REVIEW

AT 11,4; "INSIDE THE BOX"

Reviewer: Demon
Developer: R Tape
Genre: Who knows!?
Platform: Spectrum 48K
Language: Machine Code

"I think I'll have a go at an old school (small) machine code program using this. Anyone else tempted?" said R Tape after seeing Andrew Green's Games Designer.

"I may regret this" I replied, "if anyone wants to submit a Crap Game as a raw byte machine code type-in then I'll attempt to enter and run it using Andrew's U.Z.X.S.G.D. (in an .rzx, natch.)"

A mere two days later and he had emailed me a stream of 465 seemingly random numbers.

I have to say I was a bit excited as I fired up UZXSGD, entered the starting address of 24000 and began entering R Tape's digits... (Oo-er Missus - Ed.)

62, 2, 205, 1, 22, 62, 14, 50, 141, 92, 205, 175, 13, 62, 1, 205, 
155, 34... URRRRK!

Unfortunately, as can be seen in the .RZX, only 18 numbers into the listing everything suddenly locks up, half-clears the screen and throws up another C Nonsense in BASIC error.

We (and by that I mean Dave) tried moving the starting address and editing the BASIC in UZXSGD, however, we couldn't even get CLS: BORDER 2: PRINT "Hello World" to run properly.

I guess I need to adjust Andrew's Crap Factor score, eh?

In the end we gave up and I loaded the numbers into Memory using DATA Statements* and created a BASIC loader to call the 24000 starting address.

* See the attached .bas file

The result is "Inside the Box" - a charming little game in which you use QAOP to keep your pixel inside the boundaries of a larger yellow box which moves erratically and randomly around you. If you find yourself outside the box it's game over.

Ironically if this were programmed in BASIC the game might actually be playable, however, at native MC speeds it's all over very quickly and very frequently for me. ('Arf, g'nuk - Ed.)

Like that episode of Futurama where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee, I've slowed things down in Fuse and it appears that the longer you survive the higher you score when you (still inevitably) die. Even on the slowest settings, however, my high score is still 2.

Absolute carp. Well done!

Hello World
_{(also by R Tape)}

205, 175, 13, 62, 2, 205, 1, 22
62, 2, 205, 155, 34, 17, 22, 91
1, 14, 0, 195, 60, 32, 22, 0
0, 72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 32, 87
111, 114, 108, 100

[ Top of Page ]