Amstrad CPC 2019 Entries

I thought of having a look at the other 5 games as well as my own and add my thoughts.

Shielding Color - Nice game with nice use of the Condensed Character set for the text and Scoring, the listing had me intrigued because some of the lines were over 255 character threshold, though a sample of the source code showed PRINT being condensed to "?" and somehow Locomotive BASIC accepts it without issuing a Line Too Long Error. The game itself starts off relatively easy with the accumulation of points increasing the Score. On a few occasions I got to 700 points before it got more difficult, though my High seems to remain at 850 which I had a little bit of luck involving which colour my Bat/Paddle was.

nanoHEXAGON - Logiker had 3 entries for the Compo, while this one is interesting, it was the least favourite of mine. The game was submitted for Locomotive BASIC 1.0, though I found it actually had a MOVE statement using the 3rd Parameter (to represent the Graphics Pen colour), which was included with other additional commands for BASIC 1.1. Is no great fuss that removing the 3rd Parameter from it the program will work the same in BASIC 1.0 as the DRAW command specifies the 3rd Parameter for Graphics Pen colour and is fully compatible with BASIC 1.0, so this has left me thinking that the Judges were playing this with BASIC 1.1?

Perhaps for me I didn't quite favour it for my bad coordination and having to place a Pixel Dot on the Side where the Walls aren't moving is too challenging, otherwise an interesting concept which plays well.

CPCanabalt - This is my favourite of the Logiker games, simple Running Man, using some interesting Video Effects at the start for the Heading and Hi-Res MODE 2 to give that smooth Scrolling look, the only thing I didn't like about it was the Sound which sounds like your playing Harrier Attack, in this case I think it's meant to be Crowd Noise.

OVO - This is a fun little game packed with Levels and Nasties and Deadly Plants to avoid, the Time Limit also making this a challenging game. Just a shame it's BASIC 1.1, apart from the use of CLEAR INPUT, the use of Backspace Control codes presents problems with how 464 manages Strings differently from 664/6128.

Tanks Alot! - I started writing this game a Week before the Deadline from some odds & ends code I'd had floating around, and unlike the other Amstrad Entries from this competition, I've spent no time trying to squeeze it into Control Code format, if I had it may of been a PUR-120 instead of EXTREM-256. Perhaps my other regrets are difficulty because the Game goes from being Very Easy to Very Hard, the final stage seems to suffer whereby the Speed gets prioritised over the controls, personally I completed the final stage a couple of times, though a great deal of luck came from how frequent the tanks appeared and where, once 10 Tanks are destroyed in each stage the game progressed to the Next Stage clearing the Board of any Existing Tanks. As for the Final Stage, I probably should of kept the game to 4 stages and extended the Length by assigning more Tanks to Shoot.

Otherwise I was very pleased with the concept of using WINDOWs, Rolling one of those WINDOWs with the Tanks on it, TESTing for when they had reached the bottom of their WINDOW and the use of using Graphics to Fire a Line, working out if a Tank was in it's Path or not and DRAWing the Appropriate Line. I just need to work on my Coding Progression for the Difficulty which this might be a good Framework to work on and come up with something Similar for Next Years compo.

LOGIpics - This is the last game from Logiker that's based on Pix which EgoTrip (a contender from past 10-Liners Compo's) wrote for the Amstrad in 2013, which is based on another game called Picross. Pix can be found here on CPC-Power -> http://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=detail&num=9969

LOGIpics uses the same principals from Pix, but has used the Amstrad's Character Set to give you 255 Characters to Work through, not bad for a PUR-80 game and it plays just as well as Pix. In terms of playability in a puzzle game this is a step up from those horrid Sliding Puzzle games which I've never enjoyed, though this game could be expanded as I found in this game it went from Easy to Difficult and then back to Easy, I couldn't believe my luck when I got to Char 32, I could jump the next level! Using the Character Set meant I was referring to the Amstrad CPC464 User Guide for reference. :D So perhaps some Original Redefined Graphics for the Game ranging from Easy to Difficult will add appeal. Otherwise it's a nice game. :)