Irate Avifauna

By MykeP

Genre: Arcade: Pig Pester

This marks number 5 of the quadrilogy.

I’m probably in the minority in that I’ve never played the original game on which MykeP has based his Spectrum version, but I’m going to assume any similarities are cosmetic.  Using a complex engine that emulates gravity and power accurately would make a very playable game, and Myke’s version applies neither of these properties.

Like his other games it’s a visual treat (especially the gorgeous loading screen) and an audible assault, as the intro screen displays.  To my great surprise this game operates at a playable speed!  Using QAOP to control angle and power, the aim is to hit the green blobs (oops sorry – Pigs) at the top of the screen.  Unfortunately the angle can only be shifted in 15 degree increments, and there are only 3 steps of power.  I may be missing a trick but as far as I can tell each screen is impossible to complete as a result!  (though if someone manages it please tell me how).

There are some lovely success screens throughout this game, but unfortunately I’ve only managed to see them via hacking rather than playing.

Thankyou Myke!

EDIT > The game is actually playable, I made the mistake that you were aiming for the pigs at the top of the screen.  You are in fact aiming for invisible pigs off screen to the right.  To get you started (as per the Excel sheet) to beat screen 1 in one go fire 50 degrees and power 2.

Download TZX here
Download Excel pointers here
 
HACK SACK
Download unlocked version

Lucky Bird Shit Dude

By Wookiee

Genre: Shart Interceptor

LBSD marks Wookiee’s third entry into the competition and this time he’s had help, from a certain Mrs Wookiee.  I don’t know which of the two were responsible for the C: Nonsense in BASIC error that results after loading (before even starting the game) but it gets bonus points.  I am however, deeply concerned that daveysludge’s toilet humour syndrome is contagious.

EDIT >> Oops apologies, Lucky Bird Shit Dude is a 128k only game, use the Tape Loader option on a 128K model and you’ll be fine.

LBSD follows the classic formula of so many catch the cash games, but with a ploppy twist, and the cultural inclusion that having a bird crap on you is in fact good luck*.  Use ‘O’ and ‘P’ to move laterally and catch the poop from the bird, which leaps 3 character squares sideways on every release (some kind of googly?) for some reason.  Every successful ‘catch’ increases your luck by one, and every one that reaches the lawn does the opposite.  The aim of the game is, I presume, to last until the end of the time limit and accrue as many poo-butts as possible.  With hacking it looks like the best possible is 14 in the allotted time.

*E.g. China and the more sophisticated parts of France.

I can’t find any trace in the code or game of the ‘used johnny’ hazard as promised by the intro screen (but then I am demob happy and have been at the xmas sherry), so I’m going to put this down as a lazy, incomplete, rush job that is exactly what this competition is looking for!

 

Like Wookiee’s other releases you have to be impressed with it, as it’s totally in BASIC and uses a mix of classic UDGs and ASCII.  Qualities that render this perfect Cassette 50 material.

Thankyou Wookiees!

Download here.

R-SWYPE

By daveysludge

Genre: Christmas Crapper

With R-Swype, davey has completed his copro-trilogy and also coined another excellent poop-pun.  It bears more similarities to Dung Darach than Thunderturds, though it’s not a mere rehash – it has some pretty nifty new additions.  It should also be pointed out that like his other games, it is programmed in machine code, features great graphics making clever use of the spectrum’s attributes, is very playable and far too good for the CGC!  However, as we approach that time of year in which many of us spend a lot of time working on a hearty yule log, it is well timed.

The aim of the game is to guide Mark Barton Dung around and ram 3 poops down the bog, at which point Scott Faece appears (announced by a bit of BEEP FX digital speech) and you must collect the Omega Cider which fuels the rocket out.  There is a nifty bit of gameplay in the later levels with the bog roll, which Mark Barton Dung can shift but Scott Faece cannot.  So you have to think ahead to allow Scott to access the cider, and ensure the rocket is not impeded by the bogroll (hmm, what sort of rocket can’t go through paper?).  The time limits often prove prohibitive (see hack sack) but what can I say, this game is fantastic – play it.

Not crap at all, an afternoon consuming great game.  Thankyou davey!

Download TAP
Download inlay1
Download inlay2

HACK SACK:     Oodles of time: POKE 53499,x

                        Infinite time:        POKE 53581,0


 

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

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