Chromablaster

Post date: 09-Aug-2016 21:40:19

Game by: GReW

Reviewed by: Simon Ferré

After a brief hiatus (you could say I was on an extended holiday, if that makes you feel better), I am ready to compile a new batch of reviews. It would be so much easier for me to have done one every couple of weeks but I do so end up leaving things until the last minute.

So, what do we have here? Wait, is there an error in this tape image? It's odd that there's only a SCREEN$ file and nothing else.

First thing I did was to load it using LOAD "" SCREEN$. I can't remember the last time I had to enter the SCREEN$ keyword but thankfully my emulator displays a keyboard layout (I hardly ever run the emulator in full-screen mode anyway) and I found it quite quickly. The screen file loaded and when it finished it overwrote the last two lines with a messages saying 0 OK, and that was it.

Here's a couple of screenshots of the file loading. The first is just before the attributes load, the second is just after they load.

Silly me had forgotten to read the instructions provided in the email that I received the attachment in:

The object of the game is to shoot alien space ships, so that the colour of your ship mixed with the colour of the alien ship matches the colour of the banner at the bottom of the screen.

Controls:

B = move up

Space = move down

M = fire blaster

Loading:

LOAD "" SCREEN$ : RUN USR 16384

Without thinking, I decided to enter the RUN USR 16384 command, and promptly crashed my emulator.

Ok, one RESET later, I followed the instructions more precisely, and et. voila, we have a game. So, the author has rather cleverly written some natty machine code, hidden it in the area of memory used to hold the screen bitmap, and hopefully relocates it outside of the screen RAM by the time it executes, so as to not overwrite the code when the game is being played.

What's this I can hear. I think next door's cat is being strangled by one of the children. No, wait, someone's watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on fast forward. Oh, hang on, this game has background music, if you can call it that. It's catchy, in that after only a few minutes you'll have it burnt into your subconscious, and will hear it even after you've bashed your Speccy apart and ripped out the loudspeaker. Why oh why didn't Sir Clive include a rotary volume control in the rubber doormat?

Still, on to the game itself. Enemies shoot across the screen from right to left, and your ship is at the far left. Moving up and down is fine, but quite slow, and the faster enemies are upon you before you even get chance to shift your ship out of the way. Sprites look like they are about 3 or 4 characters high, so it takes quite a lot of keypresses to get out of the way of an enemy at times. You can only fire one bullet at a time too. All the while, your ears are bleeding with that shrill background music going relentlessly.

As you can see, the score at the bottom is in a blue background, and you have to try to shoot a blue ship to score points. Shooting any other coloured ship loses you energy, and as you can see, that's quite limited too. Once you lose too much energy, it's game over, with a rather nice sound effect which plays. It sounds like some sound effect from a well known game, but I can't quite put my finger on it. The sound effects are good throughout, and in fact there's not much wrong with it.

It has obviously been created by a very talented individual. If only the background music was better it would rival a professional release (ok, maybe on a budget label) from back in the day. At the end of the game I did feel like I could play it again, and it would be fun to spend more time playing. What is such a high quality game doing in a crap game competition?

Score: 16384 out of 48K