By Steve McCrea
What do we have here? A spectrum BASIC version of the arcade classic ‘Thrust’? Well not quite, but not light years away either. In Space Scarper you rotate the yellow ship and thrust (with inertia) in that direction towards the red thingy while avoiding the cyan walls. I was surprised to see this and had a look in the code for any machine code USR calls – but nope, it’s good old fashioned BASIC PLOT and DRAW. Clever stuff.
Genre: Don’t touch the sides ‘em up
What do we have here? A spectrum BASIC version of the arcade classic ‘Thrust’? Well not quite, but not light years away either. In Space Scarper you rotate the yellow ship and thrust (with inertia) in that direction towards the red thingy while avoiding the cyan walls. I was surprised to see this and had a look in the code for any machine code USR calls – but nope, it’s good old fashioned BASIC PLOT and DRAW. Clever stuff.
To keep the game varied and interesting each screen is
different. It is created in a painfully slow pseudorandom way before
you can begin, and on occasion even makes a screen with no playable pathway to
the goal! When you do have a playable screen though Space Scarper is pretty good,
perhaps a bit slow but the game mechanics are sound.
Space Scarper has some good points: playable concept and
nice use of PLOT and DRAW for the main sprite.
These are finely balanced with some crap factors, namely slow reactions,
a game screen creator that is capable of generating impossible screens and taking an eternity to draw the damn
thing in the first place.
On balance: we’ve hit CGC paydirt!
Tipshack: Don’t
touch the walls.
HACK PACK:
Immunity 110 GOTO 100
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