March 2015 – Page 4 – The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2015

Month: March 2015

Eye Gambler

4th March 2015

From the guy that brought you such greats as the legendary Sam Fox Strip Snap, Alan Whicker simulator and, of course, Good Night’s Sleep Simulator, we have a new work of art called Eye Gambler. Here is the synopsis straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Geoffrey Bong has a problem with his eyes. He just can’t control them!”

OK so far, and oh, don’t I just know that feeling!

“So, taking advantage of this poor guy’s misfortune, you (and a friend/enemy/casual acquaintance) get to gamble on which of his eyeballs will reach the edge of his eye first.”

Err.. yes, just as you do when your friend/enemy/casual acquaintance has myriad abnormalities!

Ethical debates aside, let’s see what this box of tricks has in store for us…

Mr Andrew Green is really trying hard here. Not only has he delivered his game in an emulator friendly “Z80” format, he has also gone to the rather extreme lengths of designing cover art for the cassette:

Eye Gambler Cover Art

Impressed? We, (sitting at the top of the menacing heights of sqij towers) are. A first for this year’s competition anyway. A full 90 minutes extra work must have gone into that.

Fortunately, the cover art offsets the fact that we have no loader or loading screen to ~~bulk at~~ enjoy so right into the game it is. The loading page is colourful making full use of the attributes file and a JSW-paused-screen-style colour cycling thingy. This is swiftly followed by story background and game instructions. Luckily, I have a mildly worryingly passion for both gambling and eyes so this game sounds right up my street.

Basically the gist is… gamble your £100 by betting which pupil will reach the edge of the eye first. Crap points are duly awarded on account that the instructions say to “bet on which eyeball will reach the edge of the eye first”. Surely your eyeballs are in constant contact with the edge of the eye? I know mine are!

After choosing between 1 or 2 player mode (on the slim possibility that happen to be sitting there with a playmate, or that you even have any mates!), you enter your names and are off.

Each player chooses an eye (L for Left, R for Right) and the amount of dosh they are willing to risk. Clear signs if quality are noted as it checks that you can’t bet more than you have so I opted to bet 10*PI and EXP 4 for my two players.

Geoffrey Bong is then drawn up on the screen and his pixel-eyes start moving around in a very disconcerting fashion.

Geoffrey Bong with his independently moving pixel eyes

Clearly the bookies only accept whole number of £££ as when both players happen to win, they were each awarded £31 and £54 respectively, thus pocketing the extra 41.592653589p and 59.815p (also) respectively. Eye-Gambler-02

After that, it is basically rinse and repeat, except for the fact that if you lose all your money you are still expected to bet even though betting £0 is “too low”.

In all, Eye Gambler is reasonably decent. It certainly wouldn’t look out of place on the Cascade Cassette 50 tape. With a very comical storyline and some amusing graphics along the way, this game wins some valuable points along the way. Certainly, it’s nice not to have your eyes burn or ears melt at some really badly designed game. All in all, a thumbs up!

Download here: .z80 snapshot.

Marginal Pain

leespoons

3rd March 2015

Crap Games

3 Comments

Hot on the heels of his strongman/budgie simulator, Dave Hughes is back with an entry that impressed me straight away by having a long machine code block straight after the (quite good, actually) SCREEN$ had loaded. As I’d turned fast loading off in my emulator, the three-minute burst of noise instantly transported me back in time to 1987… I’m 12 years old again and I’m waiting patiently for the Mastertronic game I spent my pocket money on to hurry up and load.

I can almost taste the anticipation as I munch on a sweet ‘n’ sour Pot Noodle (that’s not anticipation, it’s diced carrot! Ed.) Will the game be a Finders Keepers? Or another Voyage into the Unknown?

I’m awoken from my daydream by my significant other yelling “Are you doing that internet banking thing again?!” At least I think that’s what she said…

Dave has helpfully included some instructions and a rather spurious back story about a REM statement trying to travel quickly through a CSSCGC entry. After sunteam’s last effort I’ve had it up to here with REM, so much so that I won’t even bother to make the joke about Michael Stipe again (you know, Michael Stipe, that’s him in the corner, losing his… oh never mind)

Now you know I said this game had a long machine code block? Well given that the author has written several good games in assembly I was expecting him to at least know how to move some graphics from one address to another, but no! I now have to sit through what seems like the whole of the Mesozoic Era while the graphics are loaded from memory onto the screen by way of the old FOR F=16384 TO 23295: POKE F, PEEK (F+16384): PAUSE 1000000000: NEXT F trick. OK, so the pause isn’t in there, but it still takes bloody ages, far longer than it does from cassette, and you don’t even get the nice screechy seagulls-being-tortured loading noises as compensation. I suppose I could speed the emulator up, but I’m very quickly starting to realise that being host of the CSSCGC is a bit like having sex on a bed of nails, except without the sex, and I’m not actually supposed to be enjoying this shit. So I just grin and bear it for three minutes (I thought you said it wasn’t like having sex? Ed.)

It’s a maze game! I like maze games. I wasn’t expecting a game I might like! Come to think of it, Dave did tell me this was a bit like his effort for the CSSCGC2014, Pixbit, but it obviously didn’t register with my crap-game addled brain. I assume if I hold down the O key I’ll go left, and if I take my finger off I’ll… nope, still going left! It’s a perpetual motion maze game! A. Down. At least the controls are fairly responsive, for a crap game written mostly in BASIC. There’s a wall coming up, hope I don’t crash into it… oh bugger I’ve pressed Q and crashed into myself instead… aaaaaaargh! Without so much as a by-your-leave I’m dumped back to the very start of the mega-slow screen-transferring epoch again. Nurse, the SCREEN$!

So I had another go and completed the level, only to be told I’d failed – because my time was – get this – too slow! Ha! Ha ha! Ahahahahahaha… oh f*** off.

There’s probably a good game in here somewhere, but if this game really was for sale in 1987 I’d strongly advise you to spend your pocket money on something else, like a one-way ticket to Timbuktu for Dave Hughes.

Verdict: this game is exactly like a sweet ‘n’ sour Pot Noodle. Bad for your health, and leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. Bleugh!

Download here!

REMventure

leespoons

2nd March 2015

Crap Games

4 Comments

LIST

10 REM It’s another game from sunteam on disk! Hooray!

20 REM Yes, yet another one where you have to change your emulator to +3 and remember the title of it to load – “remvent.ure” in this case!

25 REM (although I have converted it to .tap, so don’t worry if the idea of a Speccy with a disk drive brings you out in a rash)

30 REM Here’s a screenshot, so you’ll get the general idea:

40 REM No, it’s nothing to do with Michael Stipe’s band – instead, it’s a text adventure constructed entirely out of REM statements. Oh, my aching sides! Fetch me some Sellotape!

50 REM Although actually, in a funny sort of way, once you realise it’s not a playable game as such, it actually becomes a bit: playable GO TO 70, annoying GO TO 80.

60 REM In fact, sunteam has clearly put some thought into this, and I would go so far as to say it’s his least brain-buggeringly awful game to date – I might even play it again! GO TO 100.

70 REM A bit like a satirical take on those Fighting Fantasy books we all used to read in the 1980s, except with fewer scary monsters and more sausages. GO TO 60.

80 REM Although it’s far less annoying if you download the .tap file I’ve thoughtfully converted and play the game on a proper Spectrum, instead of one of those weird new-fangled Amstrad thingies. GO TO 60.

91 REM There is no line 90.

100 REM Download the game here (.dsk file for masochists/.tap file for the rest of us)

Where’s Wally?

leespoons

2nd March 2015

Crap Games

3 Comments

Another Simon Ferré effort, and at least this time he’s bothered to include a game. Despite the name, Where’s Wally isn’t the long-awaited follow-up to the last Wally Week title, Three Weeks In Paradise. Instead it’s (loosely) based on Martin Handford’s books of the same name, in which you have to find the bespectacled, behatted, bestripey-bejumpered Wally. Curiously Wally has different names in different languages (Waldo in North America, Charlie in France) so perhaps with a bit of tweaking Simon could, if you’ll allow me to lapse into corporate bollockspeak for a moment, “leverage the game’s multi-territory excremence value going forward”. I particularly look forward to the Norwegian version, Where’s Willy?

It starts well, with a FULLY ANIMATED loading screen, an astounding feat of programming skill that would have made the creators of the Moon Strike loader weep with rage if it had come out in 1988:

Hypnotic, isn’t it? In fact I’m guessing you’re all still looking at it right now, so I might as well write any old shite in this paragraph, just to pad out the review. Ultimate Play The Game were a rubbish software house. Glenn Medeiros was the greatest singer of the 1980s. The Commodore 64 is the best computer ever made.

Ahem. Now I’ve got that out of my system, let’s take a look at the game. Simon very helpfully hasn’t given any instructions, so after pressing a key you’re left to work proceedings out for yourself. Luckily Simon’s gone for the traditional key option of Q, A, O, P and Space – although U, D, L, R, F would’ve gained him more crap points! The game is pretty self-explanatory – you have to find Wally in a sea of stripy-jumpered people. Wally and his friends look very similar, comprising of a head (with no hat or glasses), a pair of stubby little legs, and the stripy jumper, which comes in a multitude of randomly-generated colours. Rather disturbingly Simon has forgotten to draw arms on his Wallies, which makes me wonder what they all do for a living when they’re not loafing about in a Spectrum game. Perhaps they take it in turns as Def Leppard’s drummer.

In an amazing feat of detection I worked out how to play the game almost straight away – you move your cursor around and highlight the correct Wally. Just to make it clear, the chap you’re looking for is the original Wally, who looks something like this (Microsoft Paint hasn’t been kind to him, but you get the idea)

The game is pretty tough at first. Choose the wrong Wally – and there are a few stripy red herrings thrown in there – and it’s Game Over, which made me wonder if Simon Ferré used to work for Dinamic. However I pretty soon worked out how to find him – I won’t completely spoil the fun for the rest of you, but if you stare at the screen without blinking you might get the idea…

And if you’re still not convinced by this game’s charms, there’s a snapshot available to download. In the author’s own words, “I was utterly captivated by this game and lost all sense of time while scouring the screen looking for Wally, and all I can say is that eventually I decided to give up after a whopping 109 score, as you can see from the snapshot I have provided. Let us see if anyone can beat this.”

I must admit after about 3 goes I was more bored than my kids on a wet Sunday afternoon in November during a power cut – but if you’re the sort of person who has far too much time on their hands, 109 is the score to beat!

Download: .tap / .sna

The Amazing Thinking Brain

bloodbaz

1st March 2015

Crap Games

Comments

A large picture of a brain with the title of the program in large friendly letters!

Opening Screen

Screenshot of first page of text. Plugs itself as "so complex that it is indistinguishable from a real human"

Opening Page

Well, today is my misfortune to be slapped across the metaphorical cheeks with another one of sunteam’s submissions. According to the author, Thinking Brain is “possibly the most advanced AI ever written“. I think the most important word to cling to in this statement is “possibly”. It is not however without at least one attribute that you would normally associate with greatness: “anticipation”.

The initial load displays a rather impressive loading screen titled “THE AMAZING THINKING BRAIN” and the enticing phrase “PRESS ANY KEY TO BE AMAZED”. OK, good so far, let’s see where this leads. Well, it leads to a reasonably colourful page basically plugging itself as an advanced AI that would pass the Turing Test and a warning to use with care. Another prompt for a key press leads to …

Screenshot of a well rendered of image of a famous picture of a scientist holding a flask in both hands

Scientist Screenshot

… another loading screen. This time of a mad scientist just slightly too passionately embracing a round bottomed flash, and another prompt to continue. “OK, stay with it” my inner optimist hails. More plug. More anticipation. Slightly more scepticism. American info-mercials start to come to mind at this point. Next is yet another screen…

Monochrome (blue on black) screenshot of a brain with insert of a single neuron with its nucleus lit up like a spark

Insane in the brain!

A brain this time with a neuron insert. A decent graphic in all. Another screen about Neurons and another random splattering of random noises. Our final graphic is Arnold Schwarzenegger in what is presumably one of the Terminator movies.

Hasta la vista speccy baby!

Again, very well put together with decent colour to add. One final screen of text keeps us from the bounty for which we seek.

And so we get to the program itself. Presumably, a sudden cash flow crisis meant that colour had to be stripped from program development at this point, however we are still sold the myth that the program will “will simulate and replicate human language with 100% accuracy” and “YOU CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE”. Pressing the final key to begin, presents you with a blank screen asking for an “Input statement” where you get to enter (presumably), a statement, a jest, a verse of prose maybe or even the complete works of Shakespeare. Whichever you chose, I will leave you to try for yourself to see if you think this program delivers on all that it promises!

"BRAIN says ..." followed by whatever you type in on the INPUT string!

The Simulator in action

If it wasn’t for pretty decent lead-in screens and the fact that the plug screens are well laid out, with good spelling, grammar and layout, and a splash of colour to add, this game could have been a whole lot more crappier. Even the occasional sound phrases which pop out over 30 seconds or so are certainly no worse than mediocre. One “almost” saving grace is the fact that sunteam has once again published this what-ever-it-is on +3 .dsk even though I was able to run the hacked .tap version straight off of my 16K Spectrum. What is the +3 bells and whistles in that?

As a result, I doubt this program will be top of the CGC listings. Try again sunteam! … Or not! 😉

Download .dsk version (provided by author) or .tap version (cunningly converted by spoons for all our sanity) here.

Advanced ZX81 Simulator

Chris

1st March 2015

Crap Games

1 Comment

The CGC has long had a tradition of people writing “advanced simulators” of their favourite (second favourite – Ed) computer platforms for the humble Speccy. From the short:
10 REM ZX SPECTRUM EMULATOR 20 NEW

All the way up to James Smith‘s Virtual ZX Spectrum – an actual ZX Spectrum emulator that runs on the Spectrum itself – and his potentially genuinely useful Twenty Commodes, Vic-20 emulator.

The question here was “which category is this going to fall into?”. Is it the usual cheap one-joke effort, or is it a fully fledged ZX81 emulator for the Spectrum capable of playing such classics as 3D Monster Maze and Barcode Hangman? (such things do already exist)

One of the delights that isn’t playable with Advanced ZX81 Simulator, running here under a proper ZX81 emulator for the Speccy.

It started off well, configuring my 16K RAM Pack with extra blu-tack to avoid the dreaded RAM Pack Wobble(TM) after three hours on Crap Castle Master. The ZX81’s K prompt stared back.

Ah… the dreams of every ZX81 owner… so this is what’s “advanced” about it…

Predictably, it’s a cheap one joke effort. Extra marks for entirely failing to mimic the ZX81’s error messages, and providing a polite wordy error rather than the abrasive unexpected reboot, screen corruption and freeze that plagued ZX81 owners in the early 1980s.

It appears that the “Advanced” in the title means “More advanced than an actual ZX81” and “Simulator” means “Not even trying to be a ZX81”.

I rate this ZX80 out of QL.

Download here.

Newer Posts →

The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2015 -

Month: March 2015