I’m at the Sqij Towers Caturday party. There’s tons of cheap booze (Tesco Value Vodka – virtually indistinguishable from water in every sense), and some scantily-clad girlies I’ll be getting off with later (you wish – Ed). We invited the entire cast of Derek Jolly’s Top Shelf Challenge series, but most of them were washing their hair (<snip rude joke about pubes> – Ed). It’s not too dissimilar to the plot of Line Overdrive, which was actually written by a cat. We didn’t invite Lee, because last time he just stood there with his arms folded, tutting at the mess we’d made of the carpet.
The Sqij Towers party. This is not relevant to the game being reviewed, merely filler.
Anyway, as it’s caturday I’ve snuck off for a few minutes to check out Simon Ferré‘s latest offering. His personal review butler is off reviewing MatGubbins‘ pussy-related fare, so I’m afraid the substitute review butler will be handling this one. So, yeah, if you can STOP TALKING and read Chapter 8 in your textbooks whilst I go and get myself a coffee*, that’d be grand. (I think you’ve confused “review butler” with “teacher” – Ed)
There are only two possible screenshots. This is the first one.
The game is in patented Chunk-O-Vision®, which seems to be the new black or something. In it, you drive a car along a road, which a cat appears to be standing in the middle of.
There are only three controls, and one of them is useless, so there are two options really. You can either (a) run over the poor defenceless kitten or (b) beep the horn to make the fearless feline move out of the way. You only get points for the former, so realistically, if you want to “win”, you only have one option, and that is to (PLOT TO – Ed) GO TO AND RUN OVER THE CAT.
…and this is the second. You’ve seen the entire game.
If you want to be a pacifist, that’s fine but you won’t get much satisfaction (or points) out of saving virtual moggies. If you are an evil cat hater, like the author clearly is, then you might want to download this covertly before somebody calls the RSPCA.
I did particularly enjoy the realistic engine noises, but the horn needs looking at.
Score: One dead cat out of ∞ live cats.
Download .tzx
* For “get myself a coffee” read “load up this pile of crud”.
Nice one Simon.
Chortle, Simon & Mat had better book their tickets to Bulgaria before the mail gets hold of these.
(Chris, I think you’ve confused ‘review butler’ with ‘teacher’ by the way.)
I don’t have a problem with cats myself, but unfortunately Sinclair didn’t include such keywords as DOG, MOUSE, RAT, EMU, DONKEY, HORSE, SHEEP, COW, etc.
Sounds like an idea for a new version of Sinclair BASIC. Provide the new animal commands and give them a suitable meaning. E.g. HORSE provides a harsh rasping white noise channel of sound.
I think we should lobby on change.org to get those keywords included (apart from the fact we’re 33 years too late).
D’you know what, I was thinking the other day of a way of changing the character set so that each keyword spelt out a different word.
You’d have to be really clever with it though, you wouldn’t be able to change, say, BORDER to DONKEY because of the two Rs in BORDER.
I suppose you could hack the ROM and copy it to the upper 16K of memory or something but that’s an exercise for someone with more brain cells than me.
Oh, I almost forgot.
I was going to include an ‘Easter egg’ whereby honking the horn ten times (or something) would give you a million points and crown you the RSPCA’s best supporter (all in glorious chunk-o-vision) but I didn’t get around to it.