UDG Strip Snap

By MykeP

Genre: Catch the Camisole

UDG Strip Snap marks Myke’s 4 entry to his trilogy and the second strip snap game in the 2013 competition.  While Andrew Greene’s version pitted your twitching digits against the might of Sam Fox, UDG strip snap caters for the full range of tastes.  So to begin you select your opponent from the handsome Hank, tasty Tina and the er..KT 81 for the technosexuals I presume, which is a thing apparently.

You also get some lovely nudey UDG graphics and animations, which I can in all honesty imagine my much younger self getting frightfully excited about.

 

It’s standard strip snap rules, last to say ‘SNAP’, or press S in this case, removes an item of clothing.  This version has a financial aspect where items of clothes are sold back when a mistake is made, reducing the tally.  Easy mode really is easy, to lose that round you’d need to be virtually catatonic, but intermediate provides more of a challenge.  The Expert setting is bugged (see hacksack) and has the same time settings as BASIC (bonus points there).

There is a really smart in game easter egg, press ‘E’ on the intro screen and you’ll see what I mean.  Speaking of easter eggs there is a hash scan thingy hiding under the attributes on the loading screen, since I lack the technology to read where it leads I hope someone else can help out here.

They say the brain is the biggest erogenous zone (and after my genitals that’s true) which is good because you’ll need a bit of imagination to get aroused by this game!

(and yes, you do get to see everything)

Thankyou Myke!  A lovely 15^th anniversary update to the original version.

Download here.

HACK SACK:

Fix EXPERT setting: LINE 2180 change betspeed to 0.7

Very long pause: change betspeed to 10.

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.

Burndown Takeout ZX

By MykeP

Genre: Arcade: Reckless driving

This Race ‘n’ shunt game marks MykeP’s 3^rd entry into the competition, and what a late spurter he’s proving to be.  For those in the know BDTOZX is based on a modern game of a similar name, in which (after a bit of research) you need to drive in a frightfully unsafe manner, crashing into other cars in order to cross the finish line first.

I actually thought that with the release of Rally Driver in 1984, there was nothing new that could be added to the genre, but how wrong I was.  If RD offered sweaty, palpitating, touch sensitive action, BDTOZX can be described as being at the opposite end of the Spectrum.  And it is from the get go, because as soon as it loads you are treated to an incredibly long pause while it loads, populates, randomizes* and initialises…..stuff.  Though as it turns out this pause seems unfortunately brief because after it comes the ‘music’ which I gather is by ‘My Chemical Romance’ and ‘Lady Gaga’ (as Myke calls them).  While it may be accomplished, it hurts.

A huge amount of work has gone into this game (which I’m not sure I’m doing justice to here), which has numerous nods to modern gaming events like ‘unlockable games’ which of course, fail to work.

 

It’s amazing how slow Spectrum BASIC can be sometimes (thankfully I had a mountain of ket** delivered last week), and I’d say Myke has pushed in all the stops to make it so.  For this game to be exciting in any real sense you have to crank the emulator right up.  But at a pedestrian 3.5MHz you take on a zen like understanding of the world, where you can see everything, and/or nothing, happening all at once.  And while a nicely drawn (and it is nicely drawn) explosion can pump up the adrenaline at faster speeds, it takes on a more poetic, contemplative angle at the snail’s pace BDTOZX was intended to run at.

Good fun this, crank up the emulator, have a look through the code at all the references, and be generally impressed with an accomplished piece of absolute carp.

Great work and thankyou Myke!

Download here.
* why did the speccy ROM use ‘z’ in randomise, for shame?
**chup

Jet Rocket v 2.0

By Iceman (Darken)

Genre: Shoot 'em left

Here we have a piece of not so abandoned-ware, as it first made an appearance in the 2010 CGC and work began on it some 25 years ago!  So after all this time and refinement this game had better be pretty bloody perfect.

 

One of the biggest differences is that this version was done in asm rather than compiled, but the thing is I can’t tell any difference between the two!

The aim of this game is to protect your rocket from the advancing sentient boxes (sorry, robots), or something.  To do so you use the keys 6,7 for up/down and 0 to fire your fearsome laser against the random alien assault.  The position of the rocket towards the left means you don’t have that much time to move to the correct row and shoot the robot, especially if you cock up the keys which I don’t find that intuitive.  I’m not sure what your space suit is made of but you have 3 lives, but if just one robot hits the rocket it’s game over.

There’s a lot of attention to detail in this game, from the advanced loading screen to the in game animations, well animation.  While it’s a lovely animation, the thing is you see it every time you complete a level, and without a skip function it can begin to grate.  In fact I’d swear blind that Iceman has timed it so that it’s not long enough to take the mickey, but not short enough to avoid frustration.  Genius!

Though it probably should be said that the graphics are a bit simple (let’s call them rustic).  

Would be programmers may want to check out some of the support material, of which there is an astonishing amount.

The Hi-Score challenge starts around 6820, I’m sure I could do better but can’t face seeing the animation again.

Lovely little game, nice to see it (again).

Thankyou Iceman!

Download TAP.
Download game and supportmaterial.
Download Loader hack

HACK SACK:
GROUND ATTACK ONLY:        Poke 30517,62; 30518,20;30531,75
NUMBER OF LIVES:                 Poke 28978,x lives (0-255)

Crisp Snatcher

By Steve Broad
 
Genre: Arcade: Catch the crisps.

Crisp  Snatcher was apparently created in 1984 with the intention of setting the blossoming games market on fire.  Steve presumably just never found the right software house, but perhaps he should have sent a copy to The Power House, the company that saw SQIJ fit to unleash on the world because Crisp Snatcher is a confusing buggy howler of a game!
 

Once we start the game we are assaulted by a gaudy display that would have William Burroughs running from the telly, and we encounter the first bug .  Like SQIJ, Crisp Snatcher has a keyread bug!  They are supposed to be 6,7 and 0 but for some reason occasionally they just don’t register - Excellent work!
 
Once you manage to engage with your rubber keys you can begin.  Yellow crispy like blobs descend from the sky and you must catch them in your bag, but beware the green errr thing, that travels from left to right occasionally dropping crystals of glass.  Of course it does.  The crisps fall too quickly and you move too slowly to be able to catch them, and it’s not clear what the laser even does!
 

Or am I doing something wrong?
 
A really nice touch is that after the inevitable GAME OVER message, when you try to restart the game crashes!
 

A superb piece of crap gamesmanship.
 
Well done and thankyou Steve!
 
Download here.

Mountains of Ketchup

By Rebelstar without a cause
 
Genre: Adventure sauce
 
Mountains of Ketchup (a pun on the ZX Spectrum adventure classic Mountains of Ket of course) marks Rebelstar’s 15^th entry to this year’s CGC.  First impressions suggest a rather simple poorly presented BASIC adventure (though is faithful to Ket’s layout) but don’t be fooled – still condiments run deep.

I like the use of action keys instead of typing commands, and the fact there is no limit on how much you can carry (though I’m not sure if I could carry a lawnmower and a mine detector at the same time in reality).
 
I’m not going to spoil the surprise but in addition to the simple text puzzles, there are some built in arcade style mini-games embedded in MOK which brought the biggest smile to my face.
 

Mountains of ketchup is tinged with tripe but is an excellent kernel of an idea that I’d love to see expanded upon.  I have to say I was disappointed it finished so quickly!
 
It’s crap, but play it, really – it’s great.

Thankyou Rebelstar!

<What the hell are the slippers for?>
 
Download here.
Download Game Map.

Super UDG FighterZ 2 Turbo

By MykeP

Genre: Arcade: Wear you down.

It’s fair to say we have a game here of epic proportions.  In part it is a rework of a game written in 1998, and with its 2 sided tape, introduction, great graphics and numerous characters with backstories it’s going to have to try bloody hard to be crap.  Thankfully it doesn’t disappoint.

You start naturally enough with side 1, which following an excellent loading screen (with some more chortleworthy easter eggs) gives us game and character info.  You may notice that SUFTT bears a passing resemblance to some classic coin op beat ‘em ups like Street Fighter, and like most of them it continues the tradition of barmy backstories and stupendous mismatches (a cowboy versus an alien?).  The 10 characters weave a tangled web of various grudges of one type or another, and the only solution is obviously to have a fighting contest where you kick and punch each other into submission.

It’s worth mentioning that SUFFT pushes the spectrums memory to the limits (which the total of 9 minutes loading attests to), and Myke had to drop 2 characters and the redefine keys option to save memory.

Onto side 2 and the game itself.  There are so many nice touches here, great graphics, logos, menu screen – so good that it nearly doesn’t belong in the competition.  But like so many other games it comes good (well, crap) when it comes down to the gameplay.  We can probably get Myke on the trades description act for having the audacity to have the words ‘turbo’ in the title!


Once you have selected your character you have to win 3 bouts each against 2 randomly selected opponents, then you fight your nemesis.   If you make it that far, win or lose you get a victory or failure message specific to the character.

The fight is a fairly simple affair, and the same graphics are used every time (though there is a lovely detailed backdrop).  The moves available are flying kick, punch, kick and block.  Which move is successful depends on how many character cells you are from your opponent.  Like a lot of beat ‘em ups there are certain moves that do more damage than others and the player can easily win if relying solely on them.  The AI is actually quite good so if you play ‘properly’ you will find the game surprisingly challenging, and dare I say it – enjoyable (especially if using an emulator you crank the processor up to 14MHz).

So, Super UDG FighterZ 2 Turbo is definitely worth a go, but steel yourself for a potential physical and psychological beating, especially if you get to hear the deadly putdown by ZX-8100.

“It looks like you’ve got jam all over your face”

Ouch.

Thankyou Myke!

Tipshack: win every fight – walk into your opponent and hold down ‘P’, you will take some hits but will always land more yourself.

Download side 1 here.
Download side 2 here.