a Dr Who expert to recognise the chilling scream of the Dalek – “EXTERMINATE”, superbly rendered using BEEPFX.

 Have a bash & see how far you get (clues are cunningly hidden in the text), then read the tips and see if you can solve it.  It has some crap qualities but at its heart is a well designed puzzle with some depth to it.

 Also put your hands together to Steve’s entry number 21, equal to the record of most CGC entries in one year.

Thankyou Steve! 

Download TAP here.

Download tips here (recommended!)

Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Text - back door war.

After a long summer pause, it’s lovely to see another crap game from Steve in the inbox again.  This mean he is but one entry away (I think)  from equalling the most games entered into the CSSCGC since its conception.

 Collateral Damage is a nice little text adventure with, like some of his other games, a point to make.  No instructions are provided but it is assumed you are the president of the United States, and for posterity it should be noted the USA is currently in an attempt to engineer a military strike against Syria.  The game was submitted before some surprising events that may actually mean on this occasion, the USA will not end up bombing another middle eastern country without UN backing (what’s even more astounding is that the UK voted against being the obedient sidekick).  Let's see.

 However, enough of that, the game itself.  This is coded entirely in BASIC and I was ready to think the slow text printing was a carp feature, though it turned out to be the text wrapping.  The normal text game phrases do not apply here, and you can only type the words in white from the main text.  The game is short and, depending which route you decide to take, open ended.  I do love the little puzzles and humour this game is liberally sprinkled with.

 The big question is: do you go east or west down the corridor?

 Excellent work Steve.

 Download here.

Tipshack: knowing the structure of a doughnut can be useful to this game.  Also, if you choose to, never go to war on an empty stomach.

 HACKSACK: Drone attacks that might not annoy the locals quite as much as usual.  In line 889 change to LET Z=2. 

Jacky Watson Darts

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Jocky Wilson simulator

For those not already familiar with Darts, it is a game of skill played by the worlds finest athletes.

It’s 1979, Butlins, you are Jacky Watson (y’know the one Dexy’s Midnight Runners did the song about) and you must win the darts championship.

Ok, standard rules, 501 to count down.  You can guide the erratically dancing cursor around the screen and press P to select throw power.  Keys JFGH also have a function to do with focussing and steadying (well that’s the idea anyway).

No Bullseye detection?!

The game screen takes a very satisfying 27 seconds to draw, but it’s lovely to watch as Steve continues prove himself to be the master of PLOT and DRAW.  The code is pretty sophisticated  as it calculates the scores, draws the darts on and off in a mostly precise fashion (the odd dart does  fail to get properly deleted though).  I’d say that’s all quite difficult to do but the funny thing is it gets the easy things wrong!  It’s possible for the dart to wander out of the screen giving a return to basic and an ‘Integer out of range error’ and it fails to correctly subtract the last bit of the score (which means you can’t complete the game!*).

So, fatally bugged* but a really rather playable darts game.  I enjoyed it, and it would give some ofthe 1980s darts games a run for their money.  Thankyou Steve!

EDIT 27/03/13: the game is not actually flawed, though my remembrance of how darts works is (sorreee).  This is an almost perfectly playable game and is less crap for it.  For shame Steve!

Tipshack: Do as the professional darts players do: drink 8 pints and eat a mixed grill before playing.

HACK SACK: in line 180 change IF ttot<pt-1 to IF ttot<=pt to allow the score to be fully depleted.

Download here.

Sir Clive Sinclair’s Pachinko Parlour Party

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arcade:

Poor Clive Sinclair, he’s lost all his cash via a barmy transportation scheme.  He holds a pachinko parlour party to fund the next one.

I’m probably not the best person to review this game as until I did some research I had no idea what a pachinko parlour was!  I pictured a Japanese cocktail party with some exchange of keys and frothy bodily fluids later in the evening.  How wrong I was!  It appears that Pachinko is a faster version of pinball with more balls.

If Pachinko is pinball on amphetamine then Steve has given it a hefty dose of ketamine for the spectrum version.  The ball emerges from the C5 and spends a fair while slowwwwllyyy bouncing around, gaining cash for Uncle Clive all the way.  With the emulator cranked all the way up its pretty hypnotic watching the yellow trail swim around.

S.C.S.P.P.P seems to go on forever!  When you nearly run out of balls you get an extra one, presumably this is where you get hooked and keep putting your hard earned cash in the machine.

Perhaps a reader who is more familiar with pachinko could comment on what may be the first version of pachinko for the Spectrum?

Help!  I can’t stop!

HACK SACK: Japanese currency: in line 50 change the £ to the following UDG: 0,68,40,16,124,16,124,16 (tsk - you would have thought the Spectrum would already have this as part of the keyset).

Download here.

Up Coprolite Creek

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Puzzle: Malusaurus Rex

Picture the scene: It is 2020 AD, barring the worst most of us will be seven years older, and that would be bearable if it weren’t for the fact that horses are extinct.  What do we sit on when we plait our hair really tight and wear those white tights??!  What do we watch when wearing our fascinators at Ascot??!!  But most of all what do we bulk up our economy burgers with??!!  Steve comes up with the obvious answer which is to go back 100 million years and hunt Dinosaur meat.  Ahem.

Firstly, bonus points for the clever title and for the fairly slow screen draw.  But apart from that I suspect this is another CGC sizzler.  This game is a quite well designed platformy puzzly adventure along the lines of many but Boovie springs to mind.  The jump is a bit ropey (in that you can float in mid-air indefinitely) and if I understand correctly some of the puzzles have more than one ‘challenging’ solution, though the latter may be intentional.

 U.C.C has crappy qualities but on balance it’s not carp, because I willingly played it to the end.  The end of game screen suggests having a go at designing some levels yourself and points to the right bit of the code to edit, I’ve done 4 levels of my own, why not have a bash and share it somewhere?

Great idea + crap. Thankyou Steve!

 

Tipshack: Prod the Diplodocus and it turns to meat.  Avoid the spikes on the Stegosaurus.  Prod the rock and the Pteranodon drops it.  Prod the Triceratops in the bum and it hits the rock which then the Pteranodon drops it.  Prod the Diplodocus further in and it turns to meat, then triggers the charging Allosaurus.

HACK SACK: Perpetual lives: in line 120 change LET men=men-1 to LET men=men or LET horse=men, nothing else will work.

The game maps are above line 1000.  Insert UDGs as you wish and mostly, the code detects and acts accordingly.  Note each level string ends with ,""

Download here (and my version with 4 different first levels here)

Ottery Quest

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Z Axis Frotter

Why did the Otter cross the road?  To meet Clive Sinclair in a transport cafe of course!  This is the aim of OTTERY QUEST and marks the first entry in the CGC OTTER COMPETITION!!!  (Best/Worst/Funniest/Whatever game with an Otter in it gets a prize) so a tank of thank to Steve for getting the ball rolling on that one :-)

Why Otto the otter and Uncle Clive are having this rendez vous is not clear to me*.  While Clive slurps his warming & nutritous oxtail soup I can only imagine Otto snarling and tearing flesh from a raw fish (very vicious animal the Otter).  Having said that Otto has to make his way past not only speeding lorries (maybe transporting Hewlett Packards across the country much to Clive's chagrin) but also a shark infested pool!  Here Steve has made the common assumption that transport cafes all have moats containing some kind of lethal predator surrounding them like they do in the USA.  Not in good old blighty thank heavens, but it adds to the gameplay anyway.

The game makes excellent use of UDGs to portray lorries and sharks looming upon you in a menacing fashion.  Otto himself looks slightly seal-like, but given it's in 64 pixels I'd say still a good rendering.  It's not so easy to actually dodge things, I managed a couple of times with the lorries and the shark collision seems a bit bugged.

What's Otto's favourite food?  CARP!  Thankyou Steve!

*Ah got it, Clive wants to meet Otto as he's the only one willing to fund the flying car.

Tipshack: Achieve the mental state of an Otter before playing.

HACK SACK: No traffic: Change line 70 to 70 GOTO 90.

Download here.

Norn Iron

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Text: Oirish

For people not familiar with the title, Norn Iron sounds like Northern Ireland in the local accent.  A nicely constructed utility here on a topic close to Steve’s heart I presume, which makes the point that those involved are pretty much all speaking the same language.

Download here.

CheeseBergerBlitz

By Steve McCrea

Genre: One of those ones where you bomb a city.

Captain Cheeseberger has lost his everloving mind, of course, and needs to land his plane.  But there’s a city in the way!  What’s a man to do?

Download here.

Doom

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arcade: Maze

I think I’m the only person on earth to have never played Doom.  So I’m assuming this Spectrum conversion is a 100% faithful one.

Download here.

Pope Springs Eternal

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Text Salvation

A second entry from Steve in the Papal minicompetition.

You are the Pope (YEAH!!) and you must ‘get out’ before too much damage occurs to your reputation and still reach the first circle of heaven.  How long can you last?

 

Another excellent (well crappy) program, with some superb swearing detection.  Top satire too, and a flamboyant way with words, thankyou Steve!

Tipshack: Quit while you still can!

HACK PACK: at the start of line 20 change to FLASH 1: BORDER 2:INK 3: PAPER 6:CLS, this will give the game a sense of urgency to make you do the right thing.

Download here.

Grope the Choirboy

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arcade: strategy

An entry for the Papal minicompetition.

Hmmm.  Grope the choirboy.  Tread carefully.

A nicely executed piece of code, and a clever statement.

Tipshack: I’m not going to give tips on how to grope choirboys!

Download here.

Gareth Hood

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arrow Hell

You are Gareth Hood, crack shot and scourge of the Guards of John.

By altering position, power and angle you must hit the guard.  This is an amazing use of BASIC, the way the arrow flies through the air, and even reappears after a realistic interval after going off the top of the screen, is a thing of beauty.

I sat down to have a quick test of this and found myself playing it for much longer than intended.  It’s quite hard (I think) to get a direct hit.

Verdict: well programmed, well designed, extremely fun and addictive.  This is an absolute treat.  NOT CARP AT ALL!

Just play it.  Now!

Tipshack: Don’t ask me, I’m bloody hopeless at this game!

HACKPACK: Success every time: at the start of line 150 add GOTO 210.

Download here.

Scrap Yard Scrapes

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Scrapyard: maze

Rule #1 of how to write a crap game,  states that only good games have the word ‘crap’ in the title, and seeing how Scrap Yard Scrapes manages to secrete said word in there twice then it must be especially good.  Well yes actually, it is.

The aim of the game is to get from the left to the right hand side of the screen, you have a limited number of bombs to plant (get clear!) which blast your way through the blocks and scrap, and you can use your plough to shift the cyan scrap.  There is a time limit, after which the scrap yard dog (apologies to the author for thinking this UDG was a pig in a previous review!) chases after you, and finds you with a remarkable reliability.  The algorithm it follows is clearly very advanced.  As you progress the game gets harder as you get less bombs.  It is best around level 3 & 4 where you really have to employ strategy to get through.

 

There’s always a fly in the ointment of course, and SYS is no exception.  The game setup including ‘Loading…’ and screen generation takes a full 41 seconds, and also there is a bug in the code where you lose a bomb if you try and plant it in a block (or was it intentional?).  Also the game becomes impossible around level 5 as you only get 1 bomb, but the screen generated usually needs more than this.

There’s so many good points about this game, I mean, Steve has even included a feature that clears space around the player at the game start, to avoid being blocked in. 

Summary: lovely UDGs, great idea, great gameplay, a simply brilliant BASIC game.   

For shame Steve, for shame!

Tipshack: get to the middle of the screen and wait for the dog to start chasing you, makes for a more exciting game.

HACK PACK: non – finite bombs:  insert LET nb=7 at the start of line 200.

Download here.  DO IT!!!!!!

Dr No.'s Division Incision Derision

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Arcade: Espionematics

An outstanding rendition of the James Bond theme beeps out followed by a not too shabby depiction of Mr Bond on the cutting slab with Dr No looming over him (Hang on…wasn’t Goldfinger the one with the laser?  No matter).

“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No Mr Bond.  I expect you…to DIVIDE!”

This sums the game up pretty much, our fearless hero’s wedding tackle is under threat and can only be saved by YOUR skill with division.  Some are easy, some are hard, and each wrong answer inches the laser ever closer to the biffins bridge.  There is no respite or endgame either it seems, James is condemned to endless mathematics or castration….choices choices.

119 divided by 7?  With a laser inching towards your gonads?! I tell you it can’t be done.

...not even by the impeccable Mr Bond who must now be wishing he was Dr Bond.

Tipshack: repeatedly watch Moonraker until you hate James Bond so much that you don’t care what happens to him.

HACK PACK:  Correct every time: Line 50: remove INPUT g and replace with LET g=f1

Download here.

Countless Runes All Pisspoor

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Capricious platform

I could be wrong, but it looks like this charming little game is loosely based on EFMB, an ingenious cross platform game released in 2012.  It’s hard to believe that a crap game could result from such an innovative, addictive and playable concept.  Somehow though, Steve has managed this feat.

So the aim of the game is simple enough, move the cyan main character around the platforms collecting the yellow runes while avoiding the (stationary) red runes.  These runes are randomly generated each level using the RND function, some array thing I don’t understand and poking the UDGs.  Following the rule that each byte of the rune is symmetrical and not zero, they more often than not, with a bit (or lot) of imagination, bear a passing resemblance to something.  Here are some choice examples C.R.A.P generated while playing:

(1-Headless screamer, 2-Telepharg , 3-Zogstomper, 4-Bunnybot)

C.R.A.P has similar advanced 4 way screen wrapping to EFMB and teleporter mechanics, and is quite good fun for a few tries.  Each screen takes a while to generate, and creates setups that are impossible to complete without losing a life (or several lives).

Countless Articles Rather Poor.

Tipshack: don’t let the excitement of randomly generated runes distract you from the gameplay.

HACK PACK: Immeasurable lives: at the start of line 190 insert: LET nl=3

Download here.

Space Scarper

By Steve McCrea

Genre: Don’t touch the sides ‘em up

What do we have here?  A spectrum BASIC version of the arcade classic ‘Thrust’?  Well not quite, but not light years away either.  In Space Scarper you rotate the yellow ship and thrust (with inertia) in that direction towards the red thingy while avoiding the cyan walls.  I was surprised to see this and had a look in the code for any machine code USR calls – but nope, it’s good old fashioned BASIC PLOT and DRAW.  Clever stuff.

To keep the game varied and interesting each screen is different.  It is created in a painfully slow pseudorandom way before you can begin, and on occasion even makes a screen with no playable pathway to the goal!  When you do have a playable screen though Space Scarper is pretty good, perhaps a bit slow but the game mechanics are sound.

Space Scarper has some good points: playable concept and nice use of PLOT and DRAW for the main sprite.  These are finely balanced with some crap factors, namely slow reactions, a game screen creator that is capable of generating impossible screens and taking an eternity to draw the damn thing in the first place.

On balance: we’ve hit CGC paydirt!

Tipshack: Don’t touch the walls.

HACK PACK: Immunity 110 GOTO 100

Download here.