British Telecom Switchboards

Post date: 21-Feb-2016 21:12:51

Game by: PROSM

Reviewed by: Gabriele Amore

It was a lazy, sunny afternoon in beautiful Milano. I just had the time of my life meeting Mr. Ramin Bahrami, the best Bach piano player in the world (at least according to Youtube). We shook hands, had a wonderful chat on Beauty and Art. We even left with an embrace. What a day! As I got back home, put his CD on the player and started to listen to it, I made the mistake of checking my google drive: a new tantalizing piece of s...oftware was there waiting for me to review it. Well you cannot always win, can you? "British Telecom Switchboards" by (infamous) PROSM, author of the acclaimed (by Simon) "Maths Master" (and God only knows how many other pieces of s...oftware yet to come), promised to deliver a few moments of clean disappointment.

After a eye-straining presentation screen scrolled up (with the typical jerk of BASIC type-in programs of those, thanks-god, long-gone days, 100 crap points for that) I was introduced to the game itself. A quite elaborate explanation was presented to me, as I was urged to join the biggest phone company in the Country, trying to bring telecommunication to every corner, even the most remote one.

Actually I was quite enticed by the style of this first part: a stripped-down BASIC version of the graphics seen in games such as Vortex’s Tornado Low Level. Of course nothing in the game was going to be that good... sadly enough, I knew it!So what is BTSB? Well it is just the typical game in which you do the same thing over and over with an increasing number of obstacles being put in your way at each round. In this case, you guide a wire into a plug trying to avoid collisions that could damaged it for good. Now, would that happen in a nice first-person 3D-rendered landscape? Or at least in a jerky upward-scrolling one (like in those type-in skiing games)? Of course not (another 100 points)!In fact the action plays horizontally and all that is left to you to do is to press Q or A (you guessed it right: that would be up or down) to correct the trajectory of the wire (a string of red paper letters, actually spelling the word “WIRE”, another 100 points for this), which is mindlessly going from the left end of the screen, to the right one. For some mysterious reason (this scores another 100 points) obstacles are rendered with cyan “A” letters, while the plug is represented by a black “O” on blue paper (does this game comes from that part of the BASIC manual that precedes the chapter about UDGs, by any chance? Another 100 points!).

The game itself is quite enjoyable, the only negative side being that it never crashed on me (-500 points, bringing the final score to a nice, round zero), as it played flawlessly every single time. All in all “British Telecom Switchboards” is another piece of smoking crap waiting for you to try it out. So what are you waiting for?

An amendment has since been forwarded to one of the hosts of this year's Competition. Here I (Simon) shamelessly use copy and paste from the original email:

Sorry to bother you again, but I have made a mistake in the game's program code. It is quite easy to fix however.

The following steps will lead to a correct game:

1. Load the game using the MERGE "" command. This will prevent auto-running and let you edit the code before the protection scheme starts up.

2. Type the following line:

501 IF LEVEL>BEST THEN PAUSE 5: PRINT #1;AT 1,9;"NEW HIGHSCORE!": FOR A=1 TO 5: BEEP 0.1,A: NEXT A: PAUSE 5: LET BEST=LEVEL

After typing the line, press ENTER to replace the old bugged line.

3. Now that the program is correct, you can run it.

I could have ammended the tape file, but I thought I would bring back the good old days when you patched games yourself with pokes or BASIC code from a magazine :)