Crap Games – Page 5 – The comp.sys.sinclair crap games competition 2015

Category: Crap Games

BEEP

21st April 2015

Here’s Sqij Towers’ very own deKay with his first entry of the year – BEEP – which is disqualified from being a keyword challenge entry because the filename’s too short – try BEEP BEEP BEEP next time! A veteran of the Speccy scene, deKay (real name Andy, a dodgy moniker if ever I heard one) didn’t include much in the way of instructions with his entry, so I didn’t know what I was in for until I loaded the game. However he did stick the whole thing on GitHub, wondering in the process how many other Speccy games are on there (answer – nobody cares), and thereby gaining a whole ton of geek points. I was also pleased to see a proper loading screen, which took five times as long to load as the BASIC game – rather than displaying it here I’ll let you discover how wonderful it is for yourself (this is because I couldn’t be bothered to turn off all the auto-load stuff in Fuse to save a .png of it, and Spectaculator, which I use when I want the full loading experience, only saves .bmp files, which WordPress won’t display and I couldn’t be bothered to convert)

Beep1

No spurious back-story or badly-drawn sausages on legs here, this looks like a game that does exactly what it says on the tin… erm, inlay. If there was one. From the instructions: “Each letter on your keyboard corresponds to a different BEEP. Except, they’re all the same and not different at all. Except one of them is.” This all sounds woollier than a Liberal Democrat’s Christmas jumper so far. Oh, and you have to press the “letter 5” to start. I do this, and am prompted to press a letter key. I immediately press the “letter 5” again, in case deKay’s strange idea of a letter still includes numbers, but to no avail. So, thinking logically for once, I start at the beginning with “a” and get a BEEP. Then “b” (BEEP), “c” (slightly higher-pitched BEEP) and “d” (BEEP). So which letter is the odd BEEP out? It’s “c” of course! Yay, I win!

As is proving to be the case with a lot of these chance/blind luck/RANDOMIZEd games, this was a sheer fluke. On my next 76 goes I failed to identify the different-sounding BEEP, because it was hiding under one of the 22 letters I didn’t press, every single time! I got so annoyed at this that I immediately transferred the game to a C15 cassette so I could smash it to bits with a toffee hammer before throwing it out of the window onto a huge bonfire of cat shit and discarded Bros albums. Aaaaaaaaaaargh!

As you still seem to be reading this, I can only assume you have a first class degree in Masochism and Gluttony for Punishment from the University of North-East Milton Keynes (formerly Newport Pagnell College for Duffers)… in which case this is the BEEPing game for you!

Score: I give this letter 5 out of 100 BEEPs!

Download .zip file (and don’t get excited, there’s only a .tap in there) here

Optical Illusions

leespoons

19th April 2015

Crap Games

5 Comments

Two reviews in one day? Anyone would think I’d been moaned at for the lack of updates. Right, I’ll make this (mercifully) short then.

It’s a game by Simon Ferré that doesn’t feature pirates (although oddly enough, Simon’s covering email was written in pirate language). You have to work out if the optical illusions are optical illusions or not.

If you want to experience the full slow loading horror then turn fast loading off in your emulator. And, erm, that’s more or less all I’m going to write, because I’ve still got nine more games to review, I’m being shouted at from upstairs because I haven’t poured out the gin and tonic yet, and I’m about to watch some telly. So you should go and play the thing for yourself, shouldn’t you?

Score: ∞ out of 100 (Who are you – M.C. Escher? Ed.)

Download here.

Point At A Pirate

leespoons

19th April 2015

Challenges, Crap Games

6 Comments

The inimitable MatGubbins returns with yet another Keyword Challenge entry in glorious Chunk-O-Vision®™©(patent pending). As with most of Mat’s games it’s yet another case of style over content, with some of the best graphics I’ve seen so far in the competition – sadly utterly wasted on the thin excuse for a game!

It’s a gambling game. Now, I’ve been addicted to many things over the years – beer, cigarettes, spicy Nik Naks, sex (You should be so lucky! Ed.) but one thing I’ve never understood is gambling. My dad did the football pools for years back in the Eighties – my Saturday afternoons were dominated by “Queen of the South nil, Stenhousemuir nil” – yet he didn’t win so much as a brass farthing. I was in a lottery syndicate for a year back in the Nineties, and we never won so much as a thruppenny bit. And every year at work we do a sweepstake on the Grand Horse Racing Race (or whatever it’s called), and every year the boss wins, much to everyone else’s annoyance. However, the beauty of a Speccy game about gambling is you don’t have to spend your hard-earned cash at all!

I’ll keep this review fairly quick, as I know there haven’t been any updates for ages (for my part, a combination of school holidays and crap internet at home was to blame). You have 100 coins and have to gamble it up to 2000 so you can pay your fare to the New World by seeing if your random arrow lands on a pirate. Sounds easy, right? Wrong… if your arrow lands on a pirate, you win some more coins, but if it lands on a non-pirate, you lose. A bit like my dad with the bloody football pools.

I have to say, Mat’s really excelled himself here with the Chunk-O-Vision graphics and characters. I’m not quite sure how he did it or how long it took, but it looks brilliant! However the game is just a bog standard BASIC guessing game, and once again suffers from the RANDOMIZE curse – I’ll give you a tip, don’t gamble too much for the first 10 or so goes, as you won’t land on a pirate. However Mat more than makes up for this with a pixellated version of Emilia Fox without any clothes – hubba hubba!

As the game itself is so crap, Mat’s kindly included a demo mode showing all the characters, which can be accessed by GOTO 6800. And if you do eventually win the game, there’s a nicely-rendered screen at the end (no spoilers, but unfortunately it’s not a properly-pixellated Emilia Fox) If not for the characters I would’ve lost interest after about three seconds, but I’ll give this 99 dubloons out of 100, provided Mat goes away and makes a proper game out of those graphics!

Download tap hearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Farage’s European Invasion

leespoons

13th April 2015

Crap Games

4 Comments

Apparently UKIP’s perma-gurning leader, Nigel Farage, is a “man of the people”, because he’s always drinking pints of real ale in pubs. Well, I went to my local pub the other day and was charged £3.75 for a pint of Old Toejam’s Sweaty Bollock-Hair, so I can only assume the people Nigel Farage is a “man of” are people with lots and lots of money, or brewery bosses. If he was a true man of the people he’d be guzzling cheap Tesco lager like the rest of us plebs. Anyway, I digress – you’ll be pleased to hear that “our” Nige now has his own Speccy game! However for reasons known only to Sqij Towers’ Chris Young, he’s been re-imagined in this game as Nigella Farage. Judging her on looks alone, she’s certainly no Nigella Lawson:

I can honestly say this is the most badly-rendered screen I’ve seen in my entire life. I assume the thing Nigella’s holding on the left is a pint of patriotism (to wash down the xenophobia-flavoured crisps), but beyond that I’m speechless! Well done Chris!

The game is even worse. Nigella Farage of the USNOOZ£ party (do you see what he did there?) has just become Prime Minister, and has made it her mission to kick out all those foreigners who keep trying to sneak into the country so they can lounge around on benefits at our expense while simultaneously taking all our jobs. To do this, she’ll lob pebbles at them on the shingle beaches of Kent in a Churchillian fashion until they go home. If all that stone-slinging gets too strenuous, a pint of beer will top up the energy levels.

So that’s Nigella on the left (shouldn’t she be on the far right? Ed.), and there’s Johnny Foreigner over there. Shifty bugger, isn’t he? Funny-looking pixels. I don’t trust him. Kick ‘im aaaaaaaht! Set the angle and power, press Space to lob your weapon, and… missed by a mile. Rats! In fact there’s so much flickering going on that I couldn’t see the pebble at all until I cleaned my glasses. I try again, and again, and again (with the help of a couple of beers), and finally manage to wallop Monsieur İñtêrłøpèr who, contrary to the instructions, doesn’t go home, but dies. Bloody foreigners, coming over here, getting killed on our beaches before they can burn our villages and ravage our womenfolk.

That was a bit of a fluke, though – I played for another few minutes without hitting another Auslander, and ended up with a score of -15, at which point I can only assume the USNOOZ£ government identified me as a leftie pinko Communist hippy and kicked me aaaaaht!

This game soon becomes unbearably tedious – a bit like Nigel himself – but at least it was made in Britain, on a British machine, by a British person, for the British, thus safeguarding British jobs for the next generation of British Britons in Britain!

Score: 1 Euro out of 100 pounds.

Download .tap here.

Lazy Clint

leespoons

8th April 2015

Challenges, Crap Games

6 Comments

Another Chunk-O-Vision™® effort from MatGubbins. I can’t be arsed to review it, so here’s a screenshot.

You can probably guess the rest, but if not, here’s another screenshot.

If you want to know what happens next, download the .tap here. If you can be arsed.

Score: 23 hours and 59 minutes’ sleep out of 24.

Honey I Shrank The Screen

leespoons

8th April 2015

Crap Games

14 Comments

I’m having horrendous trouble with my home broadband at the moment, to the point where I can see the piles of crap games clogging up my inbox, but I can’t log in to my website to review them (other than via the WordPress app for Android, which with my fat fingers is like using an elephant with a sledgehammer to crack a nut for a squirrel). The upshot of this is until my connection gets sorted next week, I can only review games sporadically via a process of Notepad++ files, screenshots saved onto USB sticks and sneakily-grabbed moments at work. I’d already planned to spend the first seven hours and twenty-nine minutes of my first day back after the Easter break reviewing Myke-P’s Grand Prix 2015, before realising that Chris had already nabbed it. So I move to the next game on the list, once again by Simon Ferré, who must think I’m his own personal review butler by now. And once again, there’s a fully animated (and rather cleverly-done) loading screen!

If I was being paid to review this game, I’d include the following marketing blurb from Simon’s email: “This imaginatively titled game will have you in total awe of the sheer brilliance of word play, smooth animated sprite control and real time drawing, complete with near interrupt-driven background sound, familiar controls, beautiful full-colour sprites, immersive game play and built in game level increase, not to mention fully animated loading screen. There is also a custom designed screen font, clear screen effect, animated game over text and two types of enemy movement.” However, the original placeholder text I typed, to stop somebody else nabbing the game, was “Lorem ipsum wibble goats-cheese aardvark teapot helicopter jockstrap Yehudi Menuin” – it would probably be doing Simon an injustice to leave it at that, but it’s very tempting.

“In this game, your a bee”. My a bee what? Clearly Simon has succumbed to some form of Muphry’s Law here – only three days ago he pointed out a double “the” in one of my reviews, and now he’s made an grammatarical errer off he’s owen! As the title suggests, it’s a tiny little screen, and another near-illegible font – not quite Arabic, but still high on the squint-o-meter. There’s also a beepy little riff in an odd time signature (9/8 or something) which sounds a bit like a tone-deaf version of psychedelic prog-rockers (much listened to in my corner of Sqij Towers), Ozric Tentacles, if they’d had Spectrums instead of proper synths. And the screen-clearing routine is reminiscent of Horace Goes Skiing (only with more beeps) – a nice touch. Well, it’s a highlight, anyway.

At least the keys are sensible. Well, except that Q and A control left and right, and O and P are up and down! Perhaps all those 12-year-old WASD fanatics were right after all.

Anyway, this game can best be described as a bimble-em-up. You bimble around the screen, collecting honey and avoiding caterpillars and butterflies. Immediately this throws up far more questions than it does answers:

Why would a bee, equipped with a nasty stingy arse, be killed so easily by cute caterpillars and beautiful butterflies?
What are caterpillars and butterflies doing on the same screen anyway? That’s just weird, the insectian equivalent of sixth formers hanging out with all the smelly 12-year-olds in Year 7. Not going to happen.
Why would a bee need to collect honey? Surely it collects nectar and makes it into honey?
How would a bee carry a jar of honey – typically weighing 500 grams or thereabouts – with its puny little legs?
Why am I sitting here writing this crap?

Answers on a postcard to Sqij Towers.

This is Simon’s first proper arcade game entry, and it certainly shows. What makes this game unplayable isn’t so much the topsy-turvy controls, but the sheer sloth of the thing – in part due to the aforementioned psychedelic 9/8 tune which continues to play throughout the game (even adding 8001 RETURN only speeds it up slightly). And you only get one measly life. On the other hand, as with all the best crap games, I get the hint of a good – or at least well thought-out – game. But on the other hand (how many hands have you got? Ed.) I didn’t want to play it more than once – in fact you could say it brought me out in hives! (the last sentence was sponsored by Bad Dad Jokes ‘R’ Us. You can stop laughing now.)

Simon said in his email “If this doesn’t win the competition, I don’t know what will.” Be careful what you wish for, Simon!

Score: 9/8 percent.

Download .tap here.

Grand Prix 2015

Chris

6th April 2015

Crap Games

16 Comments

Sqij Towers’ very own Myke-P submitted this game, rather belatedly, for the Worst Game in the World restoration challenge he set for last year’s CGC (somebody should tell him that challenge isn’t still running – Ed). I was wondering whether we should leave it up to Myke to review his game himself, for that full CSSCGC 2014 feel, but I needed a break from Bloodborne (more on that later – much later) so here we are.

Myke Pickstock: Sounds a bit like My Pit Stop.

This game is truly a work of art. It’s just… beautiful. In the summary of this game in his WGitW feature, Myke does comment that he may have “oversold the graphical flair”. This fully fleshed out version brings even more graphical flair. Just look at the screenshots! When the competition finishes, the author intends to put on an exhibition and sell the original oil canvas paintings for £499 a pop. Framed prints will be a more reasonable £29.99, and copies of the game mere pocket money at £11.99. Fans of comp.sys.sinclair’s chocolate-based economy will be pleased to hear that Myke will accept Rolos, but only for bribes. (I have it on good authority that Lee gives higher marks to games submitted on +3 disks – Ed)

And… they’re off! I mean, “start your engines!”

I have a passing interest in Formula 1, I don’t really know too much about it, but watch on occasion and have probably been around the track on Nigel Mansell’s Grand Prix more often than Nigel himself has in real life.

Thankfully a knowledge of Formula 1 is not required to enjoy this game. In fact, it would probably be detrimental.

Won by a nose! I mean, er, wheel. Or something.

It’s your basic horse racing betting game, but with cars, and no bets. It’s also two player only, so as I live on my own, I enlisted the help of Lachlan (the knitted lemming from my Twitter profile pic, fact fans) to play player two. The track is… uninspired. It’s more like a drag race (note to self: crap game idea involving men in drag running) as there are no twists and turns, no pitstops and a distinct lack of anything that embodies F1 at all.

Bit confused that I seem to have been driving the car, rather than just betting on the outcome…

I did initially wonder whether this was one of those horse racing betting games (but with “iron horses” – Ed) (aren’t they trains? – Sub Ed) that cheats so you can never win. After about four races I discovered that actually it wasn’t and even ended up cheering my car on to make it go faster. Lachlan just stared nonchalantly and ended up losing 2-1, which I take to mean that shouting at your Speccy does have a positive impact on the random number generator.

…but I seem to have won, so who cares?

Is it the Worst Game in the World? It’s the pits (*groan* – Reader’s voice) but, no, not even close, and no amount of Rolo bribes will convince me otherwise. Although the repetitive unskippable beeper tune did make me switch my speakers off eventually.

Score: DNF

Download .tzx

Gardener of Doom

Myke-P

5th April 2015

Crap Games

7 Comments

Last year’s Forest of Doom had an epic backstory of dwarves, dark magic, forests (obv. – Ed) and death barbs.

This game, however, has a seemingly pedestrian plot involving Charlie Dimmock tidying up her back yard!? Luckily, just as I was falling asleep in my armchair on a Sunday afternoon, those clever marketing chaps at R Tape, inc. insisted on adding an imminent nuclear apocalypse to the plot – which ups the tension by a factor of 5.4321!

The games loads with a programatically rendered nuclear hazard symbol, immediately followed by some exceptionally clear (and disappointingly well wrapped) instructions:

There is an impending nuclear apocalypse but your garden still needs sorting.

Your task is to cut all the long grass with the mower, put all the leaves in the bin, and feed all the acorns to the Jay.

If all that wasn’t enough, you should probably build a shelter to protect you from the pending nuclear winter. Use the rocks.

Naturally, as R Tape is both kind and sound (ish – Ed) of mind, the keys with which you will accomplish these tasks are QAOP.

Advanced Lawnmower Simulator of the Apocalypse?

The garden is rendered at random (and at surprising speed for a 100% BASIC entry) with blocks of grass and the aforementioned leaves, acorns, bin, Jay and rocks.

Where the acorns and leaves appear directly influences whether I start by mowing the grass or cleaning up the objects first.

You start with 1500 ‘seconds’ on the clock and, in this particular round, I (wished – Ed) away nearly 1200 of them just pushing around the lawnmower.

Lawn mowed. Now for the leaves…

I try to clean up as many acorns and leaves as I can, but it’s all for naught – the remaining time is depleted in, well, no time!

Suddenly this creepy top-hatted geezer appears in the bottom-right of the screen. I’m not sure who he’s supposed to be, however, his job seems to be to judge how well you’ve done at clearing the garden so I’m guessing it’s a nightmarish vision of Alan Titchmarsh?

Whoever he is he takes his sweet time about the assessment and, eventually (but predictably,) berates me for missing ‘one or two’ items. Then, without even considering my pleas for mercy, fires me on the spot!

You’re Fired!

I barely have time to start feeling sorry for myself when the sirens begin to wail and the figure in the bottom-right becomes even more ghoulish than before.

If you thought your eyes hurt after Dave’s last ‘… of Doom’ outing, then you ain’t seen nothing yet (and soon won’t be able to anymore) as the screen systematically fills with blocks of flashing nuclear debris.

You can run but you can’t hide (unless, as you were warned, you’ve built yourself a shelter out of rocks – Ed) and inevitably you’ll succumb to the apocalyptic fallout leaving only the cockroaches and a satisfying STOP statement.

Game Over

On my best day I reckon I’m about 300 ‘seconds’ short of getting anywhere close to completing all 4 tasks, so out of pure curiosity, I resorted to editing LINE 391 to give myself more time. Anyone who doesn’t want to ruin the surprise (or thier eyesight – Ed) shouldn’t click here.

Then it occurred to me; who cares about their job knowing that the entire world is about to be wiped out by a nuclear apocalypse?! Forget what Titchmarsh says and just build the (flippin’ – Ed) shelter! Sure enough, that strategy works as well.

All in all a marvelous waste of an afternoon and fine excuse not to mow the actual lawn. Nice work R Tape – I’ll have whatever he’s having, please bartender.

Score: 1 out of 4 Horsemen

Download: .tap

Crap Idea Generator

leespoons

2nd April 2015

Crap Games

14 Comments

So the competition’s been running for a few weeks now, and we’re already up to 30 entries, with lots more still on the dung heap and a whole nine months left to go – yikes! But what about those of you who want to produce a crap game but find yourselves lacking in inspiration? Fear not! This great utility from Simon “Simon Ferré” Ferré takes the hard work out of game design by coming up with the idea, leaving you to concentrate on the actual gameplay:

It’s a simple principle, a something has to do something with something by doing something. However with over 50 RANDOMIZEd somethings for each something (Or something. Ed.) the crap game possibilities are almost endless, as you’ll see in the forthcoming screenshots – and I really liked the name of the variables used to construct the game ideas – i$, d$, e$ and a$!

Note to self – there’s not much to review here really, the readers just need to load the thing up for themselves and find out what it does, so you probably need to pad this out a bit. Just put any old shit here and you can always change it later if need be. It’s not as if anybody reads these reviews anyway. They’re all far too busy watching cat videos, or uploading cat videos, or watching videos of cats uploading cat videos… how’s my word count now? … watching cats videoing cats watching videos of cats uploading cat videos…

…only 250-odd words? Bugger, that’s not even two tweets’ worth. Perhaps I’ll write a poem to bulk it out a bit more. There was a young fellow called Tucker, whose girlfriend was a chicken plucker. Whilst having a punt*, he opened her (picnic basket. Ed), and promptly proceeded to (have a nice cup of tea and a couple of cucumber and bloater-paste sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Ed). Is that 500 words yet? Oh, that’ll do.

So at some point I’ll be setting the CIG challenge… although with potentially over 7 million different crap game ideas, I may live to regret it!

Score: 7,171,008 crap ideas out of 100%!

Download herré (do you see what I did therré?)

*A punt down the Cam (a river in Cambridge), in a punt (a type of boat which you punt along). I was really struggling to think of anything else that rhymed with “picnic basket”.

Stephen Hawking’s Advanced Wheelchair Flight Simulator

Chris

30th March 2015

Crap Games

2 Comments

Stephen Hawking: A brilliant mind, trapped in a barely functioning body, with the voice of a robot. This may sound like the trailer for next summer’s sci-fi blockbuster (read it again in your best “trailer voiceover man” voice, preferably loudly if you’re on the bus or something), but this is science fact, not science fiction.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Stephen Hawking!

The UK’s second favourite professor is the leading authority on black holes, although it was Einstein who originally predicted their existence, before fudging the equations as he believed them impossible. Black holes are strange creatures. So strange, in fact, that they aren’t actually creatures at all. You couldn’t keep one as a pet. Well, you could, but it would – quite literally – eat you out of house and home planet.

The UK’s favourite professor is Brian Cox (not pictured)

Black holes are virtually impossible to detect. This is partly because they emit no light, and partly because space and time are intertwined, and massive objects like black holes warp this. If you look at a black hole invariably you’ll see what is behind it, due to an effect known as gravitational lensing. If you get really close to a black hole time slows down. If you get even closer, time will stop. By that point you would have had your atoms torn apart by the excessive gravity so you’d never actually experience this.

Daley Thompson for the Stephen Hawking generation.

In Stephen Hawking’s Advanced Wheelchair Flight Simulator by Paul Weller…. Yes, that’s right. In between embarking on a national tour and promoting his new album (Saturn’s Pattern, out May 11th), the Modfather likes nothing more than writing crap games for his favourite 1980s computer (I think this is why he prefers us to call him “sunteam” – Ed). Thankfully the former The Jam singer managed to sneak this in before Stephen Hawking trademarked his own name, so the legal bill should be reduced.

Anyway, the plot goes that the robotic professor is trying to get up close and personal with the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. There is a theory that everything sucked in by a black hole is spat out into a parallel universe. I’m not sure if this is what he is trying to achieve here, it isn’t really adequately explained. It’s also not explained why he doesn’t use a rocket to escape the Earth’s gravity, as a lump of dark matter is unlikely to provide the propulsion needed – especially as nobody really knows what dark matter is, not even Stephen Hawking knows, and you’d think he would do some research first if he’s going to be utilising such a thing. Anti-matter would possibly be a more useful propellent, as it might cause a massive emission of energy before the matter of the young scientist and the lump of anti-matter cause neither to continue to exist.

High score challenge.

Basically it’s a button-masher. I would explain more but we’ve run out of space-time. How inconvenient.

Score:

Download +3 .dsk here (it’s a +3 Lee, it’s not fucking rocket science)

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