Another day, another ZX81 offering, this time from absinthe_boy aka Angus Gulliver, who was last spotted in the CSSCGC 2014 with his Sochi Advanced Downhill Tea Tray Simulator. I get the feeling he’s missed a trick here, not calling this game “Advanced Great British Bake-Off Simulator” and featuring a mini-game where you control Paul Hollywood’s raised eyebrows (“You’re using apples in your apple pie?! *long pause* O-kay…”) , but never mind.
It’s a game about toast. After loading the .z81 file (yay, another file format I’ve never used before!) and pressing RUN there’s some weird flickering and the above title screen. I can only assume this game is for people who don’t have a toaster, or don’t know how to use one. There’s probably a joke to be here about the “toastrack” on the 128k Speccy, or even the Commodore 64 “breadbin”, but I can’t be bothered to make it.
Ooh, such choices! White, brown or 50/50! I never had that in my day, we were too poor to afford any sort of flour and had to make our bread out of pencil shavings, acorns and dog shit.
More choices! Although surely “extra thick” won’t fit in the toaster?
Blimey, this ZX toaster even has a heat setting! Whatever next? I’d better put it in the middle. Middle for diddle, as The Wurzels once sang. The excitement is killing me…
And there you have it… a 24% virtually burnt piece of virtual hot bread, and the end of the program (signified by the cryptic error message “0/590”). That was fun, wasn’t it? Nah. Shall we try it again? Nah. Because, pretty though the toaster graphic may be (for a ZX81 anyway), this game does suffer slightly from being a ZX81 program – what I’d really like to see is a Spectrum version of this, with a loading screen, full colour hi-res graphics and a Tritone version of this 70s oddity from Streetband (featuring Paul “Not Chris Young’s Brother” Young on vocals):
Score: 0/590.
Download here (zx81 .z81 file, use the “Load Snapshot” option to run in EightyOne, if you’re using a different emulator then I’ve no idea, sorry)
0/590 is error code 0 (“OK”), line 590. Or, in Spectrum speak:
0 OK, 590:1
That video captures the excitement of toast more than the game does.
Watching toast, erm, toast captures the excitement of toast more than this game does!
Then there’s this sort of toasting…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Apvga3w1wA